As an anthropologist, I endorse this message!

Schools haven’t changed all that much in 4000 years. In this post I argue that’s a good thing. I discuss evolution, evolutionary psychology, culture and make the claim that schools are the first — and most important — educational technology. open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

NEW POST Conceptual understanding is a myth Transfer is a better focus fillingthepail.substack.com/p/conceptual...

Registration is now open for the Explicit Teaching Institute NYC 2026! Join me in New York City for 5 days of deep dives into the science of learning, explicit instruction, video study, and deliberate practice. No fluff. Just better teaching. 🎟️ educationrickshaw.com/2026/05/15/b...

Egor Lappo telling us about social learning in chess playing (not in cats sadly, despite the photo)

My Fractions Lesson 1 idea (outline): start with whole numbers. I'll try to have some more soon.

🎉🦜NEW PAPER ALERT 🦜🎉 Which social learning biases underly the acquisition of novel food in wild parrots ? We (@lucymaplin.bsky.social, @bjjbarrett.bsky.social, @sonjawild.bsky.social, @drjohnmartin.bsky.social) presented >700 cockies with a novel, artificial food (🧵1/6)

A new episode of Transmissions is out! We feature Dr. Aiyana Willard, Reader in Psychology at Brunel University London. We talk about the adaptiveness of religion, including alternative beliefs such as witchcraft, tarot reading and other local healing practices. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2m5...

How did language evolve? We ran some experiments in Minecraft to find out! youtu.be/7vgS8s6MhSk?... And link to paper: academic.oup.com/jole/article...

Human memory and learning I have added an overview to my website for my 20 years of research into memory, Indigenous knowledge systems and archaeology. www.lynnekelly.com.au?page_id=6978 #memory #memorycode #MemoryCraft #knowledgegene #indigenous #firstnations www.lynnekelly.com.au?page_id=6978

Built environment is a key driver of cardiometabolic health in two indigenous groups undergoing rapid lifestyle change [Turkana pastoralists of northwest Kenya (n = 3692) and Orang Asli mixed subsistence practitioners of Peninsular Malaysia (n = 1119)] academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

Content opens doors, but only if we teach it well. Less overload, more clarity, a core of explicit instruction. educationrickshaw.com/2026/04/19/s...

What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/

📢Fully-funded #PhD opportunity with us: 🐦 Quantifying (social) learning and social behaviour in an urbanised world 🐦 Position at @ceec-research.bsky.social 📆29th May deadline More info: tinyurl.com/yz28s96x Apply: tinyurl.com/2wpkb64y #cognition #socialbehaviour #fieldwork #birds 🙏Please Share

🧬 Which “Darwin” do we mean — the one focused on competition, or the one open to cooperation? Later interpretations narrowed his ideas, but Darwin himself explored relationships and social selection. 🔗 www.prosocial.world/posts/which-... #Darwin #Evolution #Darwinism #History #History

Huh

Back when I made things. This one is one of my favorites. sineof1.github.io/geo_transfor...

Two great opportunities to join a superb research group & work on a cool project 👇🧪

The preliminary programme for @ces2026.bsky.social is now out. What a fabulous line up! airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026?__cf...

🧠 What drives high-performing education systems? Montserrat Gomendio (former OECD Deputy Director of Education) joined me to unpack why some countries excel, what PISA reveals, and why reform is so hard even when we know what works. 🎧 #ChalkandTalk #PISA

CITIZEN SCIENCE - Two excellent articles on how good it is! ‘My head feels clearer’: how citizen science can improve people’s health theconversation.com/my-head-feel...? theconversation.com/there-may-be...? All Damian's birding goes into e-bird - I go with him but he's the one with the knowledge.

The Science of an Evolutionary Transition in Humans I was honored to give a colloquium talk at the KLI last week on the Science of an Evolutionary Transition in Humans. There's a lot to cover, so it's a dense talk.

ROCK ART as knowledge - as it should be portrayed! NT rock art thousands of years old sheds new light on the mysterious Tasmanian tiger theconversation.com/nt-rock-art-...? "These variations ... more likely they relate to different ways paintings were used to pass on information about the animal."

NEW FREE POST Differentiated Instruction My role in its downfall fillingthepail.substack.com/p/differenti...

Join me on Friday, April 10th! euromathsoc.org/news/ems-lec...

New OA paper @royalsocietypublishing.org: What can we learn from bonobos and bottlenose dolphins about the evolution of between-group cooperation? royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... Lovely collab with @lirsamuni.bsky.social Martin Surbeck and Richard Connor.

New article from E. D. Hirsch and me on (1) the evidence for the importance of knowledge in reading; (2) why it’s taken so long for people to acknowledge the evidence; (3) what we predict if the role of knowledge is taken seriously. www.educationnext.org/rediscoverin...

Chris Frith in conversation about his life and work. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otgz...

John Sweller developed cognitive load theory. He is my guest in the next episode of Chalk & Talk! Coming tomorrow, March 20. Don’t miss it!

British archeologist and writer Mike Pitts recently argued that the Easter Island statues were meant to be where they are - not all heading for the platforms. I argued this way in The Memory Code. I compare our different approaches reaching the same conclusion: www.lynnekelly.com.au?page_id=6876

@fordhampress.bsky.social publishes scholarship across the humanities & social sciences. The Fordham University Press Publisher Collection offers access to more than 60 new titles in 2026 & more than 1,250 backlist works, including more than 60 #OpenAccess books. Learn more: https://bit.ly/4svGQTy

“findings offer original insights into the social organization of craft production and the rise of symbolic practices at the dawn of sedentism, which ultimately shaped the Neolithic transition in Southwest Asia” 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Interested in the Big Questions of human evolution, culture and society? In the Vienna area? Come join my colloquium at the Konrad Lorenz Institute on March 26 at 15:00. I will be speaking on: The Science of an Evolutionary Transition in Humans kli.ac.at/en/events/ev... Also online.

Art or scribbles? In the Eye of the Beholder: The Evolutionary Emergence of Visual Communication by Iain Davidson (Springer, 2025) www.lynnekelly.com.au?page_id=6859 At last we have an authoritative book on the story of art from its first emergence as human mark-making to contemporary works.

NEW Freedom stifles creativity whereas constraint forces imagination to work. open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

NEW FREE POST The Gift of History The familiar and the strange fillingthepail.substack.com/p/the-gift-o...

The autism spectrum has widened to the point of collapse, with important implications for provision in overstreched classrooms. But, as @utafrith.bsky.social points out: "We’re all neurodiverse"... www.tes.com/magazine/tea...