Ancient DNA #Ötzi the Iceman and his neighbors had totally different ancestries Genomic diversity and structure of prehistoric alpine individuals from the Tyrolean Iceman’s territory 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Suggests local and non-local admixture events between HGs and Neolithic farmers

👇 This thread 🏺🧪 #Ötzi

Nubian Levallois technology associated with southernmost Neanderthals🏺🧪 J Blinkhorn @clement-zanolli.bsky.social @huwgroucutt.bsky.social @elliescerri.bsky.social @chrisbstringer.bsky.social @mdpetraglia.bsky.social et al www.nature.com/articles/s41... Btw ~ 70 and 50 kya they expanded into Levant

Sulfur as a proxy for identifying coast-inland human mobility in Northern Iberia during Late Prehistory🏺🧪 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... Shows population movement between coastal and inland locations observable through differences in δ34S isotope values of individuals linked to environments.

Muscle AMP deaminase activity was lower in Neandertals than in modern humans 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... While being conserved among vertebrates, AMPD1 seems to have become less functionally important among Neanderthals and modern humans.

Polygenic prediction of human complex traits using ancient DNA 🏺🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Ancient DNA has revolutionized our understanding of human history and clarified many aspects of human evolution on a molecular level.

Humans Started Butchering Elephants 1.78 Million Years Ago In Tanzania Homo erectus may be the culprit, but we can't be sure. Earliest Evidence of Elephant Butchery at Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) Reveals the Evolutionary Impact of Early Human Megafaunal Exploitation 🏺🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Discovery of Lucy Australopithecus afarensis A Milestone in Human Evolution🏺🧪 discoverwildscience.com/the-discover... The discovery of an A. afarensis fossil, famously known as “Lucy,” marked a monumental milestone in the field of paleoanthropology, reshaping our understanding of human origins.

10 Breakthrough Discoveries That Shaped Modern Paleontology 🏺🧪 discoverwildscience.com/10-breakthro... Modern paleontology didn’t arrive with a single eureka moment – it grew out of a string of bold bets, lucky finds, and clever tools that turned stone into story.

Underground Conquest: Cave Exploration and Nationalism 🏺🧪 daily.jstor.org/underground-... As cave exploration became more popular and speleology developed as an academic discipline, cave explorers were drawn into a problematic European nationalism.

🔆 Good morning! 🎵 O'er the land of the free*... (*Restrictions may apply) And the home of the Republican cowards . 🎶

The Ordovician Mass Extinction Killed 85 Percent Of Life On Earth In A Totally Unique Way 🧪 And you've probably never even heard of it. www.iflscience.com/the-ordovici... At the end of the Ordovician, all major groups lost important species, but none disappeared entirely.

Tiny particles suggest massive comet trail may have transformed Earth's climate more than 12,000 years ago, A 12,800-year-old layer with cometary dust, microspherules, and platinum anomaly recorded in multiple cores from Baffin Bay 🧪 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

There's a mysterious link between Earth’s magnetism and atmospheric oxygen The strength of Earth’s magnetic field seems to rise and fall in line with the abundance of oxygen Earth’s magnetic field seems to correlate with conditions that helped complex life to thrive🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🔆Good morning! Dedication to work is to be admired, provided the work itself is of value, but the more of a day’s hours you devote to it, the likelier returns diminish. Why You Should Only Work 3–4 Hours a Day, Like Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf & Adam Smith 🧪 www.openculture.com/2025/09/why-...

Evolution Charles Darwin #OTD 🏺 🧪

Will we be raising humans capable of independent thought? Intrinsic curiosity builds cognitive immunity against AI manipulation. Why Curious Kids Become Unhackable Adults 🏺🧪 www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-...

📢 Job vacancy 🏺🧪 A great opportunity! Starting: 05.01.2026 - Until: 04.01.2029 Application deadline: 06.10.2025

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... This publicly available dataset represents a resource for understanding how computations distributed across and within brain areas drive behaviour.

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... This study offers a brain-wide perspective on prior encoding at cellular resolution, underscoring the importance of using large-scale recordings on a single standardized task.

Extreme Heat Makes People More Negative A large-scale global study shows that extreme heat affects not just our bodies, but also our emotions. Unequal impacts of rising temperatures on global human sentiment 🏺🧪 www.cell.com/one-earth/ab...

Sound of a Baby Crying Can Make Adults Physically Hotter Nonlinear acoustic phenomena tune the adults’ facial thermal response to baby cries with the cry amplitude envelope 🏺🧪 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... A baby’s cry generates a synchronized emotional response in both men and women.

The Brain Merges Sight And Sound For Faster, Smarter Decisions Distinct audio and visual accumulators co-activate motor preparation for multisensory detection 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Auditory and visual decision processes run separately before combining in the motor system.

This Hidden Human ‘Sense’ Is Quietly Shaping Your Reality The Neural Underpinnings of Aphantasia: A Case Study of Identical Twins 🏺🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Suggesting that aphantasia is a spectrum rather than a discrete condition.

Some Languages Don't Clearly Express A Sense Of The Future, And It Skews The Way We See Reality Is the future a foreign land? Or is it impossible to separate tomorrow from the now? 🏺🧪 www.iflscience.com/some-languag...

🔆Good morning! "Each morning we are born again, what we do today, is what matters most." -Buddha

Ruin a song by adding "literally" to the title. Stairway Literally to Heaven

Ruin a song by adding "literally" to the title: Love is literally like oxygen

Local cuisine was on the menu at Cafe Neanderthal 🏺🧪 arstechnica.com/science/2025... We’re starting to find features that distinguish one Neanderthal culture from another.

Neanderthals might have eaten maggots along with the meat they stored from hunting. Neanderthals, hypercarnivores, and maggots: Insights from stable nitrogen isotopes 🏺🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Suggests maggots as a contributor to the high δ15N values observed in Late Pleistocene hominins.

Cut from the same cloth? Comparing Neanderthal processing of faunal resources at Amud and Kebara caves (Israel) through cut-marks analyses 🏺🧪 www.frontiersin.org/journals/env... Suggests distinctive butchering between Amud and Kebara caves despite comparable occupation, lithics, and resources.

Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80 ka ago? journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... The first results of a search for weapon points in the oldest levels of the Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter in Uzbekistan at around 80 kya.

Neanderthal hunting involved superb tactical planning, using the landscape to disadvantage prey. Shoot first, ask questions later: Interpretative narratives of Neanderthal hunting 🏺🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Examines strategies employed by Neanderthals at a series of sites in Europe.

Sexual Size Dimorphism in Australopithecus: Postcranial Dimorphism Differs Significantly Among Australopithecus afarensis, A. africanus, and Modern Humans Despite Low-Power Resampling Analyses 🏺🧪 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Reasons for differences in studies and compares dimorphism

How the pelvis evolved to enable human bipedalism Analyses of pelvis development in humans and other primates reveal how changes in bone-patterning processes helped humans to gain the ability to walk upright. The evolution of hominin bipedalism in two steps 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Adaptive landscapes unveil the complex evolutionary path from sprawling to upright forelimb function and posture in mammals 🧪 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... This may imply that synapsids evolved and radiated with distinct forelimb trait combinations for most of their recorded history.

Mutations driving evolution are informed by the genome, not random. De novo rates of a Trypanosoma-resistant mutation in two human populations 🏺🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Results are highly congruent with the HbS findings, underscoring the importance of high-resolution mutation rate studies.

Stasis and faunal overturn in ancient marine communities: Punctuation and evolution on the periphery 🧪 www.cambridge.org/core/journal... The result is a pattern of evolutionary and ecological stasis and change that is coincident and highly punctuational.

Mitonuclear divergence predicts gradual speciation in animal hybrid zones 🧪 ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... Collectively, this data synthesis in the early stage of animal speciation reveals a gradual development of reproductive isolation with mitonuclear genetic divergence.

Flourishing chemosynthetic life at the greatest depths of hadal trenches 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Hadal trenches, some of the Earth’s least explored and understood environments, have long been proposed to harbour chemosynthesis-based communities

How did life get multicellular? Five simple organisms could have the answer Single-celled species that often stick together in colonies have researchers rethinking the origin of animals. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition 🏺🧪 www.cell.com/trends/cogni... Reviews preliminary evidence for the co-evolution of cultural innovations that distribute cognition and technological complexity across human history.

Perfect? No. Useful if used right? Yes. ‘LinkedIn is like air to me’: The scientists who’ve cracked professional networking 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41... Fans of the global social-media platform explain how best to harness its career-boosting and collaboration potential.

I... I can't even look at Sam Altman's face anymore... Backpfeifengesicht.

⚠️ AI has some legitimate uses, however... Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — and in social media. This can't go on unchecked. Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia 🧪 zenodo.org/records/1706...

Stephen Jay Gould was born OTD in 1941. “Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table.... Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.” 🦫🦋🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪#HistSTM #PhilSci #EvoBio

Why kids need to take more risks: Science reveals the benefits of wild, free play 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41... Studies reveal how risky play can benefit child development. But encouraging it can be a challenge for parents “Play should always be led by the child and what the child wants to do"

Music Sparks Social Imagination and Eases Loneliness This effect remained robust irrespective of vocals or language comprehension. Solitary silence and social sounds: Music can influence mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Child neglect alone without other forms of abuse, can alter critical pathways White matter microstructure abnormalities in children experiencing neglect without other forms of maltreatment🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Suggests alterations in WM microstructure contributed to behavioral symptoms

Tiny Neurons Shape Empathy and Social Memory Parvalbumin interneurons in the insular cortex control social familiarity and emotion recognition 🏺🧪 www.cell.com/cell-reports... Findings highlight that PVINs provide context-dependent control over socioemotional behavior.