Three years ago today, I was excavating ancient hippo fossils!

#FieldworkWeek. It's been a great few days doing TerraForm project fieldwork in Malta. Working with my great team at the University of Malta, and with visiting collaborators from the Universities of Durham and Milano.

Nature is very caperble of beauty

(1/4) Fun fieldwork this week. Here we are looking at portable optically stimulated luminescence (P-OSL) data, to guide further sampling and analyses...

It's that thyme of year

I'm curious how people organise their herbs and spices? Here is mine.

Looking forward to taking part in this conversation at Palazzo Falson on June 2nd. www.palazzofalson.com/news-events/...

New preprint on (in my opinion, dubious as always) Nubian Levallois claims osf.io/preprints/so.... interesting that there has been a change of authors compared to an earlier version of this (www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...) are some changing their minds on culture historical approaches?

This is will be a great talk next week

Exciting times with the TerraForm project. Today was the first day we used our new differential GPS system. This allows us to record the position of anything to within a few mm accuracy. Shown here with my spatial guru, Dr Dario Calderone.

Acanthus (Acanthus mollis) season in full flow!

Is 'anatomically modern human' a useful concept (no)? How secure is the dating of fossils such as Misliya and Manot (spoiler: not very!)? What can we reliably say about the arrival of Homo sapiens in Australia? And much more. Read more in my recent QSR paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ok well if you find these Bronze Age pits interesting....here are a few more from Malta and Gozo :)

Bronze Age 'rock cut pits' (probably grain silos), at Wardija San Ġorġ. Hundreds of these pits are known in Malta, mostly in fortified/defensible positions.

Couple of scholarships for Palestinian nationals available at the University of Malta, to do masters in 1) heritage management, and 2) artificial intelligence. www.um.edu.mt/study/feesfu...

Interested in how outdated Eurocentric views continue to shape ideas on our species' spread beyond Africa, and how the dating of many key archaeological and fossil sites is much less certain that sometimes claimed? Sounds like you need to read my recent paper, www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Morchids. Love the spring.

Fomm ir-Riħ in Malta recently.

#FieldworkFriday....No fieldwork this week...but i'm having fun writing about clay.

Fantastic new paper from @elliescerri.bsky.social 's group and colleagues, led by @margheritac17.bsky.social: "Malaria shaped human spatial organization for the past 74 thousand years"

'Could the Rising Star hominins represent relict australopiths?' Nice new preprint. www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...

"Ultimately, the new research offers key clues to early human toolmaking strategies and priorities, Groucutt says. It also shows that “stone remains key to understanding the stone age.”"

Lovely Bronze Age pottery from Malta (Source: Peet et al., 1910; doi.org/10.1017/S006...)

An orchid at sunset.

Understanding how, why, and when the global spread of Homo sapiens occurred is a major question in human evolutionary studies. Revolution, modernity, and the dispersal of Homo sapiens beyond Africa🏺🧪 Huw S. Groucutt @huwgroucutt.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#flowerfriday...fragrant orchid, pyramidal orchid, and Azure Stonecrop.

#FieldworkFriday....scoping things out for the TerraForm project.

New paper alert. My new article just published in Quaternary Science Reviews, "Revolution, modernity, and the dispersal of Homo sapiens beyond Africa". www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Pleasure to appear on 'Big Picture Science' talking about possible Palaeolithic proto-writing (i'm on from 4.00 minutes) bigpicturescience.org/episodes/old...)

Confessions of an archaeologist....had never been to Stonehenge until recently. It is pretty amazing to be fair!

New paper alert. Led by my PhD student, Amy Hatton, we explore the use of machine learning methods to detect prehistoric stone structures in Arabia. Well done Amy, she did a huge amount of work to do this paper! And excited that this marks my 100th published journal article! Paper: lnkd.in/d6GRDRxY

We're looking for an Associate Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology (mainly teaching Evo Med and Stats at UCL Anthro) as maternity cover! Please share - closing date 30th April www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

It's a year since we published our findings from Latnija Cave where we discovered evidence for a previously unknown hunter-gatherer phase of Maltese prehistory, showing that people were reaching small and remote islands earlier than known. Much more to come :)

#ForestFriday..... from a recent trip to the Forest of Dean, beautiful Celtic Rainforest.

Just finished this book, wonderful.

A fitting memory to Emilie. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Nice new Palaeolithic evidence from eastern Arabia. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lots of amazing pyramidal orchids out at the moment.

Couple of nice new papers for the lithics folks, congratulations to all authors. www.nature.com/articles/s41... and www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Yay!!! After years of looking, finally found some Maltese Spider orchid (Ophrys melitensis).

Oh wow, new work on one of the sites long claimed to show early peopling of the Americas challenges early dates. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I'm pretty bored of the topic, but someone has to...

The office today

Sicilian Squill (Scilla sicula...'Għansal ikħal' bil Malti) also looking great at the moment

Yay peak orchid season developing, lots of the lovely Maltese pyramidal orchids out (endemic form of Anacamptis urvilleana only found in Malta).

Tools for some finer work today, sampling sediments from sections exposed in excavation.

Some things change, some things stay the same. 'Knights of St John' tower built in 1659 (Torri ta' Triq il-Wiesgħa), next to a WW2 era pillbox, in eastern Malta.

Amazing how the archaeology of Arabia is developing. Nice new paper from my colleagues. www.nature.com/articles/s41...