A study in Nature Communications shows that hominins were consistently and specifically procuring a single kind of raw material to make stone tools at the South African site of Jojosi between 220 and 110 thousand years ago. go.nature.com/4cyKgiX 🏺🧪

🔨 Early humans in South Africa were quarrying stone as long as 220,000 years ago That was found by an international research team including the @unituebingen.bsky.social and #UniCologne. ▶️ uni.koeln/7MBKW 📺 youtu.be/JMQudzjLmUw 📰 doi.org/10.1038/s4146…

News from Jojosi!

The roadDB workshop at #CAA2026 is in full swing!

News on Neanderthal population history! 🧬 We combined archaeology (from @roceeh.bsky.social ROAD) + ancient DNA, to uncover a genetic turnover ~65 ka linked to a SW France refugium. Together, aDNA & archaeology reveal a richer, nuanced past than either could alone. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The latest ROCEEH Newsletter is available! 🇦🇪 @unesco.org World Heritage site Faya Paleolandscape 📱🎲 Visual Communication Design meets Neanderthals 👩‍💻 The R package 'roadDB' 🕸️ ROCEEH Symposium “Diversifying networks. How culture infuses the environment” www.researchgate.net/publication/...

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📢Last call: Submit your presentations to the ROCEEH (co-)hosted sessions at @caaint.bsky.social by November 9th! S25: How to do ROAD: An Essential Tool for Conducting Multidisciplinary Studies Related to Human Evolution 🪨💀🦣🌼 S39: Palaeo-GIS 🌍📌 🔗https://2026.caaconference.org/conference-sessions/

Our joint workshop on "Big Data and Human Evolution" between ROCEEH and @boneslab.bsky.social, organized by Giulia Marciani in Ravenna, is in full swing! Great talks, good company and Sangiovese🍷

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The deadline for abstracts for CAA 2026 in Vienna is approaching — only 10 days left! Showcase your research using the ROAD database in Session S25 "How to do ROAD", or highlight your spatial archaeological studies in Session S39 "Paleo-GIS". More info: 2026.caaconference.org/conference-s...

CFP for CAA 2026 Vienna is open (deadline Oct 26)! We're back with Session 39: Palaeo-GIS — for GIS in Palaeolithic & prehistoric contexts. Reflective, context-aware papers especially welcome. 🔗 Session info: 2026.caaconference.org/conference-s...

Annoucning two sessions at CAA 2026, Vienna 🎉 📢 Call for papers is open — abstracts due Oct 26, 2025 🧩 S25: How to do ROAD – A Tool for Multidisciplinary Studies in Human Evolution 🗺️ S39: Palaeo-GIS 👉 Details & submission: 2026.caaconference.org/conference-s...

We congratulate the Faya Paleolandscape on its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List! (whc.unesco.org/en/list/1735/). Since its early years, ROCEEH has supported research in Jebel Faya and neighboring sites financially and with personnel. 📷Sharjah Archaeology Authority

📄📢New article: Bader, Sommer, Linstädter, Masia, Blessing, Forrester, & MacDonald (2025). Decoding hunter-gatherer-knowledge and selective choice of lithic raw materials during the Middle and Later Stone Age in Eswatini. Journal of Archaeological Science, 180, 106302. doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...

New @roceeh.bsky.social Newsletter #25 with an article on our archaeoligcal + geoscientific work in the Jojosi Dongas!

Seeing Blatten buried again and again, from every angle... Properly staggering! 😮😱

I strongly recommend visiting @gideys.bsky.social 's talk on the Mai Adrasha archaeological site in Tigrai, to be held in Session S29: "Heritage under bombs - digital methods in the studies of endangered heritage in conflict zones"!

ROCEEH's Jan-Olaf Reschke, Christine Hertler and Christian Sommer @sommergeo.bsky.social spotted at #CAA2025 in Athens! Hear our talks in Session 14: "Advances in modelling past human ecosystems", held in Room A5 on Thursday, May 8th, 13:45–16:05.

Become my colleague and work with ROCEEH on the ROAD database!

⏩Fast forward: You can easily create animated maps in R using data from the ROAD database @roceeh.bsky.social. This example shows the appearance (🔴) and deposition (⚫) of ~6000 dated assemblages with stone artifacts between 2,780,000 and 10,000 years BP. 💻 github.com/sommergeo/ro...

I'm very proud that Marie Luise Geisbusch, whose B.Sc. thesis I supervised, has been awarded the Sustainability Prize of the University of Tübingen for her thesis "Restoration Effects on Peatland Vegetation – Integrating Field and Landsat Data" 🌱🛰️

Ok, first bluesky post here: I'm excited to share our introductory paper on joint archaeology + geomorphology work in the Dongas of Jojosi, KwaZulu-Natal 🇿🇦. doi.org/10.36615/saf...