📢 Registration is now open! 📢 Sign up for in-person attendance before 31 October 2025 to get Early Bird prices. Waged delegate fee is £110 Unwaged delegate fee is £40 More information and links to register can be found on the TAG York website: tag2025.hosted.york.ac.uk/en/registrat...

Evolution (abridged)

the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat

Letting the Archaeology side down by also actually liking Palaeontology. Here's my little beach find collection.

I'm excited (and nervous) to be presenting at @tag2025york.bsky.social this year! Can we find signs of ancient emotions hidden among the earliest archaeological assemblages? Image: Sterkfontein Oldowan tools - 1.7-2.2ma Sampled from Kuman, K., 1994. doi.org/10.1006/jhev... #TAG2025

Very pleased to see our paper now out in Communications Biology! 🥳

Apologies for the hiatus. Life got challenging, and I just couldn't face wading through the 1000s of Bot / AI slop accounts that were trying to follow me. That being said, I quite enjoyed eating matchmakers and slamming the block button like a death metal, double bass drum solo.

me, stepping up to give my intro lectures like

Registration for in-person or online participation for our symposium is still open!

To support those who qualify for the unwaged registration fee. Includes: Free registration + £200 to help cover UK travel, accommodation costs, or support caring responsibilities. Open: early September Deadline: early October If you have any questions email [email protected]

This aurochs bone from a ~10,000-year-old wetland 🇩🇰 is engraved with probable human figures. Wetlands' preservational qualities provide a valuable source of organic material such as bone and wood. However, they are at risk from climate change 🏺 🔗 from 2022 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

The demographic drivers of cultural #evolution in #bird song CurrentBiology

"sketch of the historical background that still shapes contemporary studies into the psychology of gender/sex identity in infants and toddlers" doi.org/10.1002/ajhb...

the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale

The first recorded strike in history took place almost 3,200 years ago! The ‘Strike Papyrus’ recounts that in year 29 of the reign of Ramesses III (c. 1157 BC) royal tomb workers at Deir el-Medina downed tools over pay and working conditions! Museo Egizio, Turin 📷 me #AncientBlueSky 🏺 #Archaeology

How we explain the past is always a complex negotiation between our modern assumptions (which we cannot escape when we study or view history) and the genuine historical intentions of the people living in the past.

The new series of @pnas.org articles on the history of inequality require some careful reading. The identical data set leads some to agree and others to disagree with Dawn of Everything... What's going on? Here are some initial thoughts.

The young female was about a meter tall when she died, making her even smaller than adults from other diminutive early human species, including the famous Lucy and the hobbit. 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d44...

Aurignacian groups at Isturitz (France) adapted to a shifting environment upon their arrival in Western Europe ∼42,000 years ago www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A great thread by Kory Bing on species we've pulled back from the brink.

I worked supporting SureStart centres across the whole of North East Lincolnshire right before the crash of 2008. There was one in every community, including some of the poorest areas of England. This feels so far removed from the current situation it's unreal.

Is anyone writing a history of Sure Start? @sarahcrook.bsky.social wondering if you know? There's lots of fairly dry policy and evaluation stuff but feels like a great lens through which one cld write the history of early 21st century Britain

Wow. I just am so grateful for the amazing systems from @elife.bsky.social for review, and from @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social that have made it possible to open up the scientific evidence on some of the most challenging problems in human origins. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

also...be sure to check out the amazing work on the figures/images....Visualizations make a difference. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Our revision of the Homo naledi burial paper is out. A massive amount of work by the whole team. Grateful to @elife.bsky.social and the reviewers for input; for a change (the oft dreaded) Reviewer 2 made my day. This is a huge paper (literally) & sets the evidential bar high. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

OMG, for some reason, these have emotionally slapped me. I love the greying dude 🥹

2025 has been brutal 💀 My father was in the last 1% of people still at home in the late stages of the Alzhiemers. Queue crisis teams, hospital admissions, emergency depts, social workers... Each wk has brought massive emotional & physical challenges. But inside that time, i've written a new paper.

Making a diagram related to mating dances in birds, and these are my first options. 👌

For your #FlintFriday dose of lithics, here are some beautiful cleavers from the Upper Son Valley 🇮🇳 The wide variety and high quality of raw materials used indicates early hominins were adaptable and skilled at making use of the landscape. Which is your favourite? 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

Western Europe’s oldest human face discovered in Spain by CENIEH Director @mmartinont.bsky.social #ICTSNews #Pink theconversation.com/western-euro...

It's been far too long since we posted a cute animal artefact for #FindsFriday! With the SAA around the corner this Moche stirrup vessel felt like the perfect find!🏺🐸

Call for abstracts: I’m putting together an edited book on archaeology and horror. Details below. Contact me for full CFP or to discuss potential submissions. 🏺👻🧟🏛️

👇👇 We have trace evidence from N England of wolves scavenging human kill-sites in Late Upper Pthc. I suggest this gave wolves access to larger prey (aurochs) than they could successfully hunt themselves. 🐕🐕🐂🐂🦴🦴

🏺 Great write up of this complicated topic. I'd merely add its *our* perception that treating human bodies in the same way as consumed animal bodies was necessarily an act of violence or disdain, because it assumes that hunting, butchering & eating other creatures is primarily about calories.

#PrimatePost 🦧💧 Chimps pee when seeing others peeing! 💦 Contagious urination may have social implications for group cohesion, marking territory and long-distance travel - like when you ask your friends to pee before a long car ride! We do it too! 🧪 #science 🏺 #BioAnth www.cell.com/current-biol...

This is a fascinating paper, linking the deposition of these sun stones and other carved artefacts at enclosures on Bornholm in c.2900BC, and suggesting this might have been a reaction to a major volcanic eruption leading to cold weather and darkened skies: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Please sign and share this student-led petition to save Ancient History here at Cardiff University www.change.org/p/save-cardi...

When they announced the closure of the Dept. of Archaeology at Sheffield we warned that that act of cultural vandalism was the tip of the iceberg. It's been sad to be proven right over and over again. It's the whole higher education that is under threat in the country. www.change.org/p/save-mlang...

🏺🧪🦣 Immensely interesting new, detailed and OA study suggesting cultural cheek piercing - like B in the image here, but one sided & potentially progressively enlarged from adolescence onwards - in a European 'Ice Age' culture 31.5-29.5 ka BP

Very pleased to pass on the news that Historic England have published new guidelines on best practice for scientific dating of #Pleistocene sites. They are aimed primarily at those working in the planning process, since many methods or considerations differ from those used for later periods…

Some exciting and tasty subjects coming up!

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Last week, my father was sectioned into hospital care. We've been here for hours on end while he's often asleep. Unfortunately, deadlines never sleep. So I'm trying to make use of the time here.

When things are pants, always work from a library. They're so full of life. The library near me is full of chatting old people, laughing kids, and this little babe - Betty the cat. Betty is my fave. She likes to sit under my table & has been there through every academic paper and essay I've written

In 2025, the fact there's no joined up End-Of-Life care is not good enough. Why can't all these organisations communicate?

It’s #MonkeyMonday! Been a few years since I took this photo of a wild long-tailed macaque on a Thai island, crushing a Nerita sea snail with a stone tool. To a gastropod these monkeys are basically a herd of rampaging King Kongs. 🧪🏺🐒 #mammals 📷 Khao Sam Roi Yot NP, September 2015

Macaques on Japan's Shodoshima Island enjoy leaving chalk marks on stones. They have no symbolic purpose, but recognisable geometric features (parallelism, intersections, repetitions). (paper) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-024-01176-y

Very wealthy people now have private jets. In three thousand years if people said "Americans had private jets" would that ring true about current experience? Obviously not. But people's ideas of the past are flattened in such a way that only the experience of the wealthy matter.

if you use genAI instead of your actual human brain you show a fundamental lack of self-respect. there’s nothing i could ever say to you or about you that could possibly be more insulting to your inherent human dignity

Oxford University Press will be awarding as many as 10 ECRs the opportunity to publish their first book in fully open access as well as in hardback. Today the website was revised to make clear that independent/unaffiliated scholars are eligible. Deadline March 3. academic.oup.com/pages/early-...