🏺🗃️ Just applied on behalf of @trowelblazers.bsky.social for something v exciting 🤞

Truly reaching the point where "AI" is meaningless.

Legit, who wants to work on a women-through-prehistory timeslip computer game with me? I HAVE IDEAS 🏺🎮

"Szalay’s subject... is masculinity: what it means to be a man today, with an inevitable emphasis on sex, violence and money" Have not read this but I don't know if I could find three "inevitable" words that describe what it means to be a woman today www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

R A D I O 3

And yet, it still makes more sense to hunt large fauna: research by @jamescolearch.bsky.social from 2017 www.nature.com/articles/sre...

I genuinely struggle to think of another context on BBC and media more broadly where a group (a protected minority!) whose rights and interests and even perception of reality are routinely being discussed/debated/dismissed, without their presence and ability to speak.

How many trans people have the BBC had on this week discussing the BBC's pro-trans bias? Zero.

🧪 Astronomy (broadly, but this kind of thing especially and also planetary geology) is my Sliding Doors career, and just looking at this gorgeous image gives me that same swoony feeling I get at a really exciting, unexpected new archaeology/human origins finding ❤️

🏺 🧪 Research and publications like this really matter, since even when one theory is not supported by later evidence, it opens up interesting new perspectives and scenarios for #humanevolution.

Love how this actually looks like textile art

Love how this actually looks like textile art

🏺 Not a specialist in this area, but digging +5000 <1m deep holes to count produce seems a strange use of energy... if local settlement had massive irrigation system nearby, then could the holes have been part of that?

💯 I'll never not be grateful for the quality children's programming that BBC rapidly created during covid, including Greg's Homeschool History podcast (which I'm also proud to have contributed to)

Claiming BBC is biased because it sometimes includes positive content about trans people is truly preposterous, but makes perfect sense if you're trying to push moral panic by arguing that they are inherently something to be debated/fake/suspicious/threatening: distilled, extreme prejudice

🏺 🧪 Research and publications like this really matter, since even when one theory is not supported by later evidence, it opens up interesting new perspectives and scenarios for #humanevolution.

Years of work and collab with an incredible team at #BBCStudios #AppleTV @framestore.bsky.social ... involving so many camera operators, writers, producers, effects people, artists and others, #PrehistoricPlanetaIceAge is out on #AppleTV Nov 26th. A definitive vision of Ice Age wildlife worldwide.

📚🗃️ Another good stay at @gladlib.bsky.social, esp. pleased to see this research about their strong links to both Transatlantic slave economy & colonial indentured labour. Made me look twice as I had my coffee too.. (truly, the fuss made about this kind of thing at National Trust sites is pathetic)

In case of use to anyone else, it removes all the 'extra' sub-sections of video, images too!

Amud I. 𝘏𝘰𝘮𝘰 𝘯𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴. Late Pleistocene. Israel. #FossilFriday Courtesy of Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. Tel-Aviv Universit  @erc.europa.eu @cenieh.bsky.social #FECYT

Is there any way to turn google search results back to just delivering websites, rather than forcing you to also see sub-sections for images and videos and "people also search for"?

I'd also like to see similar 'drop this shit' energy directed at Facebook. It's become a default community organising platform, used (because it's 'free') as an information dissemination source even for public, state-funded things like primary schools, where opting out is practically v difficult.

🏺

I actually quite like the idea of "æfterbears", as something going back to the Old English, and which avoids odd interpretations

Interesting, and relevant to so much right now, that we don't seem to have a future equivalent for "forebears" - we need a word for those who will come after, that encompasses humans who aren't our direct descendants, but is more personal than just "posterity".

Sadly this has had to be cancelled due to low ticket sales meaning that it would make a loss and the overall charity effort was going to suffer. But @flintdibble.bsky.social & I still like our performance idea so you might see it in another form at some other future event!

🏺 Since Titan has an active atmosphere and weather patterns that deposit material over its annual (long, c. 29 Earth yrs) seasons, if we ever get back there to look at the archaeology of this historic lander site, we may well have to excavate it

This is good context to my earlier post, but I'd still argue that we should change the name. If it's not just about religion, let's call it something more accurate and appropriate than RE. bsky.app/profile/huma...

Re: tendencies to ascribe personhood to #AI: "...it was impossible not to invest the machine with some faculty of intellect; it seemed to have made the first step from brute matter to life and purpose, showing its progress by great power." Dorothy Wordsworth, 1803, encountering steam-powered pump

Young people don't need more "Religious Education" to live in modern world. If it's inclusion/social cohesion govt is aiming for, then a better approach would be to drop RE, and create new subject Anthropology, on critical thinking, philosophy & belief systems. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

🏺 Archaeology Q - any recs for recent literature exploring the ideology of changes in mortuary practice from Neo to CW/BB in Europe, i.e. not when/where/who, but why?

Back at wonderful @gladlib.bsky.social for a week of intensive work, weaving through the threads of #Matriarcha 📚✒️ (women and horses; writing-the-self; Neolithic violence; origins of stories)

What's the latest on how much those Alexa things actually spy on you? Kids were messing about at a friend's where an Alexa was present, and asked it which one of them was doing something, to which it immediately named the correct child. They do not live there and have never told it their name.

💯 It amazes me that so many left-wing people who celebrated Labour's win, and felt real hope listening to Starmer's vistory speech, rapidly lost perspective on how long it takes to fix a country that was gutted for 15 yrs by right-wing policy.

Am not a professional educator but I don't actually think that giving prompts to an image genAI is a great pedagogical tool for kids to learn how to improve the descriptive quality of their writing

🏺 I like the notion of very complicated, high tech yet relatively short lived archaeological artefacts

🗃️ My grandmother, aged well over 90 and a child in WW2, found a hugely attentive audience at a local primary school recently where she talked about meeting Italian prisoners of war, people taking parachute silk from a crashed plane, and GIs giving out gum. Connecting generations is so important

"I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter!... I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me!"

And costume to match... Happy Halloween 🕸️

Are you looking for some mid-late 90s vaguely-maudlin-yet-still metal tunes for your Halloween dusk pre-party vibe? You're welcome

Are you looking for some mid-late 90s vaguely-maudlin-yet-still metal tunes for your Halloween dusk pre-party vibe? You're welcome

Bronze Age cosmology vibes

I’m often asked by women whether they should accept eg panel invitations if they feel they’re being tokenised, and I always say “do you believe the men on the panel were invited only on merit?”.

Another one bites the dust. When I expressed my professional concerns at issues in the science unit and where it was headed, I was quickly terminated. Public service broadcasters have a remit; we should hold them to it

Longest woolly rhino horn yet found, from longest-lived individual, a female

🧪 Here's the radio encounter between Ben & @toriherridge.bsky.social a year ago (7:40➡️) which covered many mammoth de-extinction issues, but didn't get into the major one for me which is how sustainable is it to create arctic-adapted elephants for a vanishing ecosystem? www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

AI experts in higher ed aghast at higher ed’s embrace of AI apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

🧪 I see Ben Lamm of Colossal is in Time as a "2025 World’s Most Influential Rising Stars, Innovator class" with a profile written by... George Church. Amongst other things, it says: "Ben has faced technical hurdles and skeptics with respect and humor." 🤔 time.com/collections/...

Join us on Nov 4 (14:00 GMT) for the next @icarehb.bsky.social LEXA Seminar! Prof Matthew Bennett explores early human transport tech from White Sands. Were travois-like devices used 22,000 years ago? Free & online: zoom.us/meeting/regi...