🏺🦣 Watching online @katharv.bsky.social talk about Apidima at #ESHE2025 , extremely important and intriguing site: what is the taphonomic context of these two skulls of different ages?

🏺 Rachel and Anne have tirelessly (and often thanklessly and entirely without financial support) produced yet more vital work on the state of professional experience for #trowelblazers

🏺 #archaeology

I see that the "World's Most Moral Army" is now claiming it is "fighting a very different war from any previous conflict anyone has fought anywhere in the world" as justification for its unprecedented carnage amongst civilians and ravaging of the entire territory www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

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#ESHE2025 Selim Natahi ‘Exploring the underpinnings of endocranial globularity in present-day humans’ Globularity & neuroanatomy, not changes in face rel position. GMM: ventricular shape explains 31% endocranial shape (parietal walls vertical stretching and bulging), supporting GWAS study!!

#ESHE2025 A fantastic 1st day 🥰! Those in #Paris have 1 more treat: the Keynote as a conversation among 5 amazing women 💪 scientists: Amélie Beaudet, Céline Bon, Charlotte Canteloup, Sonia Harmand & Lucie Rigaill, with Rachel Mulot as moderator [cyber glitches prevent streaming the event] Enjoy!

🧪🦣🏺 Missed this but what an interesting method: fascinating social elements thinking about how long #Neanderthal hearths were burning: organisation and labour division of fuel choices, regularity of collection & fire-watching, cuisine/tech possibilities, and building of the social world...

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This morning's reading #Matriarcha 📚✒️

🏺 Always intrigued about potential that such things existed in prehistoric settlements. Identifying multi-storey buildings from stone remains are one thing, but organic superstructures might not preserve. e.g. what if these Neolithic house models aren't symbolic, but show real architecture?

For those who may not know ... the magnetic field of Uranus is tilted ~60 deg relative to its spin axis. So it looks like the aurorae are occurring near the equator, because, in fact, they are! Within ~ 30deg of the equator.

🏺 Always intrigued about potential that such things existed in prehistoric settlements. Identifying multi-storey buildings from stone remains are one thing, but organic superstructures might not preserve. e.g. what if these Neolithic house models aren't symbolic, but show real architecture?

🗃️ ...chugging Cokes while sitting on the already-old London Underground... The first steam-driven, gas-lit tube line opened in *1863*, the same year that the Forbes Quarry #Neanderthal skull arrived iand was shown to Charles Darwin, who thought it "wonderful" www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/...

🧪🦣🏺 I see there's a number of presentations at #ESHE2025 on Homo naledi, but all anatomically-related. Really wish newer taphonomic work on bone accumulations from Dinaledi & Lesedi, plus updates on fire/potential archaeology, were presented to colleagues at conferences instead of more pre-prints.

🧪🦣🏺 People have been wondering about this as a "wouldn't it be amazing if..." possibility for DECADES, and now it seems meticulous work may be making it a reality! #Archaeology is truly a science of wonder 🤩 [my Q is whether it's possible to distinguish painters from later touchers-of-art...]

🏺🧪🦣 Fantastic to have people like Marta live-posting from the cutting-edge human origins conference going on in Paris right now! Shanidar is an incredible place for our understanding of how to interpret accumulations of #Neanderthal individual remains.

🗃️ ...chugging Cokes while sitting on the already-old London Underground... The first steam-driven, gas-lit tube line opened in *1863*, the same year that the Forbes Quarry #Neanderthal skull arrived iand was shown to Charles Darwin, who thought it "wonderful" www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/...

#ESHE2025 Andrea Lukova ‘Reconstructing loading from the internal bone structure of the Homo naledi foot’ Signature of climbing in the naledi foot? Close look at the talus and 1st MT Human-like features – BUT!! Also climbing traits in talus – suggesting climbing was key element of locomotion!

🧪🦣🏺 I see there's a number of presentations at #ESHE2025 on Homo naledi, but all anatomically-related. Really wish newer taphonomic work on bone accumulations from Dinaledi & Lesedi, plus updates on fire/potential archaeology, were presented to colleagues at conferences instead of more pre-prints.

#ESHE2025 1st Pecha Kucha! Merlin Szymanski ‘A systematic evaluation of hominin and faunal DNA in Pleistocene sediments’ 250 collabs in aSED consortium Cave sites much better preservation; carnivores, rhinos & elephants: mismatch btn fossil record & DNA Also mismatches btn arch & DNA affinity 😍!

On the day Rubio inaugurated an archaeological “tunnel burrowed under a Palestinian district, along a Roman-era street” in an “archaeological park established by an Israeli settler organisation… Israeli planes bombed the most important storage depot of ancient artefacts in Gaza City”

I love this

🧪🦣🏺 People have been wondering about this as a "wouldn't it be amazing if..." possibility for DECADES, and now it seems meticulous work may be making it a reality! #Archaeology is truly a science of wonder 🤩 [my Q is whether it's possible to distinguish painters from later touchers-of-art...]

🏺🧪🦣 Fantastic to have people like Marta live-posting from the cutting-edge human origins conference going on in Paris right now! Shanidar is an incredible place for our understanding of how to interpret accumulations of #Neanderthal individual remains.

The anti-science element of Reform rhetoric should be linked to the economics. eg promoting anti-vax & questioning paracetamol safety (!!) directly puts children's health at risk... if he can't be trusted for responsible health policy, why should voters trust him on anything else?

🏺🦣🧪 FANTASTIC thread on incredibly important work by brilliant team - oldest bead workshop in W. Europe, and crucially, more taphonomic evidence separating #Neanderthals (represented by Middle Palaeolithic) from the Châtelperronian EUP cultural phenomena. (3rd pic site discovery 1977)

A 💯 fake-uncertain response, 💯 aimed at making people question and then lose trust in scientific expertise & authority. Farage and Reform telling everyone exactly who they are, perfectly OK with the prospect of dead children bc that's what happens when you make parents distrust safe medicines

#Geology types - anyone familiar with Stac Fada member tell me if these pebbles might be part of the ejecta stuff? The one on right collected off Stoer beach this summer and I think the other also from there.

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Really, really important thread intersecting science and politics. 🧪

🧪🏺🦣 Re-dating using HYP on Lagar Velho suggests charcoal & most fauna unassociated (except red-stained rabbit). Child's anatomy still being described as "mosaic" with Neanderthal features, pointing to "shared ancestry". What are general thoughts on the latter? www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Much better

Conférence "Qu'est-ce qui fait de nous des humains, de la préhistoire à aujourd'hui ?" le 25/09 à la mairie du 13e arrondissement de Paris Avec notamment S. Harmand (@cnrs.fr) dans le cadre de la 15e réunion de @eshesociety.bsky.social @inrap.fr @mnhn.fr traces.univ-tlse2.fr/accueil/agen...

Speaking here (as last year's @Humanists_UK Darwin Medalist) on humanity and evolution, and weaving my own secularist great-great grandfather's story into the lecture, is one of the things I'm most proud of 💕

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'Humanists UK was a lone voice sounding the alarm about far-right Christians looking to dissolve the boundaries between church and state... The idea was long dismissed as an Americanism that couldn’t happen here, but here it is.' @pollytoynbee.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Been growing this one all summer, it finally fruited! #harvest

Expertise matters. I strongly believe that one of the problems with the media has been the tendency to treat everything as just a branch of politics, and to (wrongly) assume that fundamentally politics-focused reporters can 'get across' any topic. It's not just wrong - it's enormously damaging.

Not keen on @theguardian.com choice of "contentious" for the subhead either. There is no contention, nor did they "unveil... conclusions". This is straight up dangerous, quackery with no medical or scientific basis, it is fearmongering misinformation, and should be reported as such.

🗃️ This whole post is considered, eloquent, and full of hope. Really worth reading for its own sake, but also for fellow scholars of the past thinking about how and why all of our work matters

& equinox began with 1st frost of the season, a day of soft light & shadow (all peripheral, out of corner of yr eye), gentle arrival of evening & all that will fall glowing

📚 🗃️ Wonderful new #history book out this week: #CrucubleOfLight: Islam and the forging of Europe from 8th-21st century. In the current climate of rampant xenophobia and especially Islamophobia, this is a vital read. Here's my full jacket quote ⬇️ www.panmacmillan.com/authors/eliz...

Radio 3's The Essay, "Symphony of the Wild" which featured me thinking about the intersections between primates, hominins & musicality is out - the five episodes (I'm in the final one, linked below) make up a lovely pod just over an hour long! www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

🏺 This review v much worth reading for fellow archaeologists. And I'd argue it's our work which both cranks & releases the tensions described: archaeology is how we learn more - as far as it is POSSIBLE - about what such places once meant, and a means to *engage with* them meaningfully now.

🏺 Can never get enough of this late prehistoric world where trees meant not just wood to people, but also bark/bast (and in other cases, roots) as a widely utilised material, likely with particular symbolic associations different to other fibres.

If you’re in the Preston area and fancy talking palaeo-parenting or primate placenta, well aren’t you in luck ;) come to this totally free talk at the University of Lancashire, kick off at 17:40 on October 8th www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/growing-up...

🏺 This review v much worth reading for fellow archaeologists. And I'd argue it's our work which both cranks & releases the tensions described: archaeology is how we learn more - as far as it is POSSIBLE - about what such places once meant, and a means to *engage with* them meaningfully now.