1/7 Our papers may seem to address different themes, but they coalesce around the deep human past as a process of niche expansion and feedbacks, into the transition to human dominated landscapes. A starting point was the pan-African structured theory of human origins: www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

This is weirdly difficult for students at first and speaks to the challenge of spatial reasoning inherent in flint knapping! Even a handaxe was hard on the first try, let alone a levallois

An archaeologist searching archives found evidence of binary lots going back nearly 13,000 years, suggesting Native Americans were using probability at the end of the last Ice Age - possibly as a way to make strangers into trading partners.🏺🧪

ACTION ALERT⚠️ Dept. of Interior is trying to rush through a revocation of Biden’s public law protecting lands around Chaco Canyon from new oil/gas leases. They’ve given only 7 day for public comment, during Easter/Passover. Thread 🧵 below on why you should care, but here’s a link to comment! 🏺

OMG, this awful regime wants to drill in CHACO CANYON.

Field folks, any advice on the tradeoffs between EOS Arrow vs Bad Elf Flex and similar #GNSS units? I'd love a version I can just clip to my backpack and ignore while using Field Maps or OnPoz on a tablet or phone. Advice for 1-3m and sub-meter RTK versions would be appreciated #GIS 🏺🧪

🧪🦣 🧬 New #Neanderthal genome just dropped! Denisova cave male, c. 120 Ka, some Denisovan ancestry, and living in very small effective breeding population <50. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

In 1953 archaeologist Robert Braidwood initiated a debate: what began the domestication of cereals in the Ancient Near East? Was it for bread or beer? Malt & malting was discussed briefly by some of the Braidwood Symposium participants but the "Bread or Beer" debate continues unresolved today. 🏺

This is our brilliant (and growing) MSc Palaeoanthropology and Palaeolithic Archaeology teaching team. Come to @ucl.ac.uk and study with these experts in human evolution, Palaeolithic archaeology and Quaternary science. 🏺🦣🧪🧬🦴 tinyurl.com/yc22vea3

Earliest evidence for intentional cremation of human remains in Africa 🏺🧪 Jessica Cerezo-Román, Justin Pargeter @justinpargeter.bsky.social et al www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... A large cremation feature at Hora 1 in Malawi dates to ~9500 years ago and contains the remains of a small, gracile adult

🦜🏔️ How did vibrant Amazonian parrot feathers end up in a desert tomb on the Pacific coast of Peru 1,000 years ago? Our new paper on @natcomms.nature.com reveals they didn't just trade feathers, pre-Inca societies transported live macaws and parrots across the Andes!👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Chuffed to finally see an IRL copy of Vol 91 of PPS, the first produced by the new editorial team of Prof Daniela Hofmann, Dr Courtney Nimura and me! New front cover, new size, new article template.

Interested to know how widespread eating limpets was- on our cold fringe of the north Atlantic they're regarded as a famine food more commonly used for baiting longlines, but I've tried a few & they're not that bad. Maybe they're just harder to harvest than the usual mussels and whelks?

An adorable #Roman shoe, made for a #baby too young to walk. The shoe imitates the footwear of Roman soldiers (caligae). The cut-out design would have shown off the kid’s socks! From Bordeaux, dating 1st/2nd AD. 📷 Bordeaux, Musée d’Aquitaine 🏺 #archaeology

Unravelling the Palaeolithic 2026! Join us for two days of all things Palaeolithic, Pleistocene and Early Human Origins at UCL Institute of Archaeology 19-20th June. Call for papers is now open and tickets are on sale! Check out our website for more information. sites.google.com/view/unravel...

Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs 🏺🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Suggests the first hunter-gatherers arriving in Europe already developed a system of intentional and conventional signs on mobile artifacts.

Fancy a swim? 🏊️ Check out our collection of maritime and underwater #archaeology, with exciting research on everything from Mediterranean shipwrecks to Maya salt production! 🏺 🔗 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Our release date is still seven months away, but my book is now up on the Yale website. Grateful to so many people who helped make this possible. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

So yeah, I went back. To that #TasTepeler exhibition here in Berlin - and down memory lane. 🏺👉 www.smb.museum/ausstellunge...

The Bronze Age vs The AI Age 1/ Can archaeology predict the future of Big Tech? Economists usually look back 50-150 years; archaeologists look back further. When you look at the Bronze Age Collapse (c. 1200 BCE), are there any parallels to our current AI trajectory? #AI #TechHistory #Archaeology

"On behalf of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), I am very pleased to inform you that you have been selected as the 2026 recipient of the SAA's Book Award—Popular category for “Native America: The Story of the First Peoples” published by Princeton University Press." Wow! No words.

A short, round, furrowed horn core inserting into the skull diagonally from Northern Kenya 750,000 years ago: a Kob #FossilFriday

By the marvellous Dr Katie Meheux, who has been researching, writing and presenting on Gordon Childe's political history for years!

... now with pictures instead of random black squares! It has arrived, the day of the superb owl! Here's a 10,000 year-old eagle-owl talon worn as an ornament. My team recovered it from the burial of a newborn girl nicknamed Neve at Arma Veirana, a cave in the Italian Maritime Alps. 🏺🧪 #superbowl

Demographic shifts, inter-group contact and environmental conditions drive language extinction and diversification. #linguistics

Job alert! 3 year post doc in my research group at University College London working on Roman Leather via biomolecular archaeology. #ZooMS #stableisotopes www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQJ187/r...

Job alert in Malta on my ERC funded IslandLab Project for a post excavation research assistant. A bachalor's degree in Archaeology, or related fields is required, ideally with experience working on faunal assemblages and handling bones/fossils, and curating finds. www.um.edu.mt/media/um/doc...

1/2 Two different limpet shells, belonging to the same species (P. vulgata). The flat one comes from low shore (large foot + reduced shell surface to resist strong waves and currents) while the pointed one comes from high shore (ribs + high shell help resist dessication by creating shadowed area)

A mammoth drawings from Arcy-sur-Cure cave,France. Outlined in red-ochre, this rotund, tuskless mammoth looks like a juvenile. At 28,000 years old, a product of the Gravettian culture, one of the oldest examples of cave art in Europe. The saddest mammoth from the Ice Age. 🦣😢🏺 #MammothMonday

Whaling may have started 1,500 years earlier than already known www.sciencenews.org/article/whal...

It was such a privilege to get to work on this amazing material from an incredible site and team - now the earliest handheld wooden tools in the archaeological record, taking evidence back to 430,000 years! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

If there are any French-speaking archaeologists in BC who would be interested in an interview on Monday (Jan 26) with Radio-Canada about whatever the heck is going on with the BC Heritage Act right now, DM me and I can connect you! 🏺

Roadkill... it's still protein. New research suggests scavenging animal carcasses wasn’t a desperate last resort, but a smart, reliable survival strategy that shaped human evolution. Revisiting hominin scavenging through the lens of optimal foraging theory 🏺🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🏺 Some gorgeous lithics from Orozmani, Georgia, just 20km from Dmanisi, also c. 1.8 Ma. (good to remember when dealing with claims of unexpectedly old sites in other places, that even extremely ancient hominins were producing unambiguous artefact assemblages) www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Hand-stencil motifs found in caves in Sulawesi, Indonesia, dating to at least 67,800 years ago, may be the oldest rock art discovered, according to a study in Nature. These findings support the theory that early humans migrated to Sahul via a northern route through Sulawesi. 🏺 🧪

I tried something new this year by building a suite of #archaeological #theory practicals, so a 🧵 on resources I (and my students) loved 🏺. I’ve linked to online materials but will happily share purpose-made stuff:

More Breaking Palaeo-news! 🐘 Boxgrove preserved oldest Elephant Bone beyond Africa. 🐘 Early Neanderthals using bone to shape beautiful tools. 🐘 New research from Simon Parfitt @uclarchaeology.bsky.social Silvia Bello of the @nhm-london.bsky.social. 🦣🏺🐘https://share.google/20WUjY5TybDAr4QoT

#ZooMS infographic and ALT generated from a spoken prompt "Can you explain what zooms is and how this is used to identify archaeological bone? and medieval parchment?" 🦴📜 #Archaeology. Slightly scary, as while it is clearly AI, my net intellectual contribution was 18 spoken words.

There's not much beating … Neolithic #SharkHunters. 🙌

We've been collecting trophies for a long time. For a very long time apparently, as these skulls of #horned herbivores at the #DesCubiertaCave in #Spain seem to suggest, which have been accumulated by ... #Neanderthals: 🏺 www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2026/01/n...

Since Jan 1 2025, which feels like four trillion years ago, research has been shared on here 5 million whole-ass times. Bluesky recently passed 2 billion posts IN TOTAL. So 0.25% of the entire site's traffic was citations to research. That is actually massively high. Is it? Yes. Here's why.

Really excited that our *new paper* is finally out 🔥 This study is the first to quantitatively investigate museum visitors’ perceptions of historical analogies that compare concepts from the deep past to modern political ideas. doi.org/10.1057/s415...

And here’s my other human origins countdown to close out the year! 🏺🧪

Within a cave used by bird nest traders, archaeologists uncover a single tooth from an ancient group: the first evidence from an extinct hominin on the world’s third largest island. What group lived there in the millennia before modern people arrived? www.johnhawks.net/p/a-possible...

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... #OntarioArchaeology #FirstNations 🏺 #CulturalHeritage #TRC

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

I got round to it! 🤣 bigbookoftorcs.com/2025/12/21/d...

A student's paper just described the interaction between Homo sapiens and Neandertals as "a situationship rather than a relationship" and I'm still laughing ten minutes later 💀🏺

the analogy I use with friends and family all the time is the jump from collegiate to professional sports. as soon as I explain it that way, it clicks in their brains what the academic job market is like.

🧪🦣 🏺 Super thread on complexity & pitfalls in using genetics to - crudely put - explain why H. sapiens are here but #Neanderthals aren't. For me, it underlines as usual that while the DNA revolution has been amazing, the #archaeology - what humans actually did - remains central to understanding.