Tom Booth
@boothicus.bsky.social
Bioarchaeologist. Amateur Scarecrow. Ancient DNA Lab @ The Francis Crick Institute Associate Lecturer in Quantitative Archaeology and Later European Prehistory @ UCL Institute of Archaeology
Can confirm (it's OA)
Negotiating Migrations
As a species, we have always been mobile and migration was a habitual feature of prehistoric life. This open-access volume uses archaeological case studies main…
bloomsbury.com
Katelyn Burns@katelynburns.com · yesterdayFor millennia migration was just a standard thing for humans.
I’m sure he muttered that under his breath right at the start of the film. But it was in Greek, Tom, which is perhaps why you missed. Maybe. (Πεπoίηται ἐκ τοῦ ἀρίστου Κορνικοῦ κασσιτέρου)
Generally enjoyed The Odyssey, but spoiled by the fact that at no point does Odysseus stare at his sword and mutter “made with the finest Cornish tin.” Completely took me out of it what a waste.
How much of Neolithic Britain survived the Beaker transition, and whose ancestry was it? Somewhere between 0 and 8%, and the answer is in the existing data, it just needs to be analysed. How and why: www.sarsen.org/2026/08/how-... (sightly updated)
How much of Neolithic Britain survived the Beaker transition, and whose ancestry it was
This is a technical discussion draft relating to the Population Replacement Evidence post. Revised 3 August 2026. This version replaces th...
sarsen.org
Fascinating - Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were populating upland lakes with brown trout. There are some species in Ireland that may have been brought in too, eg a small, cuddly bear cub is easy to transport in a boat … and how did red deer get here in the end?
Antiquity Journal@antiquity.ac.uk · 2d agoRead the original research in Antiquity 🆓 'The introduction of fish to the Scandinavian mountains by hunter-fisher-gatherers 5000 BC' - Axel Mjærum, Ellen K. Friis, Trygve Hesthagen & Andreas J. Kirchhefer doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 13/13 🧵
Great to see our new paper out; evidence for Neanderthals in Arabia! Time to stop imagining our hominin cousins as only being found in cold northern forests! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Neanderthals in the desert? Population history best explains Middle Palaeolithic technological heterogeneity in Arabia
Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia present a rich record of hominin occupations between ca. 100 and 50 thousand years ago (ka) at a critical biogeogr…
sciencedirect.com
Reasonable, good stuff from Tim here, not just because he cites me and colleagues relatively favourably! I understand that all we have to compare against are historical examples, but it’s worth bearing in mind dynamics may have been unlike anything that’s been observed historically.
Tim Daw@timdaw.bsky.social · 4d agoMy take on what the evidence of a population replacement looks like, and what we actually see in Chalcolithic–Early Bronze Age Britain. www.sarsen.org/2026/08/popu...
🏺 It’s Yorkshire Day and as someone who is (almost!) a naturalised Yorkshireman, it feels only right to highlight some objects from the York Museum Trust in honour of the day. 📜 Like this gorgeous bone comb fragment with an amazing little animal head. www.yorkmuseumstrust.org.uk/index.php?pa...
“It’s a run, not a race…”, except the times when it’s not. This is unlikely to ever happen again, so for the sake of posterity, you understand…
A stone slab carved with daggers and triangular axe-heads Found in a burial mound somewhere near Badbury Rings hillfort #Dorset in 1845 The only similar Early Bronze Age carvings in Britain come from the sarsens of Stonehenge © The Trustees of the British Museum Acc No 1892,0901.293 #Findsfriday
Extra big attn archaeologists How about absolutely not
Doremus Schafer@doremus-schafer.bsky.social · 5d agoGoogle put out a five-point bullet list of supposed use cases, it is, uh, not wildly convincing. My 'favorite' is 'have the stochastic parrot show your students what historical sites looked like in olden days'. blog.google/products-and...
Hi! Live near Lancashire? Got young kids? I’m in Preston on Monday afternoon for a fun event about my kids’ book You Are History! I’ll be joined on stage by the book’s amazing illustrator Jenny Taylor as a talking/drawing double act! A few tickets left here www.visitpreston.com/article/1300...
You Are History with Greg Jenner and Jenny Taylor - Visit Preston
Historian and podcaster Greg Jenner shares delightful, daft and downright deadly facts form his book
visitpreston.com
One of the major pains of academia is having to click through labyrinths of webpages to submit papers. Now, thanks to Joe Rich (and AI), problem solved! His tool is called PaperPush and is available at github.com/pachterlab/p... It's super easy to use! 1/🧵
GitHub - pachterlab/paperpush
Contribute to pachterlab/paperpush development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
A huge loss. Roy Hodson was our first gender archaeologist in British Iron Age studies, using complex seriation at Hallstatt to determine that status (grave wealth) was not gendered. His work in 1964, on British insularity (against invasionist thinking) another classic. A great mind, methodologist.
Welwyn Archaeological Society@welwynarchsoc.bsky.social · 6d agoSad to hear of the passing of Roy Hodson, pioneering user of #statistical methods in #archaeology. Although we only met in passing quite some time ago, his work forms the foundations of much quantitative archaeology and an important part of the @uclarchaeology.bsky.social 's history. RIP.
I recently wrote a book review, on the edited volume The Early Neolithic of Northern Europe: New Approaches to Migration, Movement and Social Connection. Highly recommended! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/UGGSE...
The Early Neolithic of Northern Europe: New Approaches to Migration, Movement and Social Connection
Published in Norwegian Archaeological Review (Ahead of Print, 2026)
tandfonline.com
🏺 Archaeologists also recognise the heritage potency of @jodrellbank.bsky.social , e.g. Mark Edmonds' work www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
When they come to model Heaven: big science and the monumental in post-war Britain | Antiquity | Cambridge Core
When they come to model Heaven: big science and the monumental in post-war Britain - Volume 84 Issue 325
cambridge.org
Jon Agar@jonagar.bsky.social · last wk.As a historian of Jodrell Bank, I agree! And the reason it is important is that it has been made to mean different things to different people at different times. Who's up for a mega thread on how and why? (I'm off for lunch now, but I'll do it after. I'll need the energy...)
Our new paper :)
Eleanor Scerri@elliescerri.bsky.social · last wk.New paper: Mesolithic mariners in the Central Mediterranean made sustained, long distance sea journeys. Not accidents, one offs, and not rare events. See thread in the comments. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar..., led by @jblinkhorn.bsky.social
Perhaps the first photograph of the summer solstice sunrise at Stonehenge, advertised for sale #OTD 150 years ago: only a shilling (£6.60 today in terms of RPI) - I wonder if there are any copies still around...?
🏺The range of the 5300-year old plague has been expanded to East Asia. Given a plague genome of a similar date has been recovered from a Neolithic tomb in Orkney, this was truly a trans-Eurasian phenomenon, but there’s still a lot of questions about how it spread. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
It's that time of year again.. No-one has demonstrated the evolutionary significance of epigenetic inheritance, at least not in animals, primarily because that is very different from just showing a transgenerational effect can occur. theconversation.com/updating-dar...
Updating Darwin: biologists are returning to an older theory to explain anomalies in evolution
To make sense of some characteristics that species exhibit from birth, you have to turn to an old discredited theory known as Lamarckism.
theconversation.com
Fascinating discovery of ~1.43 million year old footprints 👣👣👣 Homo and Paranthropus wandering around the lakeshore.... www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
Insights into hominin body size, locomotion, and behavior from Early Pleistocene trackways in northern Kenya | PNAS
The Early Pleistocene fossils of the Koobi Fora Formation, northern Kenya, record two well-documented hominin genera, Homo and Paranthropus, preser...
pnas.org
Speaking of the Sea Peoples, Polyphemus is on the Sea Peoples diet: he sees people, he eats em.
Okay I thought this was taking the piss but apparently this actually happens!?
Gabe Moshenska@gabemoshenska.bsky.social · last wk.I enjoyed the cameo by Ea-Nasir running through the burning ruins of Troy blasting an air-horn and yelling AWOOOO IT’S THE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE
Want a book about the end of the southern British Iron Age, the Roman invasion and the greatest king of this island has ever had? If only such a thing existed...🤔 www.bloomsbury.com/uk/caratacus... @bloomsburyacademic.bsky.social January 2027 #Archaeology #AncientBlueSky 🏺
New paper reviewing the issues around presentation of claims for #Naledi burials, both in publications and popular media. Useful not merely re: this site, but in considering how archaeologists construct arguments (& data collection) more widely. 🏺 🧪
Andra Meneganzin@andrameneganzin.bsky.social · 2w agoMy joint work w/ Matteo Bedetti is now officially out in Biology & Philosophy! [Re-sharing the 🧵, with full-text link 👇] We examine how evidential standards are negotiated in funerary #archaeology debates, using the Homo #naledi burial controversy as a case study in epistemological practice.🧪🏺💀
Porky Arreglando Su Corbata de Moño
ALT: Porky Arreglando Su Corbata de Moño
static.klipy.com
Adam Rutherford@adamrutherford.bsky.social · 2w agoYou suddenly get a narrator describing your life and there’s no way to turn it off - everyone can hear it. While shopping, at work, at home, with friends - the voice narrating your every move goes on. Who do you hope is the voice of this narrator?
