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Caley Orr

@caleyorr.bsky.social

Associate Professor | CU School of Medicine & CU Denver Anthropology | Paleoanthropology, Primate Morphology, Teaching Anatomy, Noisy Rock & Roll, Felis catus | Research: ucdenver.academia.edu/CaleyOrr

324 Posts1752 Follower831 Folgt
@drphilcox.bsky.social · last mo.

JOB ALERT! We are recruiting at @ucl-c4ia.bsky.social - a lecturer (Grade 8) or associate professor (Grade 9) in primate or human evolutionary anatomy (research and teaching). Contact Susan Evans or myself for further details. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRZ412/l...

Lecturer / Associate Professor in Primate or Human Evolutionary Anatomy at UCL

Searching for an academic job? Explore this Lecturer / Associate Professor in Primate or Human Evolutionary Anatomy opening on jobs.ac.uk! Click to view more details and browse other academic jobs.

jobs.ac.uk

Paige Madison@fossilhistory.bsky.social · last mo.

A few words from archaeologist Jamie Hodgkins on the latest H. naledi paper, which is cool and impressive overall (congrats to the proteomics team on this) but risks being overshadowed by claims from some team members that are a reach. 1/2

The latest proteomic paper on H naledi is fascinating, and frankly not surprising. The tooth morphology has long indicated that this was a population with exceptionally low variation, so the proteomic results are consistent with that pattern. The paper itself is strong. As with all science, future amelogenin‑based studies will determine whether this method can reliably determine biological sex with high confidence in older contexts, and different species. Personally, I think the paper is cool, and congratulations to Dr. Madupe. What is frustrating is that this finding, like everything associated with H. naledi, is immediately folded back into the burial claim. The defenses of the H. naledi burial claim always circle back to the same two talking points: 1) that "experts" don't think a small‑brained hominin could possibly bury its dead, and 2) that "experts" don't think that H. naledi had “culture.” I find both points puzzling. The small brain size of H. naledi has not been a major concern for most researchers or reviewers; the only people emphasizing it are the project directors who emphasized the point in their Netflix show. There is no known brain‑size threshold required for mortuary behavior, or for most behaviors, for that matter. Non‑human animals have been observed covering and attending to their dead. The “culture” argument is equally confusing. If culture is defined as a system of shared, learned, socially transmitted behaviors, knowledge, and practices that shape how a group interacts with the world, then I am not aware of anyone in paleoanthropology who doubts that all hominins had culture in some form. We know that different chimpanzee communities have distinct behavioral repertoires and tool‑use patterns. Ravens, crows, bowerbirds, capuchins, macaques, and baboons all exhibit group‑specific behaviors: culture by any reasonable definition. Importantly, as I have discussed before baboons, chimpanzees, and bears use caves as birthing dens...
Kai Caspar@nomascus.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New study on the evolution of primate cognition, brain size, sensory and motor functions, prompted by "recent work showing fishes perform as well as primates on various cognitive tests." 🐟🦍🧪 Great to see such broad comparative perspectives driving research. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Sensorimotor Complexity and Cognition as Predictors of Primate Brain Size

Objectives As animal brain size increases, cognitive performance generally increases. However, other key brain functions, such as the regulation of somatic processes, processing of sensory input, an...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Aylwyn Scally@aylwyn-scally.bsky.social · 3mo ago

'Anglo-Saxon' is a bogus and misleading term in all but a very narrow set of uses. And I'm not sure it's entirely helpful even in those. But I think it's particularly bad as an ancestry category, certainly when applied to present day individuals, and probably in the past also.

Christian Rowan@crowan-tectonics.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Excited to share our new paper published today in @natcomms.nature.com! We find that the crust beneath the Turkana Rift is extremely thin, and that the rift’s maturation played a key role in shaping the accumulation of Turkana’s world-famous hominin fossil record. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Necking of the active Turkana Rift Zone and the priming of eastern Africa for continental breakup - Nature Communications

This study indicates that the East African Rift System in northern Kenya may be closer to breaking apart than previously thought and that its development played an important role in the preservation o...

nature.com

Caitlin S., PhD@paleophile.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I'm glad to see WaPo and Forbes covering the #NSF #NSB terminations. The public needs to understand that scientific research in the US, as we have known it for three quarters of a century, is collapsing and it may take a decade or decades to recover from this. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...

Trump ousts National Science Board members

Members of the independent board that guides the National Science Foundation said they received a notice from the White House that their position was being terminated.

washingtonpost.com

Eleanor Scerri@elliescerri.bsky.social · 3mo ago

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...

Did Our Species Evolve in Subdivided Populations across Africa, and Why Does It Matter?

We challenge the view that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved within a single population and/or region of Africa. The chronology and physical diversity of Pleistocene human fossils suggest that morpho...

cell.com