Eleanor M. Williams
@eleanormw.bsky.social
NERC CREATES DLA PhD student, University of Cambridge | Human Evolution in Africa, Plio-Pleistocene, Palaeoanthropology, Archaeology | she/her
The Unravelling the Palaeolithic 2026 (preliminary) conference program is now available! Join us 19th/20th June for two days of excellent presentations on all things Palaeolithic, Palaeoanthrolopology, and Pleistocene. Tickets on sale until 7th June. sites.google.com/view/unravel...
Unravelling the Palaeolithic - Timetable and Programme
Preliminary Conference Timetable Now Available!
sites.google.com
Thoroughly enjoyed supervising on the @cam-archaeology.bsky.social undergraduate training dig at Wandlebury Country Park this week. Great students, great weather, and a great time had by all
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
Much like buses, wait a while for a paper on complexity and two come along at once! You can now see our paper revisiting Oswalt’s original data, with @lucytimbrell96.bsky.social, @sarah-paris.bsky.social, and Gonzalo Linares-Matás! /1 www.isita-org.com/jass/Content...
isita-org.com
James Clark@jclark997.bsky.social · 5mo agoI am delighted to share our new paper on measuring complexity across the Primatological, Archaeological, and Ethnographic records, with an amazing team of co-authors - including the excellent @lucytimbrell96.bsky.social and @ceciliapad.bsky.social! Short 🧵 below /1 doi.org/10.1007/s108...
I am delighted to share our new paper on measuring complexity across the Primatological, Archaeological, and Ethnographic records, with an amazing team of co-authors - including the excellent @lucytimbrell96.bsky.social and @ceciliapad.bsky.social! Short 🧵 below /1 doi.org/10.1007/s108...
The Tool Systems Approach: Measuring Complexity in the Primatological, Archaeological, and Ethnographic Records - Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
Measuring technological complexity across species, as well as across temporal and spatial scales, is an ongoing challenge among authors who work on primatological, archaeological, and/or ethnographic questions. Researchers in these individual fields have developed a number of innovative ways of approaching this issue that reflect the specific affordances of their data with a known set of limitations. However, comparability between these approaches is often difficult. One such field-specific approach is the techno-unit method of Oswalt et al. (1976), which has had a massive impact on our interpretation of ethnographic technology over the fifty years since its publication. Nevertheless, this method has issues with its compression of variability and the different pathways to “complexity”. Here, we review a number of different ways technological complexity has been measured in non-human primates, the archaeological record, and modern human foragers, in order to identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. We suggest that the approach deployed in any given study should continue to follow the data and research questions under consideration, but that we lack an easily-applicable method that allows explicit comparisons between fields of study. In this context, we introduce the Tool Systems Approach as one possible way of doing so, which decomposes tool manufacture into its constituent steps (i.e., Tool Systems Total) and discrete forms of action (i.e., Total Discrete Actions). We apply the approach to a number of different technologies across the three fields, to explore the practicalities of its application, as well as its limitations. Plotting these different technologies with regards to their maximum complexity through time reveals trends that may map onto important changes in cognitive evolution, which are also reflected in ever-growing variability in the complexity of individual artefacts. The ramifications for the study of technological complexity as a whole are discussed.
doi.org
Nice article honoring the career of Abel Molepolle and many other South Africans whose hard work at Sterkfontein and Swartkrans produced the remarkable fossil record we know today sajs.co.za/article/view...
sajs.co.za
We are seeking a Research Associate in the Structural Analysis of Palaeolithic Tools (Fixed Term) to contribute to the AHRC funded The Mechanical Optimisation of Stone Technologies by Early Humans in Africa project. Closing date: 15 April 2026 www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...
🪨 Earliest Oldowan toolmakers selected distant stone sources? #ICArEHB Jonathan S. Reeves (w/ Finestone, Plummer et al.) in Science Advances: doi.org/10.1126/scia... #Lithics #Archaeology
Acheulean Expediency Potential: Handaxe Manufacturing Time Costs, Covariates and Skill www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Acheulean Expediency Potential: Handaxe Manufacturing Time Costs, Covariates and Skill
Despite decades of replicative experiments, the fundamental question “how long did it take to make an Acheulean handaxe” remains poorly understood. Archaeologists routinely base influential Pleisto...
tandfonline.com
Postcranial fossils from the site of Drimolen in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa provide further insights into hominin paleobiology at approximately 2.0 million years ago! New study by Caley M. Orr et al.: anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Interested in Oldowan stone tools and early human behaviour? Develop your #PhD with #ICArEHB through the #FCT #PhD #Fellowships 2026. #Archaeology #Research #Prehistory #ScienceCareers #PhDLife
I am really excited to share news of this new jaw...until now Paranthropus had been conspicuously absent from the Afar. Fieldwork at Mille-Logya is not easy, and this fossil is the result of years of very hard work (and a lot of days of dry screening by our team)! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus - Nature
With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in east...
nature.com
The first article from the Cambridge Prisms: Extinction special issue on 'Hominin Cultural and Biological Extinctions', guest edited by @jjrowan.bsky.social and Dr Alastair Key, has just been published. A continuous record of early human stone tool production: doi.org/10.1017/ext....
KNM-ER 64061, most complete Homo habilis skeleton yet (Koobi Fora) shows primitive limb proportions: long forearms, thick cortices, small body mass & ~160 cm stature. Upper limbs like early Homo, but proportions differ from H. erectus Grine et al anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
🚨CALL FOR PAPERS!🚨 @lucytimbrell96.bsky.social and I are running a session (S17) at PanAf2026 in Mozambique, titled: Pan-African Homo sapiens evolution: linking processes with data. More info: panaf2026moz.com/panaf-sessio... & submit an abstract: panaf2026moz.com/paper-submis... deadline March 15th
PanAF Sessions
The Local Organizing Committee is excited that almost 70 sessions and workshops will occur at PanAF Moz 2026. Pan-African Association members and non-members are welcome to submit paper abstracts t…
panaf2026moz.com
A great start to 2026! My paper with Alastair Key is out #openaccess in Cambridge Prisms Extinction. We examine temporal continuity in the African ESA - no significant gaps, no evidence for loss of tool making abilities c.3.3-1.5 Ma. @cam-archaeology.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
A continuous record of early human stone tool production | Cambridge Prisms: Extinction | Cambridge Core
A continuous record of early human stone tool production - Volume 4
cambridge.org
My colleague Ryan McRae and I wrote our annual round up of top discoveries in human evolution from this year for the @plos.org Sci Comm blog - enjoy! scicomm.plos.org/2025/12/19/t...
Top Stories in Human Evolution of 2025 - PLOS SciComm
By Ryan McRae and Briana Pobiner 2025 has been quite the wild year! With more exciting stories in human evolution than we…
scicomm.plos.org
“What archaeology asks of everyone is an openness to alternate worlds. An understanding that your society, with its ways of working, worshipping, learning, loving—even knowing a dog—is just one permutation of endless human and beyond human possibilities.” www.sapiens.org/archaeology/...
Unearthing What Archaeologists Can and Cannot Know
An archaeologist studying 1,000-year-old dog burials reflects on the need for evidence and imagination in archaeology.
sapiens.org
New paper by @sarah-paris.bsky.social 🚨 "The transformation of ochre from a loose pigment used widely in early burials to rare pellet deposits in later interments mirrors broader processes of cultural change, technological development and ideological realignment in Southeast Asia."
Ochre use in burial practices in Thailand, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age | Antiquity | Cambridge Core
Ochre use in burial practices in Thailand, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age
cambridge.org
Paranthropus boisei is a human fossil cousin w/ giant jaws and teeth that lived in East Africa ~2.6 to 1.3 million years ago. Whether it could make & use tools has been a paleoanthropological mystery since the 1960s. Our new paper describes the first firmly associated hand and foot. 1/
New fossils reveal the hand of Paranthropus boisei - Nature
Analyses of newly discovered hand and foot bones of a Paranthropus boisei specimen provide insight into possible tool use and other palaeobiology characteristics among Plio-Pleistocene hominin species...
nature.com
Great time visiting Lucy and Selam in Prague this weekend! Amazing to see the original fossils, well worth the trip
Last week I matriculated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to start my NERC-funded (CREATES DLA) PhD in Archaeology! @caiuscollege.bsky.social @cam.ac.uk @cam-archaeology.bsky.social
We are hiring a Project Co-ordinator! 🚨 Are you extremely organised with great interpersonal skills? Able to multitask efficiently? Interested in African prehistory? Keen to work with an enthusiastic team? We want to hear from you! Closing date: 17 October, 2025
Project Coordinator (Fixed Term)
Applications are invited for a 12-month Project Co-ordinator position on the NG'IPALAJEM project, funded by the ERC. The project aims at collecting new palaeontological, archaeological and geological
cam.ac.uk
Poster Session 2 #ESHE2025 83 wonderful posters. 169 in total. Palaeotrails’ Jesse Martin & @martamlahr.bsky.social on detecting microevolutionary trends in fossil hominin populations.
Pastoralism remains central to survival in the Turkana of northwest Kenya, where heat and water scarcity pose constant challenges. New research uncovers the genetic signatures that underlie adaptation to arid living in this pastoralist community. Learn more this week: https://scim.ag/4nxcJbx
Happy to share the first paper from my PhD! Open access in a special issue of JAS, 'The Mind in Deep Time: Interdisciplinary explorations of cognitive evolution' When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill share.google/hj43OR6QWXtc...
When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill
As the most numerous manifestations of technology across the Palaeolithic record, linking stone tool artefacts to past hominin cognition and expertise…
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Very much enjoyed working on this paper. An important site for #Palaeolithic archaeology in the UK. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Hominin glacial-stage occupation 712,000 to 424,000 years ago at Fordwich Pit, Old Park (Canterbury, UK) - Nature Ecology & Evolution
The authors report Acheulean hominin occupation of eastern Britain during glacial marine isotope stages 17–16 and again in glacial marine isotope stage 12 via stone tools in sediments dated to 712,000...
nature.com
Last sunrise in Turkana before heading back to Nairobi. What an incredible few months it's been! #kenya #fieldwork @palaeotrails.bsky.social
