Everyone's comparing Nolan's Odyssey to Homer, but I think there's much more richness The ancient Greeks adapted the Odyssey into ART While these images might appear static to us, I want to walk through how an ancient Greek saw art: AS DYNAMIC STORYTELLING like our films 1/13

Excited about my newest publication, published today! I really enjoyed working/writing with this group, led by Metin Eren. Spoiler alert: the answers to the questions we pose in the title are 'probably both', and 'nah, we can't'.

Chris Widga@widga.bsky.social · last mo.

More of this, please. Metin Eren, @brianapobiner.bsky.social, and others. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Love the colours and patterns in some Norfolk flints!

We’re hiring a Research Assistant🚨 Interested in human evolution and African prehistory? We’re looking for someone with excellent organisational skills who will be based in Cambridge, with fieldwork opportunities in Kenya🇰🇪 Deadline: 01.07.2026 🔗 Apply online:
www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

The lab group is out in full force at Unravelling the Palaeolithic 2026 @unravellingpalaeo.bsky.social @finnstileman.bsky.social kicked off day one, presenting on identifying soft hammer flaking in the Acheulean Up tomorrow @anna-r-mika.bsky.social @jclark997.bsky.social &@vaneshreev.bsky.social!

Great talk from @finnstileman.bsky.social on soft hammer knapping at the Unravelling the Palaeolithic conference today #UTP26 @unravellingpalaeo.bsky.social

Our (open access) paper on Neolithic arrowheads has just come out! We explore Levantine connections and local innovations in NW Arabia! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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

Out today making handaxes for an upcoming experiment. Always surprised by the frequency of canonical ‘blades’ - a useful reminder to not rely too heavily on typology!

Been playing with clay silver which is magic! Here’s a ring impressed with a 13th century seal I found when I was a kid

Casts are too expensive so I am making terracotta skulls instead - this one with the help of Levallois flakes!

New open access paper 🎉🎉 Acheulean Expediency Potential: Handaxe Manufacturing 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

The artwork that illustrated our PNAS paper on the oldest wooden tools was made by Gleiver Prieto, who has also worked with me on illustrations for previous projects, including the paleoenvironmental reconstruction of Marathousa 1. Gleiver's art really brings Pleistocene Megalopolis to life ✨ 🤩

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/...

Evidence for the earliest hominin use of wooden handheld tools found at Marathousa 1 (Greece) | PNAS

The Middle Pleistocene (MP; ca. 774 to 129 ka) marks a critical period of human evolution, characterized by increasing behavioral complexity and th...

pnas.org

Early humans in central China may have been making sophisticated stone tools as early as 160,000 years ago, according to research in Nature Communications. This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period. 🏺 🧪

Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China ~160,000–72,000 years ago - Nature Communications

Stone tools illustrate behavioural complexities in Middle Pleistocene hominin populations. Here, the authors present small dimensional flakes and hafted tools from Xigou, central China, dated to ~160–72 thousand years ago that demonstrate early, complex technological advancements.

go.nature.com

🧪🏺 WOWWWW New dates in SE Asia for rock paintings - major implications: - nature of early aesthetics, innovations - relationship to oldest known Australian settlement? - and (IMO) impacts claims that cave art in Europe >50 Ka is necessarily work of #Neanderthals www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi - Nature

A hand stencil painted on a cave wall on a small island off the coast of Sulawesi more than 67,800 years ago suggests a very early occupation of Wallacea.

nature.com

My mum just came back from a walk around a field with this, saying it’s probably not old but she wanted to show me just in case. It’s an early medieval stirrup mount! Landowner contacted and shortly off to local Finds Liaison Officer! Always worth keeping one eye on the ground!

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

Prehistoric tool made from elephant bone is the oldest discovered in Europe

A remarkable prehistoric hammer made from elephant bone, dating back nearly half a million years ago, has been uncovered in southern England and analyzed by archaeologists from UCL and the Natural His...

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Latest paper: Boxgrove is a key European site dating to 480,000 years ago. At GTP17, hominins knapped handaxes and then butchered an adult female horse. A fragment of the horse's scapula appeared to have evidence of impact from a wooden spear..... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Please join us next week, Thursday 13h November, for our next talk. We will be joined by Finn Stileman, University of Cambridge. More details 👇 Please register here: liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi... We hope to see you there!

📣 PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS 📣 An international team, including our own Finn Stileman, have published a new study in Nature Communications on a monumental rock art tradition in northern Arabia dating between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📸 @finnstileman.bsky.social

New discovery! Here @mariaguagnin.bsky.social and our team report on 12,000-year-old life-size camel rock art engravings in the Saudi desert. #GreenArabia @griffith.edu.au www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our new paper is out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 12,000 year old camel engravings marked water sources in the desert. A great team effort @mdpetraglia.bsky.social @finnstileman.bsky.social @stewiestewart.bsky.social et al!

Monumental rock art illustrates that humans thrived in the Arabian Desert during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition | Nature Communications

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nature.com

Was great to present a poster at #ESHE2025!

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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Thrilled to share our latest article on the Lower Palaeolithic occupation of Fordwich Pit, Old Park - including at least one likely glacial occupation in MIS12! 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

More ceramics! So fun to work with!

Picked up a stone-textured dish at a pottery market that perfectly nests a porcelain handaxe; makes me think of the tool latent within a nodule before being shaped to fruition

🏺🧪🦣 #Neanderthal Fat Factory! V. exciting to see new, massive evidence of this grease-rendering behaviour which we've long believed was going on. (someone once commented I use the word "fat/fatty" a lot in the narrative/poetic sections of #Kindred, THIS IS WHY) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#Neanderthals Ran “Fat Factories” 125,000 Years Ago. Groundbreaking discovery by @paleomonrepos.bsky.social @unileiden.bsky.social @leizarchaeology.bsky.social and the LDA in Saxony reveals large-scale fat processing by Neanderthals: idw-online.de/de/news854632 #archaeology #paleolithic #prehistory