New paper klaxon! Neanderthals in the Desert? Our new paper suggests that Neanderthals may have been responsible for producing MIS 3 Middle Palaeolithic Levallois blanks in northern Arabia! Have a look at this: 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

We recently finished our seventh year digging at Old Park, Kent. Every year we’re very grateful to be able to return to this beautiful site that is very slowly revealing its secrets.

New paper out in @pnas.org: Insights into hominin body size, locomotion, and behavior from Early Pleistocene trackways in northern Kenya. Link here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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

A truly excellent (and extremely scary) deep dive into the current state of Atlantic Ocean circulation - featuring a pertinent reminder of why palaeoclimate is so important to our understanding of present climatic change! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

After record heat, could the Atlantic make Britain's weather even more extreme?

As temperatures rise, scientists are investigating whether a changing Atlantic could bring more volatile weather to the UK

bbc.co.uk

1/🧵 We do need to talk more about the illegality and lawlessness of the Cass Review. Hilary Cass cited Anne Wæhre's then-unpublished “study” via “personal communication”. It was later published at doi:10.1007/s00787-024-02508-5 and doi:10.1111/apa.17530, and the papers have now been retracted.

We are in such dire straits

Rachel Pope@prehistorian.bsky.social · 4w ago

“In a letter to the Office for Students, which distributes the funding, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said funding should no longer be given to support nursing, computing, history, creative arts, performing arts, archaeology, and geography courses.” removepaywalls.com/https://www....

Very, very happy that our paper is finally out! We look at how tight a fit primates experience at birth, and found really cool results. It has been a long journey from collecting the first data seven years ago! A brief thread (1/8) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Comparative primate analysis shows that humans are not unique in having a tight cephalopelvic fit at birth - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Analysing cephalopelvic proportions among 29 extant primate species, the authors show that a tight cephalopelvic fit is not unique to humans, with comparable or tighter fits occurring in several non-h...

nature.com

[Open Access] www.cell.com/current-biol...

First multi-individual Neanderthal mitogenomes from north of the Carpathians

Picin et al. report eight Neanderthal mitogenomes from Stajnia Cave, identifying at least seven individuals and placing them in MIS 5. This oldest multi-individual genetic assemblage in Central Europe...

cell.com

And now, the final presentation of #UTP26 Dr James Clark on Handaxes are Markers of Human Population Movement in in Late Early and Middle Pleistocene Africa. 🦣🏺

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!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

University of Cambridge staff to 'escalate' strike action

Tomorrow is the first of 10 more days of action scheduled to take place this month, says a union.

bbc.co.uk

🚨New paper!🚨 I really enjoyed @vivek123.bsky.social & colleagues' article reflecting on the diversity of perspectives within the Man The Hunter conference. My commentary out today discussing not only diversity across societies but within them🤩: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thoughts welcome!

From diversity to flexibility: Seasonality as the forgotten dividend of Man the Hunter

sciencedirect.com

A great opportunity with a great supervisor 👇

Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias@ceciliapad.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🚨FULLY FUNDED PHD POSITION!🚨 If you are interested in trying to answer the question of "How did climate shape the movements, interactions, and evolution of hominin populations?" Come join my lab at @humanorigins.bsky.social 🧬🧪 deadline 7th of June ⬇️ uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

🚨FULLY FUNDED PHD POSITION!🚨 If you are interested in trying to answer the question of "How did climate shape the movements, interactions, and evolution of hominin populations?" Come join my lab at @humanorigins.bsky.social 🧬🧪 deadline 7th of June ⬇️ uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

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...

James Clark@jclark997.bsky.social · 4mo ago

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...

Vaccines are humanity’s greatest scientific achievement.

Pregnancy vaccine reduces baby hospital admissions for RSV by 80%

A study confirms the vaccine gives excellent protection for babies against life-threatening chest infections.

bbc.co.uk

Check out our latest paper in JAMT on measuring tool complexity across different contexts 👇🏼 Big thanks to @jclark997.bsky.social for leading this project!

James Clark@jclark997.bsky.social · 4mo ago

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...

Happy to be a part of this great new article on assessing and measuring complexity in archaeological, ethnographic and primatological contexts!

Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias@ceciliapad.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🚨🧪NEW PAPER!🚨 Led by the great @jclark997.bsky.social - We present the Tool Systems Approach: A method to calculate cultural complexity in a way that allows comparisons between the archaeological, ethnographic and primatological records, hence tackling big Qs in CE link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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

Our new paper exploring the measurement of complexity in tools - the result of significant and ongoing work, including that which emerged from our Complexity in Lithics Conference! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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 ...

link.springer.com

🚨🧪NEW PAPER!🚨 Led by the great @jclark997.bsky.social - We present the Tool Systems Approach: A method to calculate cultural complexity in a way that allows comparisons between the archaeological, ethnographic and primatological records, hence tackling big Qs in CE link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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 ...

link.springer.com

Morez Jacobs et al used 45k genomes to localize Neandertal haplotypes w/i the British; used these to infer the SFS of the introgressing Neandertals; and then inferred population history parameters of the introgressing pop. Also lots about selection. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cliftonville (Kent) Council By-Election Result: 🌍 GRN: 38.8% (+26.7) ➡️ RFM: 33.1% (-7.0) 🌳 CON: 15.2% (-4.5) 🌹 LAB: 10.4% (-11.6) 🙋 Ind: 1.3% (New) 🔶 LDM: 1.2% (-1.9) No Ind (-3.0) as previous. Green GAIN from Reform UK. Changes w/ 2025.

Contactos entre grupos de cazadores-recolectores del Solutrense asentados en regiones de Iberia central y del suroeste de Francia: Far-reaching hunter-gatherer networks during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe

Far-reaching hunter-gatherer networks during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe

Geochemistry of stone tools reveals unprecedently large social ties among European hunter-gatherers during the Last Ice Age.

science.org

🚨I couldn’t be happier to share that today I’m officially starting my own research group at the Human Origins Cluster of Excellence in Tübingen (@humanorigins.bsky.social)!🚨We’ll explore drivers of genetic, phenotypic and cultural evolution by integrating evidence from many fields in creative ways 🧬

🧪🦣 Pre-print Tsoupas et al. 2026 Tracing #Neanderthal ancestry patterns through successive population expansions in Europe "admixture between hunter-gatherers and Neolithic populations was an order of magnitude higher than that between Neanderthals and modern humans" doi.org/10.64898/202...

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows

Brown Swiss in Austria has been discovered using tools in multiple ways – something only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees

theguardian.com

Lovely new paper by @sarah-paris.bsky.social & Charles Higham "Ochre use in burial practices in Thailand, from Neolithic to the Iron Age" 😍!! @cam-archaeology.bsky.social

"Normalcy bias is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings. Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalc...

🚨 Palaeo jobs alert!! 🚨 Two(!!) postdoc positions available in Cambridge! 1. Human Evolutionary Anatomy: cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc... 2. Evolutionary Biomechanics: cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc... As part of the @erc.europa.eu funded STEPS project!