Felix Riede

Job Alerts!🚨 We are looking to fill three Independent Junior Research Group Leader positions in the 'HUMAN ORIGINS' Cluster of Excellence at the University of Tübingen
Application deadline: Sept. 10, Starting Jan. 1, 2026

1. Genotype-Phenotype interactions:
uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

Our knotropology en español with comments by @felixthehauskat.bsky.social and external knot experts.

www.elperiodico.com/es/sociedad/...

And here’s to more!

Two cross-faculties collaborative theme groups selected to AIAS Following a successful year with four active cross-faculties 3-2-1-Go! Collaborative Theme Groups, the Interdisciplinary Taskforce at Aarhus University and AIAS have selected two new groups who will j...

Two new 3-2-1-Go! Collaborative Theme Groups selected to AIAS. The ‘Tracks and Footprints’ and ‘When Politics Meets Business’ groups bring together researchers across faculties and disciplines to transform perspectives, build bridges and understandings around one theme🎉
aias.au.dk/events/show/...

Volcanic cooling Large volcanic eruptions have a major cooling impact on the climate

www.theclimatebrink.com/p/volcanic-c...

Off to the field with @ll-herskind.bsky.social and a group of awesome students - four weeks teaching excavation and my @erc.europa.eu project CLIOARCH’s very last field season. And we’re going to excavate the world’s oldest amber art workshop from the Late Pleistocene 🤩

DEADLINE EXTENSION!

The deadline for submitting an abstract for the upcoming @sscipchildhood.bsky.social conference has been extended to Thursday the 10th of April, 12 pm (GMT+2)

Note that online participation will also be an option

See more here: conferences.au.dk/sscip-2025/c...

Last day to get your abstracts in for SSCIP 2024!

Awesome!

Coming up this afternoon! 👇

Wow, brave and awesome. You’ll be a great v- dean!

🌟 LAST CHANCE! 🌟 Join us at @econovoau.bsky.social for an incredible opportunity to study human ecology relations across socio-technological configurations! Apply now and be part of something amazing! ⏰ Deadline is TOMORROW at 23:59 CEST! lnkd.in/d4ws3iiK #OpportunityKnocks #JoinUs

@au.dk is a top-100 university and Aarhus a super-liveable city with forest, beach, and ocean (well, the Baltic) at your doorstep. You can even hang out at beautiful Campus Moesgaard :)

Join the dynamic @econovoau.bsky.social team and work with me, @jcsvenning.bsky.social and @anordonez1.bsky.social to study human ecological relation and niches across socio-technological configurations (foragers, farmers, etc.) past, present and future.

2-yr postdoc on human macroecology in a functional trait perspective Aarhus University (re-advertisement) - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at School of Culture and Society - Department of Heritage Studies, Aarhus University

Interested in humans from a macro-ecological/macro-archaeological perspective? Here's the right postdoc for you international.au.dk/about/profil... - deadline tomorrow April 1st at 2359 CEST!

Interested in children and childhoods of the past? Come join us at @au.dk - in the fab facilities of @aiasdk.bsky.social - for this year's @sscipchildhood.bsky.social conference.

Abstract deadline is April 4th!

conferences.au.dk/sscip-2025

Finally, working with strings is very algorithmic, it's a form of ethnomathematics - esp. ethno-topology - and it may have been a meeting ground between human brains and mathematical cognition for millennia as early humans were 'honing their tools of the mind' (osf.io/preprints/ps...)

Some regions also have their very own unique practices perhaps reflecting their particular histories of dispersal and interaction.

Both knots and string figures show really interesting patterns: in both domains most societies traditionally practice only a limited repertoire of all the possible ones suggesting some deeply shared history.

The amazing @roope.bsky.social dug deep on this and teaming up with topologist extraordinaire @allisonhenrich1.bsky.social we devised a first-ever tidy way of turning knot patterns into string code, which can then be analysed readily for patterns. We natch also have the coordinates.

What is it all about? Early anthropologists found that string figures were globally distributed, often played by children but more often integral parts of storytelling, knowledge encoding and other core features of the societies they encountered. It's a global human (near)universal!

A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation | Journal of The Royal Society Interface Few cultural practices beyond language are as widespread as string figure games. Their global distribution and potential to yield insights into cultural transmission and cognition have long been noted...

Which in turn builds on this paper where we apply the same mathy approach to knots/unknots to the iconic string figures royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

It's a neat summary of our paper in CAJ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

In knots, archaeologists see evidence of cultural exchange, and perhaps the early sparks of cognition Knots have been a fixture for thousands of years. A recent database finds that many cultures share the same ones. Image credit: Shutterstock / UVgreen.

Wanna read a digest of a fun anthro thing I've been up to lately? Our recent work on knots present and past has just been covered in @pnas.org Journal Club www.pnas.org/post/journal...

The Canis lupus ssp. (Mammalia, Carnivora) of the Baume Traucade (Issirac, Gard, France): A complete skeleton of a “dog-like” individual from the post-LGM Completely preserved canid skeletons dating from the Pleistocene are rare finds. Here, we describe such a unique discovery from Baume Traucade, a cave…

The Canis lupus ssp. (Mammalia, Carnivora) of the Baume Traucade (Issirac, Gard, France): A complete skeleton of a “dog-like” individual from the post-LGM www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Anthropocene Micro-credential Program 2025 published! - Anthropocene MC Anthropocene: Seminars, field trips, hands-on workshops and practical demonstrations of interdisciplinary cooperation, led by top experts.

Discover the Anthropocene from a transdisciplinary perspective! 🌍 Join our new microcredential course at Charles University—seminars, field trips, and hands-on workshops led by top experts. Prague, Czech Republic | www.anthropocene.cz/en/micro-cre... | Program: www.anthropocene.cz/en/programme...

A circular dendrogram (phenetic tree) of knots, made using the ggtree package in R. A text-readable and high-resolution PDF-version of the tree is available as a supplementary material.

Pleased to see our work published:

The Ties That Bind: Computational, Cross-cultural Analyses of Knots Reveal Their Cultural Evolutionary History and Significance

We analysed knots across 12,000 years and 82 societies.

Time to tie a thread 🧵 about why knots matter.

doi.org/10.1017/S095...

Job alert!
@katerinad.bsky.social and I are looking for an archaeologist/archaeological scientist to join us on a 4 year post-doc, helping to manage and participate in field and lab work on 2 ERC grants in our group. We would love to hear from you via the link! 👇
jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Postdoct...

But seriously, Sweden, what's with the snow?!

I'm on route to Gothenburg to give a seminar on our work exploring the role and relevance of stranded whales in the Late Palaeolithic along the European margins.

Preliminary results out here doi.org/10.1080/1556... with @shumon.bsky.social, @sofiefh.bsky.social et al. but we've got more coming :)