Felix Riede

Top notch footage!

Wonderful video by @antiquity.ac.uk summarising our research!

Also covered in National Geographic: www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

And now covered in @science.org by the fab @spoke32.bsky.social: www.science.org/content/arti.... Do check it out for yourself - the earliest evidence of mineral-based blue pigment in Palaeolithic Europe!

I, too, am proud to share this quite exciting finding with you: Europe's oldest mineral blue pigment. It's azurite and we found it on a legacy object that had long languished in a storehouse. New analysis bring new insights :) #palaeolithicblues

Human Impacts of the 8.2 ka Event on Mesolithic Foragers in Western De The 8.2 ka event had a major but regionally variable climatic impact in the Northern Hemisphere. In Denmark, it impacted lakes and rivers, which were essential landscape features for contemporaneous foragers. There is also evidence for a marked increase in sand drift...

Check out @felixthehauskat.bsky.social, Kathrine L. D. Andreasen & Peter M. Yaworsky's "Human Impacts of the 8.2 ka Event on Mesolithic Foragers in Western Denmark: A Model-Based Approach Inspired by 'Radical' #Disaster #Risk Reduction Research" in "Under Pressure" at

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...