@ruthmace.bsky.social
Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, UCL
African harps as units of cultural evolution: a cladistic analysis on their morphology. New paper by Salome Strauch et al| Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
08.10.2025 06:30 — 👍 9 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 0
From 2006. A younger and shell-shocked looking Catherine on a balcony holding a very tiny baby with the mountains of Vancouver in the background. The baby is so new, Catherine still has the pregnant bump.
Conventional wisdom says motherhood should wait for tenure as before you land a permanent post, #academia is just not that family friendly🙁
@carersinstemm.bsky.social are calling for change and to celebrate their new report, a Saturday🧵on parenting & academia! 1/9 👩🔬🧪🔭⚛️
ℹ️: carersinstemm.co.uk
If you are around @ucl.ac.uk later this month, I’ll be giving a talk on Spatial Population Dynamics and Human Evolution on the 28th 🤩
www.ucl.ac.uk/social-histo...
Happy to share our new paper introducing the Animal Culture Database in Scientific Data: We’re putting together a resource consolidating primary research on cultural behaviors in wild animal populations and how they’re affected by human activity (1/5) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
22.06.2025 23:16 — 👍 193 🔁 84 💬 3 📌 2
Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"
How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!
400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!
📣 Job alert! *Assistant Prof in Computational Social Science*. We're a friendly department, with sharp students, at a great institution, in a lovely city. We have real strengths in computational social science & are looking for a colleague to build this further. Share and reach out with quesions!
18.09.2025 15:50 — 👍 20 🔁 26 💬 0 📌 1New paper with Narhulan Halimbehke,
@olkcampbell.bsky.social , Yishan Xie et. al in Human Nature
@evobias_erc
Our findings suggest attitudes to bride kidnapping driven by cohort replacement link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Released today!
SEVEN DECADES: HOW WE EVOLVED TO LIVE LONGER
Now available at your favorite bookseller.
Leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon if you can.
Please help spread the word!
#sevendecades @princetonupress.bsky.social
Strategies in the ancient game of Go mirror deep societal shifts, from feudal traditions to today’s AI advisors. @babeheim.bsky.social in EHS www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
18.09.2025 05:18 — 👍 6 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0Looking forward to be in Paris for the launch of the CultureLab!
12.09.2025 16:26 — 👍 12 🔁 3 💬 2 📌 1
The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco.
Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee:
Sarah Alami (co-chair)
Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair)
Zachary Garfield
Edmond Seabright
Ooh we've opened our call for small research grants. £10k for any humanities or social sciences research. Open to independent scholars. We use partial randomisation to allocate the funding: random allocation between all that meet the quality threshold
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/ba-l...
Centre for Ecology & Evolution autumn symposium & mixer www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...
29.08.2025 21:21 — 👍 1 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0Apply! I postdoc'd at Stony Brook U--great folks there.
"The Meave Leakey Postdoctoral Scholar, named in honor of Dr. Meave Leakey’s extraordinary contributions to the understanding of human and primate evolution in the Turkana Basin, will join the SHaPE Lab in the Department of Anthropology."
New paper! ⚡ With Gabriel Aguirre and Marcelo Sánchez, looking at patterns of blowgun types and use across societies of the world. We find areal patterns, similarities mediated by cultural connections, and specific types characterizing distinct branches of the Austronesian language tree. 🎯
27.08.2025 21:37 — 👍 22 🔁 8 💬 0 📌 0
The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution hard copy
Physical copies of this 71-chapter tome now exist. Do encourage your library to buy a copy…also doubles as excellent door stop! Co-edited with Jamie Tehrani and @rachkendal.bsky.social. @oxunipress.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social
27.08.2025 14:30 — 👍 62 🔁 28 💬 2 📌 6
Lexical borrowing between click languages of three distinct families provides new insights into the pre-history of southern Africa New paper by Anne-Marie Fehn et al | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
26.08.2025 21:36 — 👍 6 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 1Submit your abstract for the 6th FRESH (fresh-cnrs.org) annual conference in the Evo Human Sciences, 4-5th November in Montpellier, with Profs Pascal Boyer & Lluis Quintana Murci - Submit and Register here before 15th of September shorturl.at/xhHgL. See you there!
18.08.2025 10:33 — 👍 9 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 1
Using 65,000 works to track how fiction has grown more distant from reality across cultures and centuries | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
14.08.2025 04:45 — 👍 7 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0
We’ve all been there
03.08.2025 18:53 — 👍 1322 🔁 134 💬 84 📌 41In Memoriam: Dr. Jane Lancaster, Pioneer in Human Evolutionary Sciences (1935-2025)
anthropology.unm.edu/news-events/...
"Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution"
Our new article is out in @science.org today
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
According to a study published in The Lancet, life expectancy at birth in Gaza declined by almost 35 years between October 2023 and September 2024, before the current phase of acute famine. A harrowing result of the genocide. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
01.08.2025 20:45 — 👍 21 🔁 19 💬 0 📌 2I love this kind of paper.
A seemingly niche topic—which the authors are genuine experts in—that regardless reveals some more fundamental ideas about how humakind operates. (1/2)
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies by Chris Buckley, Guillaume Jacques and others | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
26.07.2025 17:34 — 👍 11 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 2Excited to see 1st of the Evoluionary Human Sciences special issue on scientific racism come out! @kevinlala.bsky.social @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman discuss impediments to countering racist pseudoscience & present 5 solutions www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
24.07.2025 12:12 — 👍 27 🔁 8 💬 0 📌 2"We propose that fictiveness is not inherently appealing for its own sake but because it enables the crafting of exaggerated content that heightens emotional responses from audiences."
18.07.2025 20:37 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1Skewed sex ratios correlate with violence against women from spouses, boyfriends and in-laws, but less so for honour-based violence from natal family @olkcampbell.bsky.social Maheen Pracha @ruthmace.bsky.social | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
12.07.2025 13:03 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Accepted manuscript 📃
'Further insights into maternal and paternal human histories in southern Iberia' | Evolutionary Human Sciences
@universitypress.cambridge.org
🔗
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Findings from our accents study follow up: image showing that study accent–listeners had the highest probability of a correct response (62.49%–70.12%), followed by UK/Ireland (53.18%–62.44%), and other English-speaking country (50.03%–56.85%) and non-English speaking country (49.72%–58.32%).
In a follow-up to our study on accent mimicry last year, we've found that natives are the best at detecting accent mimicry.
People from other English speaking countries were, however, worse at mimicry detection than were native listeners.
@robfoley.bsky.social
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
