Gabriele Russo

Close to sunlight or deep underground? New data to reconstruct site formation processes at the Middle Paleolithic Escoural cave (southern Portugal) The ability to exploit the deeper levels of cave systems is regarded as complex human behavior. Evidence that Neanderthals possessed this skill remain…

📢 Just published: our latest paper on site formation processes at the Middle Paleolithic sequence of Escoural Cave, southern Portugal.

Check it out!

@erc.europa.eu @icarehb.bsky.social #neanderthals #archaeology #openscience

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Mind-blowing!
Stone tools in Sulawesi dated to ~1.0–1.5 million years ago suggest hominins were crossing ocean barriers way earlier than we thought. This could be the oldest evidence of hominins at see, island-hopping across Wallacea long before our species!
#Paleolithic #Archeology 🧪🏺🦣

Neanderthals were not ‘hypercarnivores’ and feasted on maggots, scientists say Researchers believe humans’ closest relatives may have stored meat from their kills for months before eating it

Fresh perspectives are great, but attributing Neanderthal heavy nitrogen levels to maggot consumption just because they have nitrogen levels seems a bit of a speculation and overlooks substantial evidence of large game hunting including herbivores and even carnivores 🧐 #Neanderthals #Hunting 🦣🏺🧪

Ancient human relative cannibalized toddlers, 850,000-year-old neck bone reveals Cut marks on a child's cervical vertebra found at Atapuerca in Spain suggests Homo antecessor was indiscriminate about cannibalism victims.

The Gran Dolina cave in the Atapuerca mountains of Spain is yielding more examples of cannibalism by H. antecessor, including the newly announced cut marks on a cervical vertebra of a toddler. 🧪🏺

I don't know if they found older specimens in the archaeological record, but an earlier wave of domesticated dogs whose lineage went extinct and was replaced by the one in the new paper could be a possibility

Ancient dog mitogenomes support the dual dispersal of dogs and agriculture into South America | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Archaeological and palaeogenomic data show that dogs were the only domestic animals introduced during the early peopling of the Americas. Hunter–gatherer groups spread quickly towards the south of the...

New research on aDNA suggests dogs 🐕 followed early farmers into South America, traveling with the spread of maize 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. Their legacy lives on, even in some modern Chihuahuas!
🧪🏺🦣

Earliest evidence of Neanderthal multifunctional bone tool production from cave lion (Panthera spelaea) remains - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Earliest evidence of Neanderthal multifunctional bone tool production from cave lion (Panthera spelaea) remains

New evidence suggests that #Neanderthals utilized the carcasses of large predators, specifically cave lion 🦁 bones, as tools! This is among the earliest known examples, and I'm sure similar findings will become increasingly common, as they've long been overlooked.
#zooarchaeology 🧪🏺🦣

Wooden tools point to ancient taste for plants Discovery in China also suggests Asian hominins crafted in wood rather than stone

"Paleo diet" fans would have you believe our distant ancestors lived on meat alone. But there's lots of evidence carbs and sugar were a big part of the Paleolithic menu – including these 300,000-year-old digging sticks found in China, reported today @science.org

Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago Neanderthals intensively processed a minimum of 172 large mammals for grease and marrow fat, 125,000 years ago.

Cool! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📢 2 PhD positions (E13 TV-L, 75%) in our DFG-funded project on great ape communication & the evolution of common ground!

🧠 Backgrounds in biology, psychology or linguistics welcome.
🗓️ Deadline: Aug 13
🔗 bit.ly/4l8p7hy & bit.ly/46jcfAq

Please share!
@elmanubohn.bsky.social @meanwhileina.bsky.social

Culturing island biomes: marsupial translocation and bone tool production around New Guinea during the Pleistocene–Holocene Humans have shaped island ecosystems for tens of millennia. A crucial part of this process included the anthropogenic translocation of wild animals be…

Multiple lines of evidence suggest people took wild #wallabies 🦘 to Indonesian islands with boats as early as 12,800 years ago (and then got them extinct again around 4,000 years ago). This is the earliest example of intentional animal translocation in the archaeological record! 😲🤯🦣🏺🧪

To ‘publish or perish’, do we need to add ‘AI or die’? The co-intelligence revolution is quietly reshaping what academic excellence means – and who can attain it, says Jakub Drábik

Interesting reflexion on the use of generative AI in academic writing 🤔

This is a cool discovery that could change #Paleoanthropology by refining it, highlighting omce more the importance of molecular studies! 🧪🏺🦣 However I'm not a fan of this salami-slicing publication strategy. 🫠 #Research #Discovery

Major expansion in the human niche preceded out of Africa dispersal - Nature Analysis of species distribution models in a pan-African database comprising chronometrically dated archaeological sites over the past 120,000 years shows major expansion in the human niche from 70 ka...

#newpaper now out in @nature.com!
A huge expansion of the human niche in Africa ~70 kya likely equipped later #outofAfrica dispersals with a unique ecological flexibility.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
led by Emily Hallett, @mikleonardi.bsky.social, Andrea Manica, @elliescerri.bsky.social 1/4

Agent-based simulations reveal the possibility of multiple rapid northern routes for the second Neanderthal dispersal from Western to Eastern Eurasia Genetic and archaeological evidence imply a second major movement of Neanderthals from Western to Central and Eastern Eurasia sometime in the Late Pleistocene. The genetic data suggest a date of 120−8...

Simulations suggest a Neanderthal route from western Europe to Altai crossed within 2000 years, potentially during the last interglacial 🦣🧪🏺 #Neanderthals

An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years Humans accumulate an ever-growing body of knowledge that far exceeds the capacity of any single individual or generation. Social learning and transmission are essential for this process. However, how ...

An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Timeline for the evolution of cold-adapted vertebrate and plant taxa.

Different phases of evolution during ice age

Palaeogenetic evidence has improved the precision of the timing of species origination as well as when and how species acquired their adaptations to the cold.

The progressive evolution of cold-adapted species 🧪
www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

The emergence and demise of giant sloths The emergence of multi-tonne herbivores is a recurrent aspect of the Cenozoic mammalian radiation. Several of these giants have vanished within the past 130,000 years, but the timing and macroevolutio...

Research into the #evolution of giant sloths 🦥 indicates that their sudden #extinction was probably caused by human activity rather than changes in the environment or climate 🏺🧪🦣

Job Opportunity at the University of Southampton: Lecturer A The University of Southampton is in the top 1% of world universities and is one of the UK’s top 15 research-intensive universities. Committed to excellence in all we do, we are growing and investing i...

The University of Southampton seeks to appoint a full-time, permanent Lecturer (A) in Archaeology specialising in Palaeolithic Archaeology and/or Palaeoanthropology. jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Magdalenian #whale bone tools 🐋 already super cool. But I wonder: did people back then know these massive bones came from whales? Or did they think they belonged to some mythical beast 🐉? They used the raw material, sure, but did it carry deeper cultural meaning too?
Anyway, amazing science! 🧪🏺🦣

Prezwalsky's horse upper dentition

Great time at #ASWA in Munich! Presented my poster on the zooarch findings from one of my PhD sites 🦣🏺 Nice discussions, inspiring talks, and (as always) wonderful people. Grateful for the connections and insights! 🧪 @icaz-news.bsky.social #zooarchaeology

The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins The long read: When fossilised remains were discovered in the Djurab desert in 2001, they were hailed as radically rewriting the history of our species. But not everyone was convinced – and the bitter...

Worth a read for any up and coming Palaeoanthropologists about how not to behave. Let's leave this culture behind in our discipline.

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

🚨 New chapter alert 🚨 What can variation in great ape communication—across individuals, dyads, populations, species—tell us about language origins and communicative flexibility? 🦧🤷‍♂️ My latest piece w/ Carel van Schaik is out now in the OH of Approaches to Language Evolution.
doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...

Yeah, I think so too. More and more research is proving it, even though some people still cling to old ideas

That's a good question! They did some XRF and multispectral stuff; they probably didn't trace the ochre's origin, but I could've missed it that part.

More than a fingerprint on a pebble: A pigment-marked object from San Lázaro rock-shelter in the context of Neanderthal symbolic behavior - Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences The pebble discovered in the San Lázaro rock-shelter (Segovia, Central Spain) is the oldest known non-utilitarian object with a fingerprint made in Europe. Its morphology and the strategic position of...

It's not just a dot on an old rock, but a fingerprint from another human species, and more proof #Neanderthals could think abstractly or symbolically 🔴 isn't awesome? 🏺🦣

A universally applicable definition for domestication | PNAS The process of domestication is commonly perceived as a human achievement, and domestic species are typically assumed to be those under human contr...

A new, universal definition of #domestication: "...solely as evolution of a nonhuman population in response to an anthropogenic niche and that a domestic population is one that cannot sustain itself outside of an anthropogenic niche."
🤔🏺🦣🧪

Pleistocene chronology and history of hominins and fauna at Denisova Cave - Nature Communications Here, the authors present mtDNA and chronological data for sediments from excavations in the South Chamber of Denisova Cave, from which they construct a timeline of hominin and faunal occupation that ...

A nice update on the chronology of Denisova Cave! I wish more sites had this type of resolution 🥹⏳️🏺🦣🧪

I am extremely honored that our Cluster of Excellence 'HUMAN ORIGINS' was selected for funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft!! This is incredible news and I look forward to exciting times ahead setting up this new Cluster!