Gabriele Russo

Early humans butchered elephants using small tools then made big tools from their bones, research finds During warmer periods of the Middle Pleistocene, ancient humans in Italy were in the habit of butchering elephants for meat and raw materials, according to a study published October 8, 2025 in the ope...

phys.org/news/2025-10...

Ancient DNA and dating evidence for the dispersal of hippos into central Europe during the last glacial Arnold et al. present evidence that Late Pleistocene hippos from the Upper Rhine Graben show close genetic ties to modern African hippos. Although hippos have been thought to have gone extinct around ...

Turns out #hippos 🦛 lived in Europe much more recently than we thought!
Fossil & genetic evidence from Germany shows they roamed 50,000–31,000 years ago, right in the middle of the last #iceage 🥶🌨️
Same species as today’s African hippos, thriving during warmer periods.
🦣🧪🧬

Wow! This is a nice news 👇

Photo of Ira Flatow and Jane Goodall taken in 2024 during her 90th birthday celebration."

Photo of Ira Flatow and Jane Goodall taken in 2020.

"I do know that when talking to people who perhaps think very differently, the only chance you have of getting them to think in a different way is to touch the heart." — Dr. Jane Goodall (1934-2025)

Thanks, Jane, for touching our hearts.

True! Also, cheetahs are not even big cats (but I still love them ahah)

Mitochondrial genomes of Middle Pleistocene horses from the open-air site complex of Schöningen - Nature Ecology & Evolution Mitochondrial DNA from horses at the Middle Pleistocene archaeological site of Schöningen reveals insight into the evolutionary history of horses and advances techniques for the analysis of ancient DNA retrieved from highly degraded samples.

Schöningen never stops to amaze!
Scientists have just recovered 300,000-year-old #horse #aDNA from the site 🤯 the oldest ever found in open air.
And those horses? Ancestors of all modern horses 🐎🧬
🧪🏺🦣

Links here 👇

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Press: uni-tuebingen.de/en/universit...

New discovery! Here @mariaguagnin.bsky.social and our team report on 12,000-year-old life-size camel rock art engravings in the Saudi desert. #GreenArabia @griffith.edu.au www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The earliest evidence of blue pigment use in Europe | Antiquity | Cambridge Core The earliest evidence of blue pigment use in Europe

The oldest use of blue pigment in Europe! 💙
At Mühlheim-Dietesheim (Germany), traces of azurite were found on a Final Palaeolithic artefact challenging the idea that blue was absent from Ice Age art.
So interesting! 🤔 Why hasn’t it been found elsewhere? Body paint, lost contexts?
🦣🏺🧪 #Paleolithic

Merci mon cher!

Thanks Roman!!

Thrilled to have won the Student Poster Prize at #ESHE2025! 🏆 Grateful for the opportunity to share my work on Lebanese fauna and for all the inspiring conversations throughout the conference!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting my poster on large carnivore 🐆 exploitation in Lebanon at #ESHE2025. Such a great venue for it, with so many interesting posters around! I also got the chance to chat with lots of amazing people! #Paleolithic #zooarcheology 🏺🦣🧪

Great talk @armandofalcucci.bsky.social! Impressive depth of data analysis, and I really appreciated the open science approach. Finally, robust evidence that the Ahmarian and Protoaurignacian aren’t directly linked
#Paleolithic #lithics 🏺🦣🧪

#ESHE2025 kicks off on 24 Sept with tours at the NHMN in Paris, followed by a keynote panel on the 25th, conference talks, posters (25th to 27th) & an excursion to Resson and Grotte à la Peinture on the 28th. More info here: bit.ly/3G9CeiQ

AI is helping to decode animals’ speech. Will it also let us talk with them? The complexity of vocal communication in some primates, whales and birds might approach that of human language.

#AI is opening a window into #animal #communication, bonobos build phrases, whales craft alphabets 🐒🐋 It’s thrilling to imagine talking back, but... what if our words change their world forever?
Here is a good read to stay updated

Imagine a rhino horn longer than most people are tall… Woolly rhinos had them! Record-breaking 1.65 m nasal horn found in Siberia belonged to a 40+ year-old female 🦏❄️
#Paleontology #IceAge #Prehistory 🧪🦣
Paper 👇
zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

NYAS Publications The traditional view regarding Homo habilis as the primary agent in stone-tool making and animal butchery has long shaped our understanding of human evolution. Recent advances in artificial intellige....

A new cool research using AI reveals that Homo habilis fossils 💀 show #leopard bite marks 🐆 For decades, Homo habilis was cast as a toolmaker, meat-eater, or even predator. But this study shows that at least some were actually leopard prey!
#AI #Archeology 🧪🏺🦣

Prehistoric Planet Ice Age homotheres, white and touching faces together.

Prehistoric Planet Ice Age Woolly rhino old adult and youngster.

Prehistoric Planet Ice Age Glyptotherium.

Prehistoric Planet Ice Age sloth mother with juvenile on back.

Prehistoric Planet Ice Age out later this year... such a thrill to put this series together, oh my goodness are you in for a treat :) Hopefully news on events and publicity coming soon! Sloths, cats, rhinos, glyptodonts AND SOOOO MUCH MORE!!

They finally added the #bookmark 🔖 feature! Finally 💙

Hominin glacial-stage occupation 712,000 to 424,000 years ago at Fordwich Pit, Old Park (Canterbury, UK) - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors report Acheulean hominin occupation of eastern Britain during glacial marine isotope stages 17–16 and again in glacial marine isotope stage 12 via stone tools in sediments dated to 712,000...

Found the oldest artefact-bearing sediments in Northern Europe (773–607kya), showing hominins lived above 51°N even during glacial stages! Crazy 🥶
#Archeology 🦣🧪

Ancient mammoth remains yield the world's oldest host-associated bacterial DNA An international team led by researchers at the Center for Paleogenetics, has uncovered microbial DNA preserved in woolly and steppe mammoth remains dating back more than one million years. The analys...

phys.org/news/2025-09...

Dental microwear of cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) reveals locally adapted foraging strategies in South-Eastern Europe during late MIS 3 Cave bears (Ursus spelaeus sensu lato) represent a remarkable example of Late Pleistocene megafauna, whose ecology and extinction dynamics remain a su…

New study of cave #bear tooth microwear 🐻🦷 shows they weren’t strict herbivores but had seasonal, opportunistic diets, like modern bears. This flexibility, plus niche overlap with brown bears, offers a more complex picture of their path to extinction!
#zooarchaeology 🦣🏺

2.6 million-year-old stone tools reveal ancient human relatives were 'forward planning' 600,000 years earlier than thought Hundreds of stone tools discovered in Kenya have revealed that human relatives traveled long distances to find raw material.

Today in stone tool news... 🏺🧪

New discoveries of Australopithecus and Homo from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia - Nature Hominin fossils from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project area, Ethiopia, suggest that early Homo and Australopithecus species co-existed in the region more than 2.5 million years ago.

New fossils 🦴 from Ethiopia reveal that ~2.8 million years ago in East Africa, four kinds of early hominins lived side-by-side, including a mysterious new Australopithecus. Our family tree even more crowded and confusing now 👌
#Paleoanthropology #HumanEvolution
🦣🏺🧪

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!
🧪🏺🦣