Will Snyder

I am taking art/design commissions (but only 1-2 per month due to the terms of my unemployment). Please feel free to DM if you are interested. Also please share to spread the word. Info about services and rates can be found at my website: sites.google.com/view/wdspale...

*Laughs hollowly in 2025*

Charlie Kirk spent his life making people like me unsafe. His followers sent me death threats for years and threatened my employer if they didn’t terminate me.

His work was NEVER about free speech. It was about hate and emboldening violent people. The dishonesty of the past 24hrs is disgusting.

New paper on precise tool use learning in carrion crows @currentbiology.bsky.social. We show that—like New Caledonian crows—expert carrion crows pay close attention to the working end of their tool, suggesting tool integration into their peripersonal space. 🧵 & vids! 👇

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Can video games help advance #archaeology? By inputting their 3D model of South Africa's Sterkfontein Caves into the Unreal video game engine, researchers made this key site in human evolution research more accessible than ever #NationalVideoGamesDay

Learn more 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺

CDC employees standing up and walking out in light of the mass shootings, firings, and *waves hands in the air* everything else.

#USAnotRFK

Lets gooooo

Our article "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience" (with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social, @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marc Feldman) is now published online.

We describe five factors that contribute to the spread of racism and suggest strategies for countering them.

doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

Yesterday I discovered that ChatGPT's PhD-level expertise didn't extend to bird anatomy. This morning I thought, perhaps I was being too hard on the half-trillion-dollar company. Birds are a little weird, anatomically speaking. Let's try something more familiar. A mammal. Behold.

A PR company working for Colossal Biosciences is sending AI generated pieces to respected science journalists & asking them to publish the articles under their own names. This is so dodgy & just goes to show our critical expert scientific commentary is working. Sci comm failure 101 for Colossal.

A screenshot of the paper as presented on the journals website

🪨 🛠️ news:

"we propose that distinctive early Acheulean artifact forms may have arisen as *secondary accommodations* to the primary goal of increasing tool size"

New empirical paper by Stout et al. argues heavily against culturally transmitted early Acheulean forms.

doi.org/10.1007/s108...

Critics of de-extinction research hit by mystery smear campaign Several researchers who have been critical of Colossal Biosciences’ plans to revive extinct animals say they have been targeted by online articles trying to discredit them

Several scholars (including me) who have been critical of Colossal Biosciences and de-extinction have been targeted by a mysterious harassment campaign

www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

Prehistoric Planet Ice Age image showing two homotheres interacting in a snowy landscape.

Prehistoric Planet Ice Age image showing two Woolly rhino, a calf and old adult.

Prehistoric Planet Ice Age image showing a glyptodont.

Prehistoric Planet Ice Age image showing a mother sloth climbing up a rocky surface, baby on her back.

It's true, #PrehistoricPlanet Ice Age is coming to #AppleTV for November 2025. These images show how good our animals are, but... believe me, this barely scratches the surface!! It has been a massive thrill and privilege to help bring this series together... you're in for an incredible treat.

Rumble in the Miocene: terror bird versus caiman Toothmarks on a fossilized bone tell a story of two mega-predators.

Toothmarks on a fossilized bone tell a story of two mega-predators

go.nature.com/4kYPLIN

Budget brainwaves: low-cost system collects brain data outside the lab Neuroscience initiative in India and Tanzania amasses a trove of high-quality EEG recordings from diverse populations.

A team of 24 people in India and Tanzania with no previous experience has collected brain-activity recordings from nearly 8,000 people in schools, offices and open-air spaces to create the largest data sets of their kind in Africa and Asia

go.nature.com/4kRBBt2

Overview of the 10 km long Jebel Faya mountain and the plain with the archaeological sites in front. The ridge forms a barrier to the Rub’ al Khali desert. (photo: Sharjah Archaeology Authority)

We congratulate the Faya Paleolandscape on its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List! (whc.unesco.org/en/list/1735/). Since its early years, ROCEEH has supported research in Jebel Faya and neighboring sites financially and with personnel.
📷Sharjah Archaeology Authority

My own university has a "strategic goal" to increase research "outputs" by 10% annually (7 year doubling time). Your university is almost surely working towards the same. University rankings are now the main driver of this damaging institutional behavior. Publication is an out-of-control arms race.

The Biases in Captive Chimpanzee Cognitive Research: First Insights From the Ape Research Index (ARI) Database

Important new work (from Elisa Bandini,
@ctennie.bsky.social, @sofiaforss.bsky.social et al.) addressing an elephant in the room - how weird are our weirdest apes, and how is that skewing research efforts?

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

BREAKING: Scientists are staging a “science fair” in the lobby of a Congressional building to tell elected officials about the critical knowledge the US will lose because their research grants have been canceled.

There are also a number of behavioral and cognitive 'strategies' other than know-how copying that are likely to have mitigated the inherent costs of knapping. The complexity of these interactions is underappreciated, and here we make an attempt to break it all down. @ctennie.bsky.social

It is also often just assumed that knapping has fitness benefits and that not knapping would be detrimental. But we actually have limited knowledge of how often and how habitually knapping was for different hominin groups. Maybe some populations didn't knap at all!

Knapping imposes risks. So much is undeniable. This includes the injury risks related to toolmaking, but also the time and energy spent on toolmaking and learning to knap and the material costs. But the relative magnitude of these costs and the overall cost-benefit profile of knapping is not known.

Costs of Early Stone Toolmaking cannot Establish the Presence of Know-how Copying - Human Nature Compared to other apes, humans show a distinctive capacity for the cultural learning and transmission of know-how: we extract know-how from other individuals and artifacts in ways that regularly give ...

Just published❗: our take on the 'costly knapping hypothesis', where we challenge the idea that the costs of knapping can be used to infer the evolution of know-how copying in the hominin lineage. #archaeology #stonetools #humanevolution link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Experimental archaeologists: standardizing blanks makes results clean but is tricky. @sahelanthrope.bsky.social et al. tested various materials and shapes. Each has pros and cons... This OPEN ACCESS paper compiles protocols & tips into one handy guide. #knapping #archaeology
doi.org/10.1017/aap....

🧪 I see the $10 billion biotech firm that will never produce enough fluffy elephants to stamp away climate change has now done some experiments on dogs, and received enormous (colossal!) free marketing from the media 👍

Led by the one and only @acortellnicolau.bsky.social, the summary paper from the funky Archaeo-riddle project (theia.arch.cam.ac.uk/archaeoriddle) - possibly the first specifically archaeological tactical simulation competition - is now out in J Archaeological Science.

Ichthyornis, Pengornis & Yixianornis by Jack Wood, all showcasing his great digital brushwork and consistency (which, for how many dinosaurs he's painted, is crazy).
#paleoart

NEW: Platformer has obtained the dehumanizing new guidelines moderating what people can now say about trans people on Facebook and Instagram. Employees tell me these changes are likely to inspire more violence against LGBT people: www.platformer.news/meta-new-tra...

PhyloPic PhyloPic is an open database of free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, available for reuse under Creative Commons licenses. Download silhouettes for use in educational materi...

Ok people. I’m drawing silhouettes this afternoon. If you have a paper coming up and you are in need of a #silhouette please let me know and I will have it ready today. As always I upload all my silhouettes to phylopic.org

I also have tutorials on how to put a silhouette in a plot in R.

A pointed stone tool made out of flint. Stained brown by iron oxide. On its left hand side it shows sharp flaking scars from knapping, on its right hand side the smooth natural edge of the flint nodule. In its centre is set a round fossil of a see urchin. The five rays of its bodyform radiating out from its centre

The echinoid fossil in this 400,000 year old handaxe from Swanscombe, Kent, had quite a journey.
Living over 65 million years ago it survived Cretaceous seas, fossilisation, Ice Age rivers, Neanderthal culture, more rivers, & quarrying to enter our scientific record.
#FlintFriday
#FossilFriday
🧪🦣🏺