Digital humanities grad students & faculty always want to offload the data cleaning drudgery on some undergrad research assistant, until they eventually come to realize that's the part of the process where the stack of qualitative assumptions comes from.
Discover the stunning surface of Mars as captured by the Curiosity rover in this breathtaking video!
📢 We are hiring! 📢
We are looking for a highly organised, efficient and detail-oriented person to join our busy team as a part-time Publishing Assistant. This role will assist colleagues across editorial, production and marketing, gaining exposure to all elements of the publishing process.
Connections
Puzzle #1005
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Keep calm and be transparent: advice from scientists who retracted their papers www.nature.com/articles/d41... @elisabethbik.bsky.social
Did you know that the spinning top is one of the most common forms of traditional play worldwide?
Our research found tops to be nearly universal across human cultures.
Wherever you come from, your ancestors probably spun tops.
New preprint: Top of the World
osf.io/preprints/so...
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I am deeply grateful for the nomination and the award.
I am thrilled that we published the first palaeoproteomics data on Australopithecus africanus, a South African ancient hominin, in the South African Journal (@sajournalofscience.bsky.social).
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🚨Job alert!🚨 The Cluster of Excellence HUMAN ORIGINS announces 2 junior Professor (W1) positions:
A W1 Tenure track Professorship in Evolutionary Modelling (shorturl.at/FN102) and a W1 Professorship (non Tenure-track) in Primatology (shorturl.at/sH0Mk)
Deadline: April 6 2026! Please share! 🔄
What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition?
In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture
can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Natural History Museum. Apply for Principal Researcher in Human Evolution jobs.nhm.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...
Narratively having Ever Given getting stuck in 2021 to set up Hormuz in 2026 is great foreshadowing. You want your audience to understand the basics of international shipping in a lower stakes context so you drop the real plot without a lot of saggy exposition about the minutiae of cargo logistics.
Funny how this poem reverberates for so many of us (the not speaking thing as a kid for me too)
🚨 New job alert!
We are recruiting a Research Fellow in Landscape Archaeology (Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East) at the University of Southampton.
Details and application:
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQU914/r...
Our new exhibition, Homo Sapiens, opens next week, and we're launching it with a panel discussion with our Curatorial Board on 19 March.
Join us to get an insight into the exhibition, which explores Linnaeus’ classification of humans and its legacies.
Tickets at buff.ly/LA4tBB0
YES
An early form of terrestrial hominine bipedalism in the Late Miocene of Bulgaria 🏺🧪
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The first known hominine postcranial element from Azmaka (Bulgaria), a 7.2 Ma old nearly complete femur, which is tentatively attributed to cf. Graecopithecus.
Connections
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Preparing for Mother's Day as a hwntw in the land of the Gogs - the struggle is real folks 🤣
#ArchaeologyIsNotPolitical News
"UNESCO is deeply concerned by the first impact that the hostilities [in Iran] are already having on many world heritage sites,"
Lazare Eloundou Assomo
Director: World Heritage Centre, to Reuters.
This is hilarious.
Also, completely enraging.
Disgusting. Possibly even more cynical than my own institution which uses a subsidiary of all new staff to avoid paying a decent pension (I suspect they’ll try to do it to us all soon). The effect has been to deter all mid-career applicants but desperate young people and hourly-paid still come.
Does AI risk repeating colonial erasure on a digital scale?
A new article in Times Higher Education draws on research by @jeater.bsky.social funded by the British Academy, exploring how AI’s training data and linguistic norms reflect the Global North’s historical dominance.
https://bit.ly/4sE53qF
ASK ME HOW MUCH MORE I COULD HAVE PUBLISHED IN THE TIME I HAVE LOST TO FAILED GRANT BIDS
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We're thrilled to announce the Ctrl-Z Award, a US$2,500 prize for researchers “who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record."
Covered by @nature.com today; read more here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/03/10/a...
There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends.
It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.
I know human lives are more important than world heritage, but fuck this.
