Benjamin Vernot

So proud of this work—out today in Cell! 🦊 (and only the beginning of lots of exciting fox work to come!)

Only 1 person in the whole study went from identifying as trans to not identifying as trans. The 1/5 number came from youth going between the binary and non-binary spectrum.

This headline and post are misleading on purpose to fit the economist's editorial bent on the political issue.

hey bluesky 👋 visa hurdles mean I’m looking for opportunities outside the US. I’m a computational biologist (bacterial + phage genomics, postdoc in Koonin’s group @ NIH). I am interested in teaming up on funding apps. reach out if this resonates!

A friend of mine was on Charlie Kirk's "watch list" of Black professors. She received so many death and rape threats that her university offered her a security detail for the walk to class.

This is Kirk's legacy.

You would never know it from reading all of these legacy newspaper op-eds about him.

Stellenangebot Curator for the osteological collection of human remains (m/f/d) bei Naturhistorisches Museum Wien Forschung, wissenschaftliche Tätigkeit in Wien

Great job opportunity here in Vienna at the Natural History Museum. @nhmwien.bsky.social
jobs.nhm.at/Curator-for-...

2025-Bridging Minds - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

We are excited for the interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Ghana starting next week! Supported by the Bridging Minds Program @maxplanck.de, organized by researchers from MPI-EVA, including @hannahrausch.bsky.social and @mariepadberg.bsky.social. More info:
www.eva.mpg.de/events/2025-...

Very excited to receive an ERC Starting Grant to study the earliest archaeological and biomolecular evidence of Homo sapiens in NW Europe

Watch this space for new positions in Bristol in 2026! 🎉

#HorizonEurope #ERCStG

Wow, that's amazing!! Congratulations!

More than 500 international scholars attended ISBA 11. Here are many of them looking up at the camera in a large group shot

Thanks to @isbarchaeology.bsky.social and @isba11.bsky.social for a great conference.

I mentioned the legacy of Henk Kars of VU who established ISBA

Geoarchaeology closed. Here is the link to the petition to save Earth Sciences @vuamsterdam.bsky.social

www.change.org/p/red-aardwe...

'Ancient stickleback genomes reveal the early stages of parallel adaptation' - now published online in Evolution @journal-evo.bsky.social‬

The last piece associated with the brilliant team effort to rethink aDNA results and social relations in Neolithic Ireland is in this month’s Current Archaeology magazine with an absolutely gorgeous cover image of Newgrange (credit: Ken Williams) archaeology.co.uk

Bioinformatician - Uppsala University Bioinformatician, Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University

The @scilifelab.se ancient DNA unit is looking for an bioinformatician placed at Uppsala University. This is a great way to be part of diverse #aDNA research projects as a staff scientist with permanent (!!) employment:

www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Sans intervention immédiate, les derniers reporters de Gaza vont mourir 21 juillet 2025 L'AFP travaille avec une pigiste texte, trois photographes et six pigistes vidéo dans la Bande de Gaza depuis le départ de ses journalistes staff courant 2024. Avec quelques autres, ils sont aujourd'hui les seuls à rapporter ce qu'il se passe dans la Bande de Gaza. La presse internationale est interdite d'entrer dans ce territoire depuis près de deux ans. Nous refusons de les voir mourir. L'un deux, Bashar, collabore pour l'AFP depuis 2010, d'abord comme fixeur, ensuite comme photographe pigiste, et depuis 2024 comme principal photographe. Samedi 19 juillet, il est parvenu à poster un message sur Facebook: « Je n'ai plus la force de travailler pour les médias. Mon corps est maigre et je ne peux plus travailler ». Bashar, 30 ans, travaille et vit dans des conditions égales à celles de tous les Gazaouis, allant d'un camp de réfugiés à un autre camp au gré des bombardements israéliens. Depuis plus d'un an il vit dans le dénuement le plus total et travaille en prenant d'énormes risques pour sa vie. L'hygiène est pour lui un problème majeur, avec des périodes de maladies intestinales sévères. Bashar vit depuis février dans les ruines de sa maison de Gaza City avec sa mère, ses quatre frères et sœurs et la famille d'un de ses frères. Leur maison est vide de tout aménagement et confort, à part quelques coussins. Dimanche matin, il a rapporté que son frère aîné était « tombé, à cause de la faim ». Même si ces journalistes reçoivent un salaire mensuel de l'AFP, il n'y a rien à acheter ou alors à des prix totalement exorbitants. Le système bancaire a disparu, et ceux qui pratiquent le change entre les comptes bancaires en ligne et l'argent liquide prennent une commission de près de 40%. L'AFP n'a plus la possibilité d'avoir un véhicule et encore moins de l'essence pour permettre à ses journalistes de se déplacer pour leurs reportages. Circuler en voiture équivaut de toutes les façons à pre…

🚨BREAKING: The last journalists working for AFP in Gaza have said they can no longer work for the news agency.

They are out of energy and they are starving to death.

I have never seen a statement from a news organisation like it.

🧵

Come check out my poster this afternoon! On the language we use to talk mobility in ancient DNA studies #SMBE2025

The entire life sciences community needs to be fighting these misogynistic, transphobic, unscientific claims

Literally begging cis biologists and societies to speak up

"Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from." This is analogous to life in a sundown town.

a silly #SciArt redraw of the squish that cat meme, but it is a grey stickfigure squishing a mosquito (that looks like a little cat) with the text SQUISH THAT BUG!

You want to collect insects (and maybe other arthropods) for reference genome sequencing, but don't want to spend a fortune on dry ice shipping!

All you gotta do is SQUISH. THAT. BUG!

More details in our recent preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am grieving the barbarism that is going to unfurl from all this. People are going to die. Livelihoods gone. All to feed a corrupt kleptocracy.

I see every day up close how different it is from the first time around. There are no guardrails. A disaster. I’m sorry we have to live through this.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük Combining 131 paleogenomes with bioarchaeological and archaeological data, we studied social organization and gendered practices in Çatalhöyük East Mound (7100 to 5950 BCE), a major Neolithic settleme...

After many years this is out now, many congratulations to everybody!

🧬In Neolithic Çatalhöyük, family was built on social relations rather than blood ties.
Genetic analysis shows that over time, co-residents were no longer genetic relatives. Female subadults were buried with 5x more grave goods.
🔍A surprising story of Neolithic social life.

🌾 Agriculture didn’t always spread with mobility of people.
New ancient DNA research shows that in western Anatolia, while communities stayed put, farming and village life spread through the movement of ideas and practices.

Seeking a few Postdoctoral Researchers at Mathematical Genomics RIKEN ECL Research Unit (25-695)

Postdoc position in my group in Tokyo!
Please get in touch if you are interested.

And happy to discuss projects - these would range from developing new methods to analysis of new genomes that we are now sequencing in the lab.

Job Ad: www.riken.jp/en/careers/r...
Lab page: speidellab.github.io

Papua New Guinea's Genetic Past Through Ancient DNA Analysis A new study reveals the significance of regional dispersals and local interactions in coastal Papua New Guinea

Ancient #DNA reveals #Papua New Guinea's genetic past. Study @natecoevo.nature.com by an intl. team led by Kathrin Nägele @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social shows the significance of regional dispersals & local interactions in coastal Papua New Guinea. tinyurl.com/2s3sc6ad & www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 FINAL REMINDER about the DEADLINE for the upcoming virtual summer school "INTRODUCTION TO ANCIENT METAGENOMICS" (4-8 Aug 2025).
DEADLINE: May 30th 2025
To apply visit: spaam-community.org/wss-summer-s...
❓ Contact: J Fellows Yates (@jfy133) or Prof. C Warinner (@WarinnerGroup)

"Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants.

Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant."