And there we have a bluestone, quite clearly floating on top of it...

It’s even a little quaint

🤯

We’re living through a grease-fat-marrow paleodietary research renaissance.

A new late Neanderthal from Crimea reveals long-distance connections across Eurasia | PNAS The Crimean Peninsula contains several important Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites, including Starosele, Kabazi II, and Siuren I. The region has b...

Very happy to share our new paper in PNAS, revealing a new late Neanderthal discovered through biomolecular techniques, revealing long-distance connections across Eurasia 🦴
@konstantinache.bsky.social @tommyhigham.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Great paper.

The either/or-ness in this summary to me is off the mark from the paper.

There’s no way a trained archaeologist would be that deterministic about fat.

Also: AI systems that are being tasked with economic planning, future govt, human well-being etc, are being trained on “history” - basically just the NY Times archives

Is it a crown?

Whaddya know

The square brow and nose, deep-pitted eye sockets to me deserve an ex-arc comparison with woodcarving using flint chisels and a global comparison of wood-carved adult male head sculptures.

It’s worth interrogating what in the carvings is style and what is a consequence of tools/skill transfer.

This Ancient Language Has the Only Grammar Based Entirely on the Human Body An endangered language family suggests that early humans used their bodies as a model for reality

Good scholarship shows some of the archaic-diaspora languages used human body as the root framework. Vestiges of that would likely have influence into early attempts to explain anatomy, etc.

The first thing I see is experienced wood-carving skills on soft limestone.
We don’t yet see familiarity with stonecarving.

Similar to how newspapers in the early days of digital publishing would run their articles at 12:00am as a new “edition.” And editors would push their writers on word length.

💷🤷🏻💷 - ok!

🌂☂️☔️

Nice! @icarehb.bsky.social

Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates suggest multiple origins of ceramic technology in Early Holocene Africa Nature Communications - Several possible points of origin have been proposed for the spread of ceramic technology in Saharan Africa between 11–10,000 years ago. Here, the authors...

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️
Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion
rdcu.be/eJi3g

Or maybe: how the impossibility of living on Mars will be the prompt that gets us to realize it's more realistic to design intelligent forms that can easily live on Mars and elsewhere in space using advances in fields of developmental biology/diverse intelligence? Are you following Michael Levin?

Where do the Dmanisi hominins fit on the human evolutionary tree? Archeological excavations at the site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia have yielded a rich assemblage of hominin fossil remains, as well as lithic artefacts and bones of fossil fauna. The site is...

What about the new preprint on Bioarchiv, I think saying Bootstrap parsimony points to orig. holotype clusters with Floresiensis, and the other 4 cluster with another species, but that they are sister taxa with Erectus/Erg? Have you weighed in it? This to me = fascinating as Yunxian.

Popular Archeology - The Multi-Million-Year Path to Becoming Human—Are We Actually There Yet? A conversation with the legendary evolutionary thinker and archaeologist, Eudald Carbonell.

Deborah Barsky and I interview Eudald Carbonell about his framework, the hominization and humanization process.

Utimately, we need larger concepts through which we understand the archaeo record, that also necessarily capture the humanistic motive to learn about them. Carbonell’s offering is potent.

My interpretation is that these are the creatures who guard the underworld. Snakes protect the travelers from the scorpions etc

A Scholar’s Quest To Find The Ancestral People Of The Most Influential Language On Earth – Interview Who and where were the Proto-Indo-Europeans? Almost 450 languages spoken by 4 billion people descend from their tongue—and J.P. Mallory has been on a life-long journey to reconstruct their world. A de...

Here I talk to JP Mallory about the quest to identify the Proto Indo European homeland. It has attracted theorists like moths to a flame for centuries now.

That’s no toy! 😅

Is it possible that the rate of phylogenetic change for Bayesian tip could speed up with more migration, more intense climactic-enviro flux; and more contact/admix? Antecessor-Longi are pretty close on Feng’s tree. Lot of traveling in short time. ESR says 600k-1m+

The problem skulls from Yunxian The relationships of fossils from deep time in China may help reveal ancestral connections for the Denisovans

Million-year-old skulls in China are adding some big wrinkles to the history of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. BBC report: www.bbc.com/news/article... & @johnhawks.net take: www.johnhawks.net/p/the-proble...

Seems we are on the verge of realizing all the fruit eating animals may be intoxicated RIGHT NOW, and this is baked into their evolutionary trajectory.

First wine, then survival: Bronze Age farmers prioritized irrigating vineyards during times of climate crisis The agricultural societies of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Ancient Near East made strategic resource management decisions that unequivocally prioritized viticulture over olive cultivation during pe...

First wine, then survival: Bronze Age farmers prioritized irrigating vineyards during times of climate crisis www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/09/f...

Yep.

How many of these have you gone to now? Seems like 40-50.
Are you coming to ESHE?

Art Deco needs ambassadors, I’m glad you’re pounding the pavement. My optimistic way of thinking about all the ugly modern buildings out there is that they are pre-clad, and some day the world will clad them in Deco, Beaux Arts, etc