Daisy McDonald

Ancient skeletons yield the first hormonal evidence of reproductive life University of Sheffield and University College London researchers have made the first successful detection of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone in bones, teeth and dental calculus, opening a wa...

"first successful detection of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone in bones, teeth and dental calculus, opening a way to identify pregnancy in the archaeological record." phys.org/news/2025-10... #histmed #WomensHealth #MedievalSky

A foraging teenager was mauled by a bear 27,000 years ago, skeleton shows The remains of a teenage boy who lived around 27,000 years ago suggest he was attacked by a cave bear—some of the first direct evidence of a predator attacking an ancient human

The remains of a teenage boy who lived around 27,000 years ago suggest he was attacked by a cave bear—some of the first direct evidence of a predator attacking an ancient human

The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago The domestic cat (Felis catus) descends from the African wildcat Felis lybica lybica. Its global distribution alongside humans testifies to its successful adaptation to anthropogenic environments.…

How and when did domestic cats conquer the world? 🐈 The aDNA study recently published in Science tells a fascinating story about the human-mediated dispersal of our purring furry friends.
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
#MetagenomicsMonday #SPAAM #aDNA #paleogenomics #cats #zooarcheology #domestication

A lovely Swanscombe flint from the Horniman stores today 🏺❣️

Prehistoric tool made from elephant bone is the oldest discovered in Europe A remarkable prehistoric hammer made from elephant bone, dating back nearly half a million years ago, has been uncovered in southern England and analysed by archaeologists from UCL and the Natural His...

🐘 Prehistoric tool made from elephant bone 🦴 is the oldest discovered in Europe

New paper from Simon Parfitt @ucl.ac.uk IoA & Scientific Associate @nhm.org & Silvia Bello
Merit Researcher at the NHM

Read more via the links:
📲 bit.ly/45JQp8r
📚 bit.ly/3ZqKAsG

#LocalAndGlobal

Archaeologists Unearth Intricately Decorated Box Carved From Deer Bone That May Have Once Held Ancient Ointments The box was excavated from a Roman-era grave in England. It was found among a trove of artifacts spanning roughly 8,000 years of human activity

📰 "Beautifully carved" deer bone box from a grave in Roman England may have contained an ancient pain relief ointment

🏺 #ArchaeologyNews via @SmithsonianMag

www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a...

Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus - Nature With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in east...

I am really excited to share news of this new jaw...until now Paranthropus had been conspicuously absent from the Afar.

Fieldwork at Mille-Logya is not easy, and this fossil is the result of years of very hard work (and a lot of days of dry screening by our team)!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Illustration of a tattoo depicting two deer being attacked by three big cats; two with stripes, one with spots.

Tattoo from the preserved body of a Siberian ice mummy, from the Iron Age Pazyryk culture of the Altai Mountains. Depicting two tigers and a leopard attacking two deer, it shows the sophisticated methods of Pazyryk tattooers #InternationalSnowLeopardDay

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology

Fossils point to common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals Bones from a Moroccan quarry belonged to a hominin that lived when the human lineage was splitting

My, what a fine geomagnetic reversal. Wrote about more stuff from Middle Pleistocene www.science.org/content/arti...

apt closing from my last SAPIENS story “What archaeology asks of everyone is an openness to alternate worlds. An understanding that your society, with its ways of working, worshipping, learning, loving—even knowing a dog—is just one permutation of endless human and beyond human possibilities.”

🏺 We don't think enough in archaeology about how often things were stored by being hung up

Biomedical and life science articles by female researchers spend longer under review Women are underrepresented in academia, especially in STEMM fields, at top institutions, and in senior positions. This study analyzes millions of biomedical and life science articles, revealing that f...

Cost of being female lead/corresponding author in biomedical sciences: "[T]he median amount of time spent under review is 7.4%–14.6% longer for female-authored articles than for male-authored articles" even in disciplines where women well-represented. #AcademicSky

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Eat Like a Neanderthal Eat Like a Neanderthal: Science-inspired recipes to help you dine like our evolutionary cousins.

Missed this when it came out over Christmas - a nice synthesis of current research on #Neanderthal diet (featuring some thoughts from me) in @nautil.us

nautil.us/eat-like-a-n...

Oldest cave painting could rewrite origins of human creativity A stencilled outline of a hand found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is the world's oldest known cave painting, researchers say.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Excavated area of peatland with a wooden trackway made from branches running through it.

Wooden remains of a later prehistoric trackway at Lisheen, Ireland, damaged during industrial peat extraction #Woodensday
Peatlands preserve organic archaeological remains but face many threats. We need to act now to save this fragile heritage.

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology

Human and dog prints in the cave floor sediment, they overlap and go in the same direction

Woof!
De Sario et al. 2026 The dog domestication: new ichnological (footprint) evidence from the Upper Palaeolithic of the Bàsura cave (NW Italy)
"Human and canid tracks in Grotta della Bàsura date to ∼14,400 cal yr BP." 🏺🦣🐶https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379125005177

Reconstruction painting from the air looking down on people gathering within the ramparts of an Iron Age hillfort and in front of a Norman castle and cathedral

It's easy to forget that hillforts had a life after the Iron Age

Here's a fine recreation of significant later activity © Peter Dunn / Historic England

It's Aug 1086 and William I has has brought the landowners of England to Old Sarum #Wiltshire to swear allegiance to him

#HillfortsWednesday

The ‘Java Man’, the first fossil evidence of Homo erectus, is now home The iconic Homo erectus fossil was welcomed home with a repatriation ceremony and a new museum exhibit in Jakarta.

“For too long, a significant part of our past held beyond everyday reach of Indonesian society. Scholars discussed it, museums displayed it, global narrative was shaped around it, yet the Indonesian people could not see them at home. That era ends today.” -Fadli Zon 🏺

The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing One of the 15 publications that put out the most studies globally has been expelled from the indexing system for irregularities. Its publisher, Elsevier, has a 38% profit margin that reached $1.5 bill...

Science of the total environment (elsevier) gets deindexed.

This is your regular reminder to please stop chasing impact factors and shitty metrics so we can stop feeding this awful system...

An alternative is to publish in more society journals (when possible).

Front Page of nature > news & views > article NEWS AND VIEWS, 10 December 2025 Oldest known evidence of the controlled ignition of fire A 400,000-year-old site excavated in England reveals signs of deliberate fires made using the mineral iron pyrite to produce sparks. By Ségoléne Vandevelde Uncovering convincing evidence for the identification of ancient traces of fire is a real challenge. Writing in Nature, Davis et al. report success on this front. Using diverse techniques and a contextual approach, this multidisciplinary team presents a set of consistent evidence for the oldest known controlled use of fire, including signs of deliberate ignition of flames. The traces of fire are dated to 400000 years aco in Barnham in southern [...]

My latest piece on #pyroarchaeology has just been published in @springernature.com ! 🎉

🔥 Evidences from England suggest the oldest known controlled ignition of fire 400,000 yrs ago. Davis et al.'s multimethod study confirm human-made fires.
📖 Want to know more? ➡️ Read here: rdcu.be/eX16c

Great question! The context of Sahelanthropus is disappointingly ambiguous. Different dates would affect whether this can be called the earliest evidence. For now any point in the established date range makes this ‘earliest’, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if the range gets updated at some point.

Okay my loves. I need your help here with a local thing! I’m currently putting together a series of talks relating to East Sussex.

If you could share with your fellow lovelies it would be incredible! @overslizzie.bsky.social @reblambert.bsky.social @hookland.bsky.social @lazaruscorporation.co.uk

West African ancestry in seventh-century England: two individuals from Kent and Dorset Archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA, can reveal powerful insights into kinship and the movement of individuals in (pre)history. Here, the authors report on the identification of two individuals with genetic profiles consistent with recent sub-Saharan African ancestry, both of whom were buried in early-medieval cemeteries in southern Britain. Focusing primarily on a sub-adult female from Updown in Kent, the authors explore the societal and cultural contexts in which these individuals lived and died, and the widening geographic links indicated by their presence, pointing back to the Byzantine reconquest of North Africa in AD 533–534.

People have always moved around, and DNA can now paint a clearer picture of ancient migration #MigrantsDay #IMD
DNA analysis at two early-medieval cemeteries in southern Britain found genetic connections all the way to sub-Saharan West Africa.

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology

Pathways at the Iberian crossroads: Dynamic modeling of the middle–upper paleolithic transition Archaeological and genomic data provide essential yet static insights into human expansion, offering limited understanding of the underlying dynamic processes. As a complementary alternative, we present a high-resolution model of population dynamics and apply it to reconstructing the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic Transition (MUPT) in Iberia. Through ensemble simulation, we examine Neanderthal (NEA) persistence, modern human (AMH) arrival, and possible interbreeding. The model maps population networks, mobility, and interactions, showing NEAs were confined mainly in coastal refugia and already declining when AMHs arrived. Heinrich Event 5 likely accelerated NEA extinction through climate stress and demographic collapse. AMHs expanded rapidly into Cantabria, overlapping with NEAs and allowing for possibly 2–6% admixture. New dispersal corridors are predicted, showing AMHs moved along the Atlantic coast from southern France into Cantabria, then inland via the Duero Route into Portugal and central Mesetas. By linking climate, demography, and culture, our dynamic model offers a broader explanatory framework that enhances the interpretive power of archaeological and genomic records.

Modeling #Neanderthal and #Hsapiens interactions in #Iberia, Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition

#archaeology #genetics

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0339184

An early East Asian lineage with unexpectedly low Denisovan ancestry Yang et al. study Denisovan ancestry in ancient and present-day humans. In contrast to other East Asians, genomic comparisons suggest that the Jomon derived most of their ancestry from a deep lineage ...

In a new paper led by Jiaqi Yang we trace the distribution of Denisovan introgressed DNA in ancient modern human genomes over time.

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

Line drawing of a fossil skull viewed from the left side

Sima de los Huesos, Spain, contains the remains of more than 27 individuals of an early Neanderthal population, estimated to be around 430,000 years old. Cranium 5 is one of the most complete known so far from the site; it is also the smallest of 15 with estimated brain sizes. #inktober

The ancient Egyptian legacy of anatomical science The early foundations of human anatomy were built from traditions of medicine, embalming, and animal sacrifice.

The body tells stories. People’s health, their place in the natural scheme of things, their relation to other individuals, all make a difference in our bodies and bones. I’m always fascinated to go back in history to see how the ancients framed these connections.

www.johnhawks.net/p/roots-of-a...

New paper. Recording the female experience of UK archaeology 1990-2010. Anne Teather and I document how an industry EDI agenda evolved in the 1990s and was dismantled, uncovering the ramifications of that for women archaeologists over the next decade.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

#openaccess✅

Orphaned mountain gorilla, Ndakasi, lies in the arms of her caregiver, Andre Bauma, shortly before her death at a gorilla orphanage at Virunga - Africa's oldest national park - in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr Bauma rescued Ndakasi as a 2-month-old, after poachers killed her parents. #animals

Different exploration strategies along the autism spectrum: diverging effects of autism diagnosis and autism traits - Molecular Autism When faced with many options to choose from, humans typically need to explore the utility of new choice options. People with an autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits are thought to avoid exploring such unknown options, but it remains unclear how autism affects exploration in decision spaces with many options. In a large online sample (N = 588), we investigated the impact of autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits on exploration behavior during value-based decision-making in vast decision spaces. We used a 121-armed bandit with spatially correlated choice options, and a dedicated computational model to disentangle generalization, uncertainty-guided exploration, and random exploration strategies. Our findings show that participants with a self-reported autism diagnosis were less likely to explore novel choice options and more likely to exploit known high-value options. Computational modeling suggests they engaged in less uncertainty-driven exploration but exhibited equal random exploration and generalization strategies. Interestingly, among non-diagnosed participants, people with elevated autism traits did not explore less. This study relies on self-reported autism diagnoses and trait measures collected online. This may limit the generalizability of the findings to clinically verified or more diverse autism populations. Our findings highlight important differences in exploration strategies between clinical and subclinical populations and emphasize the importance of cognitive modeling and using vast decision spaces to better understand autism.

"neither autism nor autism traits lead to suboptimal... decision-making" & "autism leads to less exploration while more autism traits did not (or even to more exploration)" molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... "results caution against extrapolating findings from trait studies to autism"