Colin D. Wren

Demographic shifts, inter-group contact and environmental conditions drive language extinction and diversification.
#linguistics

Research Fellow in Biomolecular Archaeology at UCL Searching for an academic job? Explore this Research Fellow in Biomolecular Archaeology opening on jobs.ac.uk! Click to view more details and browse other academic jobs.

Job alert! 3 year post doc in my research group at University College London working on Roman Leather via biomolecular archaeology. #ZooMS #stableisotopes

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQJ187/r...

Job alert in Malta on my ERC funded IslandLab Project for a post excavation research assistant. A bachalor's degree in Archaeology, or related fields is required, ideally with experience working on faunal assemblages and handling bones/fossils, and curating finds.
www.um.edu.mt/media/um/doc...

Two limpet shells on a lab bench. They are about the same lenght but with different morphology. Left one is rather flat with smooth surface, while the right one is higher, with coarser surface and more pronounced ribs.

1/2 Two different limpet shells, belonging to the same species (P. vulgata).

The flat one comes from low shore (large foot + reduced shell surface to resist strong waves and currents) while the pointed one comes from high shore (ribs + high shell help resist dessication by creating shadowed area)

A mammoth drawings from Arcy-sur-Cure cave,France.
Outlined in red-ochre, this rotund, tuskless mammoth looks like a juvenile.
At 28,000 years old, a product of the Gravettian culture, one of the oldest examples of cave art in Europe.
The saddest mammoth from the Ice Age. 🦣😢🏺
#MammothMonday

Whaling may have started 1,500 years earlier than already known Specialized whale-bone harpoons from southern Brazil dating back 5,000 years suggest that Indigenous groups in the area were whalers.

Whaling may have started 1,500 years earlier than already known www.sciencenews.org/article/whal...

Evidence for the earliest hominin use of wooden handheld tools found at Marathousa 1 (Greece) | PNAS The Middle Pleistocene (MP; ca. 774 to 129 ka) marks a critical period of human evolution, characterized by increasing behavioral complexity and th...

It was such a privilege to get to work on this amazing material from an incredible site and team - now the earliest handheld wooden tools in the archaeological record, taking evidence back to 430,000 years! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

If there are any French-speaking archaeologists in BC who would be interested in an interview on Monday (Jan 26) with Radio-Canada about whatever the heck is going on with the BC Heritage Act right now, DM me and I can connect you! 🏺

Image: Ninara/Wikimedia Commons

Roadkill... it's still protein.

New research suggests scavenging animal carcasses wasn’t a desperate last resort, but a smart, reliable survival strategy that shaped human evolution.

Revisiting hominin scavenging through the lens of optimal foraging theory 🏺🧪
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Screengrab showing slide from publication, with title "Lithics". Small photo of hand holding an artefact. Larger photos of lithic artefacts including classic flakes with bulbs of percussion.

🏺 Some gorgeous lithics from Orozmani, Georgia, just 20km from Dmanisi, also c. 1.8 Ma.

(good to remember when dealing with claims of unexpectedly old sites in other places, that even extremely ancient hominins were producing unambiguous artefact assemblages)

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi - Nature A hand stencil painted on a cave wall on a small island off the coast of Sulawesi more than 67,800 years ago suggests a very early occupation of Wallacea.

Hand-stencil motifs found in caves in Sulawesi, Indonesia, dating to at least 67,800 years ago, may be the oldest rock art discovered, according to a study in Nature. These findings support the theory that early humans migrated to Sahul via a northern route through Sulawesi. 🏺 🧪

I tried something new this year by building a suite of #archaeological #theory practicals, so a 🧵 on resources I (and my students) loved 🏺. I’ve linked to online materials but will happily share purpose-made stuff:

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 analyzed by archaeologists from UCL and the Natural His...

More Breaking Palaeo-news!
🐘 Boxgrove preserved oldest Elephant Bone beyond Africa.
🐘 Early Neanderthals using bone to shape beautiful tools.
🐘 New research from Simon Parfitt @uclarchaeology.bsky.social Silvia Bello of the @nhm-london.bsky.social.
🦣🏺🐘https://share.google/20WUjY5TybDAr4QoT

Infographic titled "ZooMS: Unlocking the Past with Protein Fingerprinting." The top section illustrates the Peptide Mass Fingerprinting process: extracting collagen from a sample, using trypsin enzymes to digest it into peptides, and analyzing it via MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry to create a unique spectrum for species identification. The bottom left section shows how ZooMS identifies fragmented archaeological bones (like Neanderthal remains). The bottom right section depicts the non-destructive "eZooMS" technique for medieval parchment, using a PVC eraser to collect protein samples without damaging manuscripts to identify calf, sheep, or goat skins.

#ZooMS infographic and ALT generated from a spoken prompt "Can you explain what zooms is and how this is used to identify archaeological bone? and medieval parchment?" 🦴📜 #Archaeology. Slightly scary, as while it is clearly AI, my net intellectual contribution was 18 spoken words.

There's not much beating … Neolithic #SharkHunters. 🙌

Neanderthals accumulated the skulls of large horned herbivores for centuries in a cave in Madrid as part of an enigmatic ritual A multidisciplinary team of Spanish scientists has unraveled the secrets of one of the most enigmatic Neanderthal sites in Europe: Des-Cubierta Cave, in Pinilla del Valle (Madrid). Their findings, pub...

We've been collecting trophies for a long time. For a very long time apparently, as these skulls of #horned herbivores at the #DesCubiertaCave in #Spain seem to suggest, which have been accumulated by ... #Neanderthals:

🏺 www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2026/01/n...

Altmetric Explorer screenshot: Showing 5,011,088 mentions (from 4,918,333 individual posts) of research outputs from the results of your search query.

Since Jan 1 2025, which feels like four trillion years ago, research has been shared on here 5 million whole-ass times. Bluesky recently passed 2 billion posts IN TOTAL.

So 0.25% of the entire site's traffic was citations to research.

That is actually massively high. Is it? Yes. Here's why.

Really excited that our *new paper* is finally out 🔥 This study is the first to quantitatively investigate museum visitors’ perceptions of historical analogies that compare concepts from the deep past to modern political ideas.
doi.org/10.1057/s415...

10 things we learned about Neanderthals in 2025 Findings about our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals, continue to surprise us, especially those from 2025.

And here’s my other human origins countdown to close out the year! 🏺🧪

A possible archaic human from Borneo The find of a single tooth from Gua Danang may be the first evidence of the archaic inhabitants of the island.

Within a cave used by bird nest traders, archaeologists uncover a single tooth from an ancient group: the first evidence from an extinct hominin on the world’s third largest island. What group lived there in the millennia before modern people arrived?

www.johnhawks.net/p/a-possible...

Ontario breaks new ground by letting politicians decide when history will be protected | CBC News In Ontario, where ancient Indigenous burial grounds and village sites lie beneath rapidly expanding suburbs, the government has granted itself powers to bypass archaeological protections, raising fear...

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

#OntarioArchaeology #FirstNations 🏺 #CulturalHeritage #TRC

Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵

rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Please do & send me an advance copy

I can't say without their permission but if you do really want to use it somewhere I'm happy to ask them!

For all who want the 🍵 on their situationship, I highly recommend Kindred by @lemoustier.bsky.social! 🏺

Completely correct!

💯

Deck the halls… Every year I think about writing this blog, and every year I don’t. Usually in the run up it’s too busy and then, as the Christmas dinner has been eaten, the last mince pie devoured, an…

I got round to it! 🤣

bigbookoftorcs.com/2025/12/21/d...

A student's paper just described the interaction between Homo sapiens and Neandertals as "a situationship rather than a relationship" and I'm still laughing ten minutes later 💀🏺

the analogy I use with friends and family all the time is the jump from collegiate to professional sports. as soon as I explain it that way, it clicks in their brains what the academic job market is like.