Claudio Tennie

Frontiers | On the origin of our fascination with crystals Crystals are fascinating structures of solid or liquid matter where atoms, molecules, and/or ions are, on average, arranged in a highly ordered lattice. It i...

Enculturated chimpanzees like the bling
www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

Frequently asked questions about Explore 2025 Here you will find frequently asked questions and answers about the call Explore - Formas open call for research projects 2025 .

A Swedish state-funded research funding agency, Formas, has started to approve applications based partially on random draws. Applications are grouped into high quality (gets funding), low quality (doesn't get funding) and a middle group where a lottery takes place 🎰.
formas.se/en/start-pag...

Claudio Tennie & Ronald J. Planer, All that glitters is not gold: The false-symbol problem in archaeology - PhilPapers Stibbard-Hawkes forcefully alerts us to the pitfall of false-negative reasoning in symbolic archaeology. We highlight the twin problem of false-positive reasoning in what we call the “false-symbol pro...

People care but it's complicated. philpapers.org/rec/TENATG

Unbelievable - Culture Conference is 10 years old! What a journey…🩵

We submitted a grant last year. Didn't get the money.

This seems like the visual version of the ‘infinity scale’ from Dunkirk

How People Reacted to the Nazis A Warning from History

This is what we never learned at school when learning about the Nazis in the 1930s. The big WHY people let it happen and why so many people were actually attracted to the Nazi Germany. And why that attraction never died.

Now we are learning all this in real time.

Ok. Admittedly I didn't read this. But hey. Look at that chicken.

The way I interpreted it when I read it was that, yes. But I didn't realise that the prize is also the price - for the soup eating contest is not ending. Your prizes you reinvest. Soup begets soup.

The more I think about it, the more "price" fits.

Ah, indeed: Prize. Thanks.
(Can I get more soup now?)

Reminds me of reading somewhere that academia is like a soup-eating contest, where the price is more soup.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce that I have accepted the position of Independent Group Leader in Experimental Archaeology at the University of Tübingen! The program will focus on establishing a reference collection for taphonomic phenomena specific to Island Southeast Asia 😁

🐘🏝️🇮🇩🦴

As you ask for newer literature on these topics in the article: doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...
Our gadgets depend in large part indeed on special types of cultural transmission (see also Tomasello) and this kind of copying indeed arrived late.

Art beyond cognition: reframing Neanderthal art through social connectivity and cultural transmission | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core Art beyond cognition: reframing Neanderthal art through social connectivity and cultural transmission - Volume 7

Our cultural backgrounds almost always (perhaps unavoidably) influence our epistemology & the questions we ask. Especially in the human sciences. E.g. some really interesting discussion here about how renascence values shape our thinking about neanderthal artwork.

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

Many thanks also to @elena-moos.bsky.social, who just joined bsky. Elena was the master knapper in the new study who made the application of the new method possible.

Follow Elena, and I am sure you'll see amazing stone tools (and even dice!) made by her.

Concerns About Theorizing, Relevance, Generalizability, and Methodology Across Two Crises in Social Psychology | International Review of Social Psychology During two crises in social psychology, the first from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, and the second starting in 2010 and still ongoing, researchers discussed the strength of theories in the…

Most researchers are unaware that the concerns about strength of theories, methodology, and lack of generalizability led to a crisis in the 60's and 70's as well. Nothing changed then, and history is a good teacher for why nothing is likely to change this time around doi.org/10.5334/irsp...

Naive humans can reinvent knapping techniques - but can they also reinvent strategies to make early handaxe shapes?

Turns out, yes, they can!

Check out Nolan's new study (open access) and I recommend to follow him, too. He is going places.

So TL;DR, it costs us 1.5 cents per 3D printed whistle (approximately) in filament and electric costs, compared to about 6 for drop shipping; we're more nimble with a distributed network, and also, they can't just seize our whistles off the ship and stop the whole thing; and we pay less in shipping.

RFK Jr. Demonstrates How To Remove Tapeworm By Scooting Ass Across Carpet WASHINGTON—In an address touting the practice as a completely drug-free method to relieve the common affliction, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. demonstrated Thursday how ...

RFK Jr. Demonstrates How To Remove Tapeworm By Scooting Ass Across Carpet

Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes’ tool-use behaviours Abstract. The variety and complexity of human-made tools are unique in the animal kingdom. Research investigating why human tool use is special has focused

Mind if I chime in? "Our findings support the notion that the last common ancestor of humans and great apes—living approximately 14 Ma—was already capable of the tool-use behaviours studied here" royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

That, too!? Awesome, thank you!

Sounds also like the voice of La Linea?

Agreed. What is important is also to realise: much social learning recycles much of individual learning. The two very often overlap. Social learning that really does heavy lifting is rare in the animal kingdom (some bird and whale song copying are the best examples of the latter)

But thats not very deep at all, hominin-branch-wise.

Open Science NL is funding 27 replication studies with €5.2M. Projects will reanalyse data, repeat experiments, and explore variations across many fields. Read more 👉 www.openscience.nl/en/news/27-s...

Ok, this is nuts. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Do you see it?
(OP @drgbuckingham.bsky.social )

The anti trip breaker is an INUS condition of your house burning down

Machine Learning Applications in Archaeological Practices: A Review | Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology

Machine learning in archaeology (open access) doi.org/10.5334/jcaa...

‘A fragmented field: Construct and measure proliferation in psychology.’ (2025)

From ‘Language models accurately infer correlations between psychological items and scales from text alone.’ (2025)

From ‘Not within spitting distance: salivary immunoassays of estradiol have subpar validity for predicting cycle phase.’ (2023)

Work in progress with cycle tracking data from the app Clue

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting next year? I'm hiring for a position at the University of Witten/Herdecke.
uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/61280592...