Stewie Stewart

‘Complete joke’: Efforts to reduce funding wait times ends with longer blowout A long campaign to improve Australia’s sclerotic research bureaucracy has culminated in an extraordinary blowout to grant approval times, leaving scientists despondent.

“A complete joke”

After the starting gun fires, Australian researchers have to wait 2–3 years before even starting the race.

Really clear article explaining the impossibly long new time-frames for Australian Research Council grants.

By @liammannix.bsky.social

Check out our new (early access) paper "The Natufian Epipalaeolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the desert of northern Arabia" just out in Sci Reps.

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

🚨 #DiscoveryProjects EOI #DPEI27 announcement:

❗️Outcomes for Expressions of Interest should now be available in your RMS account ▶️ rms.arc.gov.xn--au-lmy

ARC should also email Lead CIs with their outcomes (may take a while & be staggered).

Full apps open 2 Mar, due 22 Apr.

DP27 EOI outcomes should be released today. My bot can't track them because they're not released publicly. Let me know when you get yours so I can post manually.

Last year's outcomes were released to applicants' RMS profiles at 12:30 (Canberra time). Outcomes for other schemes are often around 11.

Deep-time preservation of amino acids in mammalian fossil tooth enamel - Communications Biology Tooth enamel preserves endogenous amino acids for over 40 million years, representing a robust and underexplored archive for deep-time biomolecular research and enabling future paleoproteomic and isot...

Deep-time preservation of amino acids in mammalian fossil tooth enamel

Grant delays feared as ARC ramps up ‘due diligence’ Researchers brace for renewed funding uncertainty as security checks prove ‘more time-consuming than imagined’

The massive delays ARC announced for all grant schemes – with longer processing times & 3-month announcement windows – were examined in Senate Estimates recently.

Here’s John Ross reporting on it, & the confusing Estimates hearing, for Times Higher Ed👇

www.timeshighereducation.com/news/grant-d...

Caprine dairy exploitation on the Iranian Plateau from the seventh millennium BC - Nature Human Behaviour Using food residues on pottery vessels and dental calculus, and faunal remains, Casanova et al. find evidence that Neolithic communities in Iran were milking goats or sheep as early as the seventh mil...

Caprine dairy exploitation on the Iranian Plateau from the seventh millennium BC

In the Australian outback, we’re listening for nuclear tests – and what we hear matters more than ever As the United States and Russia signal a return to nuclear testing, Australia’s remote monitoring station plays a crucial role in global verification.

theconversation.com/in-the-austr...

Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China ~160,000–72,000 years ago - Nature Communications Stone tools illustrate behavioural complexities in Middle Pleistocene hominin populations. Here, the authors present small dimensional flakes and hafted tools from Xigou, central China, dated to ~160–72 thousand years ago that demonstrate early, complex technological advancements.

Early humans in central China may have been making sophisticated stone tools as early as 160,000 years ago, according to research in Nature Communications. This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period. 🏺 🧪

Portable ER-FTIR as a non-destructive method to pre-screen collagen for ZooMS analysis in archaeology In the last decades, archaeology has witnessed a significant increase in the use of biomolecular analyses to study a variety of materials, including s…

Portable ER-FTIR as a non-destructive method to pre-screen collagen for ZooMS analysis in archaeology

An Overview of the Rock Art of AlUla: Tracing Changes in Content and Form Across 12,000 Years of Human History Between 2018 and 2021, the Identification and Documentation of Immovable Heritage Assets (IDIHA) Project recorded over 19,000 rock art panels in the AlUla (al-‘Ulā) region of north-western Saudi Arab...

An Overview of the Rock Art of AlUla: Tracing Changes in Content and Form Across 12,000 Years of Human History

Mummified cave cheetahs inform rewilding actions in Saudi Arabia - Communications Earth & Environment Naturally mummified cheetah remains in a Saudi Arabian cave system with radiocarbon-calibrated ages between about 4,200 and 100 years cluster with Asian as well as West-African sub-species, with impli...

Mummified cave cheetahs inform rewilding actions in Saudi Arabia

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Out of Africa I revisited: Life history, energetics, and the evolutionary capacity for early hominin dispersals Paleoanthropological interpretations have traditionally emphasized Homo erectus sensu stricto as the first hominin species to expand out of Africa dur…

Out of Africa I revisited: Life history, energetics, and the evolutionary capacity for early hominin dispersals

Postdoctoral positions in ancient environmental genomics within the Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS)

🧬 #Bioinformatics AEGIS #PostdocJobs in metagenomic pipelines & HPC: Ancient Environmental Genomics at @ucph.bsky.social to reconstruct ecosystems and develop climate-resilient crops. 🌍
Deadline: Jan 4, 2026.

Mikkel Winther Pedersen (mwpedersen@sund.ku.dk)

#AcademicJobs #aeDNA #ClimateChange

Jobs - Balance of the Microverse

New 2-year Postdoc: Ancient #Metagenomics & #Microbiome Sciences! 🧬🦷

Join Prof. @christinawarinner.bsky.social ’s group at @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social to study the evolution and ecology of ancient oral microbiota.

📅 Apply by Jan 20, 2026: www.microverse-cluster.de/en/career/jo...

🦙🧬Pleased to present our new paper out in @natcomms.nature.com 🧬🦙

Palaeogenomics of early camelid use in the Atacama Desert (Chile).

We used ancient DNA to revisit animals being hunted/herded >3,000 years ago.

Manuscript here: rdcu.be/eVwwl
#aDNA #popgen

Thread below🧵
Reposts appreciated :)

New collagen peptide markers from New Guinea fauna: identifying archaeological bone in the tropics Abstract. The Pleistocene and early Holocene archaeological records of the New Guinea are sparse and poorly understood, yet are hugely relevant for underst

New collagen peptide markers from New Guinea fauna: identifying archaeological bone in the tropics

I'm pleased to announce that Natalie Munro and I have authored an Element through @universitypress.cambridge.org on "The Behavioral Ecology of Food: Bridging the Archaeological and the Contemporary."

It will be released in February, and you can pre-order it here: www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...

Are you an Early Career Scholar? Do you want to learn how to publish in international journals?
Together with Archaeological Dialogues & Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, we are hosting a publication workshop
@tag2025york.bsky.social today, from 13.10-14.10 in room TFTV/109

Experience in #archaeological #proteomics?
Interested in #Roman economy / organic artefacts?
Background in data analysis for #ZooMS?

Then apply for a 3-year RA post working to join PELLIS project with the wonderful @gtaylortu.bsky.social to investigate Roman leather economy

Apply by 12/01/2026

#FieldworkFridayFieldworkFriday. Trying to understand deposits of the Al Wusta Playa, Saudi Arabia, which we published a few days ago (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...).

Post Doctoral Research Associate at Newcastle University Apply now for the Post Doctoral Research Associate role on jobs.ac.uk - the leading job board for higher education jobs. View details.

Postdoc, Great Wall of China
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPR113/p...

Griffith secures $85m to transform global understanding of human origins - Griffith News Transforming Human Origins Research Centre of Excellence to reframe the study of our species globally.

I’m so honoured and excited to be leading this international initative together with so many amazing people and organisations news.griffith.edu.au/2025/12/09/g...

Wow! Huge congratulations to @mdpetraglia.bsky.social and everyone else at ARCHE on this massive news, a major Australian Research Council grant to fund the Centre of Excellence for Transforming Human Origins Research. www.arc.gov.au/news-publica...

Here’s to the next 7 years of research with the newly funded “ARC Centre of Excellence for Transforming Human Origins Research.” It is truly a privilege to be part of such a stellar team of scholars and partners

www.arc.gov.au/news-publica...

Postdoctoral position in radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at School of Culture and Society - Department of Heritage Studies, Aarhus University

👀 Postdoctoral position in radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies @auarcher.bsky.social

international.au.dk/about/profil...

🚨 #CentresOfExcellence #CE26 announcement:

❗️Outcomes announced publicly for ARC Centres of Excellence 2026❗️

See ARC's RMS for list ➡️ https://rms.arc.gov.au/RMS/Report/Download/Report/a3f6be6e-33f7-4fb5-98a6-7526aaa184cf/288

/bot

Assessing the intensity of Late Quaternary humid phases in the Nefud Desert, northern Arabia The climate history of the major dryland zones of the world, such as the Saharo–Arabian Desert belt, plays a key role in the dispersal of early humans through these intermittently inhospitable region...

Assessing the intensity of Late Quaternary humid phases in the Nefud Desert, northern Arabia

Optimizing ancient DNA recovery from archaeological plant seeds - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Optimizing ancient DNA recovery from archaeological plant seeds

Recovering DNA from ancient plants is tough, but this new method makes it work! A new extraction workflow improves recovery of fragmented endogenous plant aDNA while preserving library complexity and read yield.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#MetagenomicsMonday #SPAAM #aDNA #archaeobotany

ARC says they’ll announce Centres of Excellence outcomes tomorrow (Tuesday 9th Dec).

This is more than 2 months late, most likely due to the new security checking requirements for ARC grants. Centres of Excellence grants also need to have been approved by the Minister.