Benjamin Utting

Wow!! What an accomplishment. Congratulations, @martamlahr.bsky.social !!!

Announcement at the British Academy

Fabulous news that @martamlahr.bsky.social has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy 🍾🍾🍾

Ancient people took wallabies to Indonesian islands in canoes Humans established a wild population of brown forest wallabies in the Raja Ampat Islands thousands of years ago for their meat and fur in one of the earliest known species translocations

Coverage of our recent paper on Pleistocene translocations of marsupials

Amazing and much-needed paper!!

What can lithics tell us about technological complexity? Reflections on and around the Hoabinhian phenomenon in the cobble world For a long time, scientific discussions of the behavioral, technological, cultural, and cognitive complexity of Homo sapiens have been Europe- and Africa-centered for their abundant archaeological di...

What can lithics tell us about key topics in archaeology - a few great articles already online in our special issue of @archaeometry.bsky.social and more articles to come:

doi.org/10.1111/arcm...

doi.org/10.1111/arcm...

doi.org/10.1111/arcm...

The impact of human dispersals and local interactions on the genetic diversity of coastal Papua New Guinea over the past 2,500 years - Nature Ecology & Evolution New archaeological and ancient genomic data from humans in Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago shed light on regional human admixture and genetic isolation over the past 2,500 years.

New paper on some of the first ancient genomes from New Guinea doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Museum Specialist - New York, NY 10024 - Indeed.com American Museum of Natural History

The Invertebrate Paleontology department at the AMNH is seeking a full-time Museum Specialist.

www.indeed.com/viewjob?from...

Tobias Richter introduces Anna Källén

Anna Källén introduces her talk.

Professor Anna Källén, Umeå University, speaking around her new book The Trouble with Ancient DNA: Telling Stories of the Ancient Past with Genomic Science (The University of Chicago Press, 2025)
@ucph-soa.bsky.social

Was it a stone tool or just a rock? An archaeologist explains how scientists can tell the difference With a little guidance and a lot of practice, even you can make stone tools the way our oldest ancestors did – and learn to recognize the signs of a deliberately made tool.

Had a lot of fun writing this piece for The Conversation. Much different than writing an academic article. The editors were amazing to work with and super helpful! 🏺🏺

theconversation.com/was-it-a-sto...

Merci pour tous les bons moments partagés. Tu vas nous manquer, Pierre.

Thank you for the wonderful moments we shared. We will miss you Pierre.

DOGE Visits National Gallery of Art to Discuss Museum’s Legal Status The move is the latest from Elon Musk’s unofficial cost-cutting agency to exert influence beyond traditional federal agencies.

Scoop: DOGE officials met with leadership at the National Gallery of Art this week to discuss the museum's legal status www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Despite the increasingly gloomy news about climate change, scientist Katharine Hayhoe offers skeptics a sunny attitude Texas Tech scientist Katharine Hayhoe has spent the last 20 years grappling with the question of how to convince skeptics that global temperatures are rising and that climate change poses a threat to ...

"What we need to fix this thing is rational hope." - Katharine Hayhoe

Our chief climate scientist, @katharinehayhoe.com,
inspires us to stay hopeful and take action against climate change. Discover her optimistic approach and how we can all contribute to a sustainable future.

This paper will be in our forthcoming #Lithics special issue: What can lithics tell us about hominin technology's ‘primordial soup’? An origin of stone knapping via the emulation of Mother Nature
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
#EarlyView #OpenAccess

A male Denisovan mandible from Pleistocene Taiwan Denisovans are an extinct hominin group defined by ancient genomes of Middle to Late Pleistocene fossils from southern Siberia. Although genomic evidence suggests their widespread distribution through...

Incredibly proud that our paper on the #palaeoproteomics analysis of the Penghu mandible, led by @tsutatsuta.bsky.social and in collaboration with Chun-Hsiang Chang, Enrico Cappellini and co, is out now in
@science.org! doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Disparition inquiétante de Pierre Noiret, professeur en préhistoire à l'université de Liège, Belgique

www.police.be/avis-de-rech...

Fire Use During the Last Glacial Maximum: Evidence From the Epigravettian at Korman' 9, Middle Dniester Valley, Ukraine The Last Glacial maximum (LGM), spanning from 26.5 to 19 thousand years before present (ka bp), is a period of extreme climatic degradation associated with reduced biomass production and resource str...

Very excited to share our new paper on Fire Use during the LGM at Korman'9, Ukraine! Check it out!
#geoarchaeology, #micromorphology, #pyrotechnology, #LGM, #Paleolithic, #archaeology
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

front page of the article

Figure. 3 from the article showing products of the Quina system at the Longtan site

Figure 4 from the article showing features of Quina products compared to ordinary scrapers.

Figures showing the site location and stratigraphy

Our new paper reports a complete Quina technological system in the 60-50 ka assemblage at Longtan, Southwest China

Ruan, Q. et al. (2025) Quina lithic technology indicates diverse Late Pleistocene human dynamics in East Asia doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

🆓 faculty.washington.edu/bmarwick/PDF...

75% of US scientists who answered Nature poll consider leaving More than 1,600 readers answered our poll; many said they were looking for jobs in Europe and Canada.

We polled Nature readers to ask if they were thinking of leaving the US for jobs abroad. Three-quarters of them (who said they were US-based scientists) said yes. 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Here, we propose a new perspective on early stone tool technology: emulation of naturally occurring sharp-edged stones (naturaliths) instead of inventing via 'Eureka!' moments. Nature provided the blueprint; hominins took it further.

🔗 doi.org/10.1111/arcm...

#Archaeology #Stonetools

Happy to escape the US to Panama City for a science communication/policy workshop! 🇵🇦🇵🇦🇵🇦

Morning at the Museum node:field_teaser]

This Saturday (Feb. 8), there's a sensory-friendly event for neurodivergent folks and their families to check out the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History before it opens for the day. I'll be in the Hall of Human Origins to answer questions!

Register in advance here: access.si.edu/program/morn...

Improving identification of caprine mandibles: Integrating morphological and ZooMS analyses Improving our understanding of ancient herd management requires increasing the number of species-specific identifications of caprine material. Differe…

Great new paper by Melina Seabrook on improving the identification of caprine mandibles using integrated zooarchaeological analysis!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#archaeology #zooarchaeology #zooms

I'm hiring two upper-level undergraduates (or recent graduates) this August for a 3 week long PAID Smithsonian internship in Connecticut. We'll be visiting several archaeological collections to measure quahog clam shells!

Please share!

Apply here by March 1:

internships.si.edu/opportunity/...

Footprint evidence for locomotor diversity and shared habitats among early Pleistocene hominins For much of the Pliocene and Pleistocene, multiple hominin species coexisted in the same regions of eastern and southern Africa. Due to the limitations of the skeletal fossil record, questions regardi...

Excited to share our latest paper, new in Science! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

HEAS Seminar Series - Human Evolution and the Palaeolithic - HEAS As part of the HEAS Seminar Series in Human Evolution and the Palaeolithic, Briana Pobiner from the Smithsonian Institution will give a talk on ‚The Role of Scavenging in Hominin Dietary Evolution‚ on...

We are looking forward to welcoming @brianapobiner.bsky.social for an online only #HEASSeminar in Human Evolution and the Palaeolithic next Monday the 2nd December at the later than normal time of 15:00 CET . Registration is on our website 🔗👇
www.heas.at/events/heas-...

Hello, Bluesky! My name is Ben and I'm an anthropological archaeologist broadly interested in the human settlement of Southeast Asia, Australia, and the Pacific. Happy to be here, and looking forward to watching this platform grow!