Natural History Museum. Apply for Principal Researcher in Human Evolution jobs.nhm.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...
- What did you do at work today Zandra?
- I shaved a wallaby with a scalpel.
Life as the lab manager of @matthewcollins.bsky.social is so wonderfully weird sometimes 😄
📣We are recruiting!
Postdoc position open in marine #eDNA / #sedaDNA in Copenhagen as part of the Arctic NordForsk #PHATE Research Project.
See the link for details 👇 and get in touch if you want to know more.
Deadline is on the 6th April 🌊 🧬
Glaciology and Climate - #GEUS
#HAB #phycotoxins
Fully funded PhD studentship: ‘Recording nature and writing the self: time, entomology and the archive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. Closes 3 May.
With Ruth Abbott, Staffan Müller-Wille, Ed Turner & me. @theul.bsky.social @zoologymuseum.bsky.social
www.ccc.cam.ac.uk/initiatives/...
The second position with #ERC-BROKENSONG is for a Research assistant/Postdoctoral Researcher with experience in statistical image processing/multispectral image processing. Deadline Mar 29, 2026. my.corehr.com/pls/nuimrecr...
The "Wise King" Alfonso X oversaw an explosion of cultural production in 13th-century Iberia. Happy to be part of PPROTEX @unibirmingham.bsky.social taking a cross-disciplinary look at his scriptorium’s output.
blog.bham.ac.uk/estoriadigit...
#AlfonsoX #ManuscriptStudies #IberianHistory #PPROTEX
🧬 NEW JOB: @york-bioarch.bsky.social is hiring a Postdoc in Ancient DNA
Work on the RoBMobS project to explore mobility and diversity in Roman Britain using genomic data.
💰 £37k - £39k
⏳ 34 months
📍 York, UK
📅 Apply by 24 March 2026
jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/post...
This is a really interesting paper and, if I may, particularly well written.
🌊 Dive into History! 🚢
Join HARKS2026U: Maritime Archaeology at UCPH & the Viking Ship Museum. Explore shipwrecks, submerged settlements, and 3D scanning in Roskilde.
📍 7.5 ECTS
📅 Apply by April 9 (Intl) / June 1 (DK)
⚓️ Ships, sailing, & science!
Apply via KUnet. #Archaeology #Vikings
Key findings:
🔹SPPV has threatened Eurasian food security for nearly 4 millennia.
🔹Major lineages diverged ~11,500–3,700 years ago, coinciding with sheep domestication.
In a scientific first, they successfully retrieved #pathogen genomes from medieval #parchment and paper #manuscripts 📖 - revealing that historical documents are an under-recognised source of ancient #disease data. (3/4)
+1
The team recovered 21 novel ancient sheeppox virus (SPPV) genomes, dating back as far as ~3,700 years to the #Bronze Age. These are currently the oldest Poxviridae genomes ever recovered. (2/4)
Biopathocodicology?? 🦠🧬🐑 (1/4)
Check out this groundbreaking new #aDNA #pathology paper by @louis-lhote.bsky.social @gingerhowley.bsky.social and colleagues!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
I am pleased to share that on December 18, I received the Award for the Best Researcher of the Year at Vilnius University in the Open Science category. This recognition was granted for my work on untargeted #paleoproteomics for the biological sex identification of archaeological remains
High-throughput targeted paleoproteomics sex estimation on medieval Great Moravia individuals using MALDI-CASI-FTICR mass spectrometry https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.17.706309v1
🦷 A new study by @marinemorvan.bsky.social
High-throughput paleoproteomics method using MALDI-CASI-FTICR mass spectrometry to estimate biological sex from tooth enamel.
Great success on 130 individuals from medieval Great Moravia.
#Bioarchaeology #Archaeology #Proteomics #TooMS 😉 #Teammasspec
www.codicum.eu/news-and-eve...
Tuomas Heikkilä is hiring a 4-year fully funded PhD in Medieval Manuscript Studies at the University of Helsinki within the ERC Synergy Project CODICUM. Interested in medieval studies, philology, history, art history, etc!
Were the Sea Peoples agents of change?
The displaced white-collar workers? 😀
The displaced hordes of white-collar workers... 😅
Thanks 👍
9/ The Lesson for the C-Suite: Archaeology teaches us that complexity is a subsidy of stability. If you build your entire strategy on a "Palatial" supply chain (Nvidia/TSMC), you are vulnerable to a 1200 BCE-style collapse.
8/ Innovation through Constraint.
Will we are seeing the same "accidental" toughening. Because we can't all afford $40k H100s, developers outside USA / China are forced to use "charcoal" methods:
A more resiliant 'steel AI' would impact markets and change workpatterns
7/ The "Steel" of AI is a happy accident. Steel wasn't a deliberate invention—it was a byproduct of struggle. Smiths couldn't melt iron like bronze; they had to work it in charcoal fires. That charcoal "accidentally" introduced carbon, making the metal tougher and lighter than the "elite" bronze.
6/ The "Steel" of AI.
Bronze was brittle. Iron (and eventually steel) was resilient. The "Steel" of AI isn't a massive, fragile LLM in a single data center—it’s a million small, locally-tuned models running on "gaming PCs."
Resilience beats Scale when the environment gets harsh.
5/ Small Language Models (SLMs) are the new Iron.
If global trade or energy crises make 100,000-GPU clusters unsustainable, we move to the "Artisanal" era.
Quantisation: Making models smaller/faster.
LoRA: Efficient fine-tuning.
Edge Computing: AI running on ARM, Gaming PC not server farms.
4/ The "Iron Age" Pivot.
When the Bronze Age collapsed, the "Democratic" technology of Iron took over. Why? Because iron ore is everywhere. It didn't need a 2,000-mile trade route; it just needed a local blacksmith with the right "recipe."
3/ Palatial vs. Artisanal Economies.
Bronze Age empires were "Palatial"—highly centralized, elite-controlled, and fragile.
We are currently in the Palatial AI era: Power is concentrated in a few "Hyperscalers" (Big Tech/Foundries). Only "Palaces" (the data center) have the tech.
2/ The Dependency Trap
Bronze wasn't a "local" tech. It required Copper (common) + Tin (rare). Tin traveled 1000s of km to reach the Mediterranean.
Today’s "Bronze" is Compute. High-end AI requires specialized GPUs + HBM memory. If that hyper-centralized supply chain snaps, the "empire" halts.
The Bronze Age vs The AI Age
1/ Can archaeology predict the future of Big Tech?
Economists usually look back 50-150 years; archaeologists look back further.
When you look at the Bronze Age Collapse (c. 1200 BCE), are there any parallels to our current AI trajectory?
#AI #TechHistory #Archaeology
