Killackey Illustration

Mobile artifacts with geometric signs of the Swabian Aurignacian. (A) Plaquette with hybrid creature (so-called “Adorant”), ivory, Geissenklösterle (gkl0025), © Landesmuseum Württemberg, Hendrik Zweitasch. (B) Mammoth figurine, ivory, Vogelherd (vhc0145), © University of Tübingen, Juraj Lipták. (C) Rod/bâton, ivory, Vogelherd (vhc0001), © University of Tübingen, Ewa Dutkiewicz. (D) Personal ornament, ivory, Geissenklösterle (gkl0006), © University of Tübingen, Ewa Dutkiewicz. (E) Spatula/lissoir, bone, Vogelherd (vhc0017), © University of Tübingen, Ewa Dutkiewicz. (F) Spatula/lissoir, bone, Vogelherd (vhc0162), © University of Tübingen, Juraj Lipták. (G) Undetermined, bone, Hohle Fels (hfc0006), © University of Tübingen, Ewa Dutkiewicz. Drawings by Ewa Dutkiewicz. Copyright: CC-BY-SA 4.0. For further details on sign coding and preprocessing see Materials and Methods.

Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs 🏺🧪
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Suggests the first hunter-gatherers arriving in Europe already developed a system of intentional and conventional signs on mobile artifacts.

A small crop of a work-in-progress digital painting. The crop shows a puppy, maybe a wolf, maybe a dog, standing and facing the viewer. Their head is lowered to the ground, sniffing a dirt surface. They are a mix of light and dark browns with some cream on their legs and nose.

Current WIP. Wolf pup or dog pup? Stay tuned…
#SciArt #Archaeology

The background painting! The textiles, the reflected light on metal…all swoon worthy.

Wowza

Edward Gorey in the streets of NYC wearing a luxurious fur coat. It’s a b&w photo

My favorite image of Edward Gorey, an underrated fashion plate

The ghosts of Past, Present, and Future Hockey. Heed their warnings.

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning. https://spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-syllabi/

In case anyone needs it for their syllabi, my statement in gen-Ai from the minicomic I made as a syllabus for class last semester. All online and printable here spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

Lots of zine recommendations by @artefactual.bsky.social to check out in this thread!

i procrastinated work to ask @echinoblog.bsky.social questions about that "smiling rock" fossil and ended up with this after everyone's verbal explanation.

lots of people seemed confused so maybe this helps. (see the entire thread for context)

Copies of the book Speaking In Pictures by Neil Cohn

Wow! My author copies arrived early for my new book from @bloomsburyling.bsky.social, Speaking in Pictures, about language, cognition, comics, and visual communication. It looks beautiful, and after working on it for 7 years I’m so glad it’s out in the world soon! www.visuallanguagelab.com/sip

The Inside Story of the African American Explorer Who was the First Man to Stand on Top of the North Pole This African-American explorer was the first man to stand on top of the world.

Matthew Henson was an explorer who spent a total of 18 years on expeditions to the Arctic—including a 1908-1909 expedition that may have been the first to reach the geographic North Pole.

#BlackHistoryMonth

#SciArt 🐡

A bunch of my craft group went to this show last night and are now in the chat figuring out how to reverse engineer Reznor’s $$$ look.

Nice new collaborative paper out this week led by Rob Heckman, using a data set we collected way back when I was a postdoc: "Correlational selection and genetic architecture shape the evolution of the leaf economics spectrum in a perennial grass" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

!!! What a brilliant project!

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland.

And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

FYI, this grant program is open to anyone communicating science.

It does not require that you went to school for science.

You could be a Ph.D. student, an artist, a community organizer, a teacher, or any other profession. As long as you are communicating science IRL in the US, you're eligible.

Y’know when the characters in a movie go to see a movie and it feels really meta? Well, with an “Ultimate Double Feature,” we play the first movie up until the point when they enter a cinema to watch a different film… then we play that film… then we go back to the first film to finish that story.

Love the light projected T-pillars!

Complex fiber and wood technologies of the first Great Basin peoples From Cougar Mountain Cave and Paisley Caves, Oregon, come remarkably preserved examples of perishable materials.

I love it when new archaeological research is coupled with beautiful photographs of the artifacts. Exciting work on the exceptional Younger Dryas-age organic technologies of some of North America’s first peoples.

www.johnhawks.net/p/complex-fi...

I want them, nay need them.

‘Regrets? Number one: smoking. Number two: taking it up the wrong hole’: Tracey Emin on reputation, radical honesty – and Reform She scandalised the art world in the 1990s with her unmade bed, partied hard in the 2000s – then a brush with death turned the artist’s life upside down. Now she’s as frank as ever

Wow. You should read this.

This seems as good an excuse as any for a short thread introducing people to some single moths I've found in my area, looking for fun.

1. Here, for starters, is a Canary-Shouldered Thorn Moth (I didn't make this up).

A damning statistic about today’s society.

Close to your heart.

Could still be just really well hidden, don’t give up hope.

*Is*

Are that his illustration on your cover? I’ve got another book with his drawings but not any of his Gormenghast ones.

My teen edition, found on my parents’ shelves and guarded fiercely ever since.

Oh yes