Off to #NEEPS2026

MFW patiently waiting for the weather to finally get warm enough to lounge by a lake.

!!!!!!!

neolithic guys get pissed if you tell them their cultures are organized by the type of pots and jewelry they made. "we called ourselves the blood hunters" "we conquered villages far beyond this horizon" sorry bud you're the western linear pottery culture now

Day dreaming doodle of the day.

Obligatory PDX carpet photo, en route to #hbes2025

Recently returned to college in my 30s to transition out of a collapsing industry, and now watching the academic structures bend and break too... It's rough out here.

Fascinated by these hairstyles in the frescoes from Akrotiri today. If recreated would the blue areas be shaved? Cropped? Dyed? Something else?

Children as playful artists: Integrating developmental psychology to identify children’s art in the Upper Palaeolithic: Hunter Gatherer Research: Vol 0, No 0 Children’s agential behaviours in the archaeological record have often been overlooked. Despite efforts to centre children in the past through ‘an archaeology of childhood’, there remains a fundamenta...

New paper out! Children actively made hand-stencils and flutings in the Upper Palaeolithic, but can we identify children's cave art without anatomical measurements? We present a new framework using universal features of young children's drawings 🏺 www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3...

My 8-year-old child just determined that the Neanderthals went extinct because their brains got so big that they were crushed.

Moral of the story: don't let your brain get so big that it crushes you.

I received a heartbreaking email today: A paper in a special issue I’m editing is being retracted because one of its authors is afraid of losing their job and their legal status in the U.S. if they publish a scientific study on evolution. Yes, on evolution, nature's engine of diversity.

Update: They were removed from our reviewer assignments completely. I'm so sorry to all those graduate students. Anonymous to protect the identity of the NIH employee I spoke to...I am on study section next month to discuss F awards. We were just instructed to put the F31-Diversity applications on the bottom of our priority list for review because there is a chance we may not be able to review them. My heart is breaking for the grad students and their mentors that put so much work into these just for them to be disqualified and thrown out.

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.

Birds on Broadway with Miah.

Glam: Paige Ashcroft
Styling: Mia Rose

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

a pine tree with bugs hanging all around it. at the very top is a dragonfly-like meganeura with open wings, circling the base is the giant millipede arthropleura. on the branches sit various insects and circular pine cones.

Have yourself a merry little Carboniferous.
#Art #SciArt #PaleoArt #Inverts

I need an adult.

Homo erectus Skull 5 from the 1.8 million year old site of Dmanisi (Republic of Georgia) wearing a Santa hat.

You better watch out, you better not cry. #FossilFriday

Beyond imagination!

A zoom out from the sharpest view of the Andromeda Galaxy ever, showing more than 100 million stars!

(Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B. F. Williams, L. C. Johnson, the PHAT team, R. Gendler / video by Universal-Sci)

Lunch break view.

Chimpanzees Crack the Code to Human Evolution Research indicates that the complex behaviors used in human language and tool making, such as organizing actions into sequences, may have evolved in our common ancestors with chimpanzees. This study a...

Chimpanzees Crack the Code to Human Evolution scitechdaily.com/chimpanzees-...

Multicolored eye

How life became colourful:
Colour vision, aposematism, sexual selection, flowers, and fruits 🧪
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Colorful flowers likely evolved ~200 mya, colorful fruits/seeds ~300 Mya. Color vision itself appears to be substantially older, and likely originated ~400–500 Mya

A wall with nine overlapping paintings on blue dyed kozo paper with portraits of a human neuron in black ink.

Student walking by a wall with eight overlapping paintings on blue dyed kozo paper with portraits of a human neuron in black ink and underneath an installation of large hanging neurons

A series of human neuron portraits hung to dance around the WSU Dengerink Gallery for the Memory: Cerebral Entanglement exhibit

#sciart #neurons 🧠

Xmas came early! 🎄
Very happy to share this review on combinatoriality in chimps and the evolution of language 🐵
Part of a great special issue, in a French, OA journal, that promotes multilingual science! French version to come in Jan!
@LaSFDP

journals.openedition.org/primatologie/1…

New archaeological research reveals insights into the first-known seafarers to brave ocean crossings from Asia to the Pacific Islands more than 50,000 years ago www.sapiens.org/archaeology/...

Concealed weapons: A revised reconstruction of the facial anatomy and life appearance of the sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens (Felidae, Machairodontinae) Homotherium is one of the sabre-toothed felid genera with a more extensive overlap in space and time with species of our own genus Homo, who must have…

Here is a link to Antón et al's paper on concelaed sabre-teeth in Homotherium:

"Concealed weapons: A revised reconstruction of the facial anatomy and life appearance of the sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens (Felidae, Machairodontinae)": www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

MFW I can't stop flitting around the internet from rabbit hole to rabbit hole.

Inferring DNA methylation in non-skeletal tissues of ancient specimens - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors show that DNA methylation patterns in one tissue can inform on those in another, under certain conditions, and devise an algorithm that allows identification of differential DNA methylatio...

A new algorithm for inferring DNA methylation patterns from ancient specimens demonstrates how this approach can reveal evolutionary changes in non-skeletal tissues, providing insights into epigenetics in archaic humans. #EvoBio #aDNA

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