Our new paper exploring the measurement of complexity in tools - the result of significant and ongoing work, including that which emerged from our Complexity in Lithics Conference!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Happy to be a part of this great new article on assessing and measuring complexity in archaeological, ethnographic and primatological contexts!
Thanks for the praise, Marc :-)!
News from Jojosi!
Jojosi (Sudáfrica): los primeros humanos modernos explotaron durante decenas de milenios (220-110 ka) una misma fuente de materia prima (hornfels o corneana).
Specialised and persistent raw material procurement by humans in the Middle Pleistocene
I continue to be as amazed as the first day when we encountered it... Unfortunately, our geologist (some call him the "the donga pope") thinks there is nothing comparable in South Africa.. I hope he is wrong! :-)
🏺 🧪
Evidence from the Jojosi site in South Africa shows early humans deliberately quarried stone for toolmaking as far back as 220,000 years ago, indicating advanced resource planning. doi.org/hbv7v9
ust a fantastic site and landscape! (view of excavations at one of the sites in 2025)
This is how the situation looks on site when uncovering the assemblages in situ - pavements of large and small stone artefacts, virtually all knapping waste!
The open-air sites demonstrate these behaviors over tens of thousands of years from ~220,000-110,000 years ago, with perfectly preserved assemblages including dozens of refits as seen in this image
🚨 Publication alert🚨 Early humans in South Africa were quarrying stone as long as 220,000 years ago at the site of Jojosi @natcomms.nature.com - specialized, long-term use of a source of a raw material source in Stone Age Africa: Read the paper #openaccess here www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A view on the site of Jojosi Shelter before excavation
I'm grateful to @gerda-henkel-stiftung.de for funding "The Jojosi Shelter Excavation Project – Understanding prehistoric land-use and raw material provisioning in southeastern South Africa". A great site that looked promising in test excavations 2025 & just next to open-air Middle Stone Age finds!
🚨Job alert!🚨 The Cluster of Excellence HUMAN ORIGINS announces 2 junior Professor (W1) positions:
A W1 Tenure track Professorship in Evolutionary Modelling (shorturl.at/FN102) and a W1 Professorship (non Tenure-track) in Primatology (shorturl.at/sH0Mk)
Deadline: April 6 2026! Please share! 🔄
Fantastic paper and very exciting results. Small weight but much higher stature for Homo habilis than other individuals!
Porträtfoto von Christian Drosten. Text im Bild auf rotem Hintergrund: 'Professor Christian Drosten erhält die Auszeichnung „Rede des Jahres 2025“ des Seminars für Allgemeine Rhetorik'.
Christian Drosten erhält die Auszeichnung „Rede des Jahres 2025“ der #UniTübingen. Das Seminar für Allgemeine #Rhetorik zeichnet den Virologen für dessen Plädoyer für eine engagierte Wissenschaft aus: 👉 uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet/…
"Archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing", it was said. Arguably this focus on the ethnographic present is having a strongly negative impact on our understanding of the deep past. Some very useful thoughts on this topic in new paper by Kuhn and Stiner (link.springer.com/article/10.1...)
Grüner Text auf weißem Hintergrund: Hochschulen zeigen Haltung: Wissenschaftsfreiheit schützen
Für Offenheit, Vielfalt und den freien Austausch von Ideen 🌍📚: Die Universität Tübingen beteiligt sich gemeinsam mit vielen weiteren Hochschulen an der Kampagne #HochschulenZeigenHaltung. 👉 uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet... #UniTübingen
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
I wonder if anyone ever got rejected from MDPI
Latest paper: Boxgrove is a key European site dating to 480,000 years ago. At GTP17, hominins knapped handaxes and then butchered an adult female horse. A fragment of the horse's scapula appeared to have evidence of impact from a wooden spear.....
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Just finished my 100th review for a journal article - not sure if I should celebrate this anniversary or not 👀 #academia #reviewernumber2
Die @unileipzig.bsky.social, @maxplanck.de & @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social bauen ihre Zusammenarbeit in Forschung & Lehre aus: 5 gemeinsame Professuren & geplanter Master-Studiengang f. evolutionäre Anthropologie an der Fakultät f. #Lebenswissenschaften der Uni Leipzig. www.eva.mpg.de/de/presse/ak...
Immer schön, mit tollen Gesprächspartnern komplexen Inhalten auf den Grund zu gehen. Danke @manuelwill.bsky.social und Ph. Gunz @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social dafür #Evolution #Anthropologie #Archäologie
www.br.de/nachrichten/...
Fossiler Schädel: Homo sapiens viel älter als angenommen? | via BR24
br.de/nachrichten/... @br24.de
#Evolution #Anthropology
The #ESHE2025 meeting in Paris starts tomorrow (please use this hashtag for sharing). If you are interested in the program, you find it here mcusercontent.com/9347aa3598d5... - Members have received an email for accessing the live stream! We hope you all enjoy the conference in person or online. /MW
You've heard of the human "cognitive revolution" around 40 kya—a moment when our species suddenly became "behaviorally modern." Have you also heard that this story is wrong?
From the archive, our episode w/ @elliescerri.bsky.social & @manuelwill.bsky.social!
Listen: disi.org/revisiting-t...
1) I am delighted to present this terrific tour de force research conducted by my post-doc Dr. Gayani Senevirathne @gayani.bsky.social and published today in Nature -
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
'we find that, based on current evidence pertaining to these costs, the case for inferring know-how copying abilities in Oldowan or even Early Acheulean stone toolmakers is weak..this points to a later date for the establishment of this crucial human skill' link.springer.com/article/10.1...
