The shift from non-figurative (geometric designs) to figurative art (animals, mostly)—and what propelled it—is one of the big enduring puzzles of cave art.

We discuss a couple accounts of this shift, including
@izzywisher.bsky.social's intriguing suggestion that pareidolia offered a bridge.

3 diagrams showing dating of cultural evolutionary developments in a) structuring of space b) body culturalization c) information storage

The most interesting paper of the Royal society collective intelligence isdue.
'Scaffolding minds: Human collective intelligence through space, body and material symbols'

https://t.co/mYDNWUiYok

Worried about the pricy hotels in Zurich? No problem, “couch surfing” is there! #ehbea2027

Can I camp somewhere beside the Zurichsee?? ⛺️

A whisper to a scream Antoine Balzeau and colleagues (2026) have just published a large analysis and open-access dataset comparing 75 human brains and endocasts.

Brains and endocasts, a whisper to a scream lawnchairanthropology.com/2026/04/15/a...

Scaffolding minds: human collective intelligence through space, body and material symbols Abstract. Human collective intelligence (CI)—the capacity of groups to solve problems, make decisions and acquire knowledge beyond individual capabilities—

Now out in PTRSB!🔥

Wherein Francesco d'Errico, Ivan Colage & I track the emergence & trajectory of hominin epistemic #nicheconstruction through material culture—the alteration of the informational landscape via spaces, bodily ornaments, & artificial memory systems.

#evosky #archeosky #philsky

We are offering two 4-year PhD positions in our new SNF project "The Evolutionary Roots of Altercentrism"

Ah fantastic! Looking forward to reading - feels like a really generative direction. And congrats on the paper 🥳

Nicely echoes Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory - early technology as containers, not only tools or weapons

Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago, but the Homo genus first appeared approximately 2.5 to 3 million years ago. Image credit: Ostapenko Oleksandra/Shutterstock.com

Was Our Emotional Intelligence The Key Driver Of Human Evolution?

Social and emotional cognition in Pleistocene hominin evolution: The role of biocultural processes 🏺🧪
@anthrofuentes.bsky.social , @marckissel.bsky.social, et al
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/5 Did diving help seals “talk”?

In part, it did: life in the water selected for very fine voluntary control of breathing, and that seems to have opened the door to greater control over the voice and, eventually, vocal learning.

(paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
by @pfcook.bsky.social

What does it mean for culture to ‘shape’ cognition? Human culture and cognition vary widely across groups, but how exactly culture ‘shapes’ cognition remains underspecified. In this review, we outline four qualitatively different pathways by which cult...

"...it remains unclear how exactly culture ‘shapes’ cognition. The study outlines four pathways: culture can privilege one cognitive process over another, prune out disfavored processes, produce new processes, or have no effect on cognition."
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

High-precision tracking of human foragers reveals adaptive social information use in the wild Foraging complexity and competitive social challenges are considered key drivers of human cognition. Yet, the decision-making mechanisms that underlie social foraging in the real world remain unknown....

"Analyzing video footage and location data from headcams and GPS devices, respectively, the authors found that social information, specifically where other participants were fishing, influenced foraging behaviors, especially for women" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

No worries :)

Is it possible to join online?

Such an inspiring talk, thank you again!

Humanity's oldest geometries, engraved on ostrich eggs At several archaeological sites in southern Africa, hundreds of highly unusual fragments of ostrich eggs have been found. Dating back more than 60,000 years, the shells were engraved by groups of Homo...

While everyone is excited by early European precursors of 'writing', let's not forget the African geometrics, here Howiesons Poort oes, but also Blombos haematite, almost twice as old

phys.org/news/2026-02...

Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs | PNAS As humans, we store and share information. This allows us to distribute knowledge necessary for survival and to coordinate large groups. Our homini...

Very interesting attempt to trace back the early evolution of a “system of conventional signs” (proto-writing system) 🧪✍️
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Human newborns form musical predictions based on rhythmic but not melodic structure by Roberta Bianco, Brigitta Tóth, Felix Bigand, Trinh Nguyen, István Sziller, Gábor P. Háden, István Winkler, Giacomo Novembre The ability to anticipate rhythmic and melodic structures in music is considered a fundamental human trait, present across all cultures and predating linguistic comprehension in human development. Yet, it remains unclear the extent to which this ability is already developed at birth. Here, we used temporal response functions to assess rhythmic and melodic neural encoding in newborns (N = 49) exposed to classical monophonic musical pieces (real condition) and control stimuli with shuffled tones and inter-onset intervals (shuffled condition). We computationally quantified context-based rhythmic and melodic expectations and dissociated these high-level processes from low-level acoustic tracking, such as local changes in timing and pitch. We observed encoding of probabilistic rhythmic expectations only in response to real but not shuffled music. This proves newborns’ ability to rely on rhythmic statistical regularities to generate musical expectations. We found no evidence for the tracking of melodic information, demonstrating a downweighting of this dimension compared to the rhythmic one. This study provides neurophysiological evidence that the capacity to track statistical regularities in music is present at birth and driven by rhythm. Melodic tracking, in contrast, may receive more weight through development with exposure to signals relevant to communication, such as speech and music.

Human newborns form musical predictions based on rhythmic but not melodic structure @PLOSBiology.org

The ‘Rosetta Stone’ of palaeoneurology: A detailed study of the link between the brain and the endocast on 75 volunteers Imaging data from 75 volunteers were used to determine the sulci on the brain and then read on the internal surface of the cranium, the endocast, the impressions actually linked to the sulci visible ...

Detailed characterisation of the link between brain and enbocast (study led by A. Balzeau); presenting a good challenge for the interpretation of fossil endocasts, and offering useful recommendations for future studies
🧪💀🧠
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Should add that one of the study authors (@annemiekemilks.bsky.social) wrote a fantastic commentary on this very issue and you can read it here:

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Lithic technological change, hominin history and climatic background from the late Middle Pleistocene to middle Late Pleistocene (ca. 300–50 ka) in China.
Source: doi.org/10.1038/s414... #FossilFriday

What Can Shamans Teach Us About Religion? | Many Minds with Manvir Singh Podcast Episode · On Humans · 01/21/2026 · Bonus · 1h 20m

What can shamanism teach us about religion -- and the human mind?

What a pleasure to share this excellent conversation to the listeners of On Humans! The hard work was done by @manymindspod.bsky.social and @manvir.bsky.social 🙏

Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/4nhm3fG...
Apple 👇

Early hominins from Morocco basal to the Homo sapiens lineage - Nature New hominin fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés at Thomas Quarry I (ThI-GH) in Casablanca, Morocco, dated to around 773 thousand years ago are similar in age to Homo antecessor, yet are morphologicall...

"The ThI-GH hominins...provide strong evidence for an African lineage ancestral to our species. These fossils offer clues about the last common ancestor shared with Neanderthals and Denisovans."

Humans Made Poisoned Arrowheads Thousands of Years Earlier Than Previously Thought The use of poison on arrows marked a revolution in human hunting technology—new evidence suggests it happened tens of thousands of years earlier than previously known

This is such a cool finding--the oldest direct evidence of poisoned arrows. Poisoned hunting weapons were a game-changing innovation for our ancestors. Absolutely incredible that researchers found traces of plant toxins on these tiny arrowheads from 60,000 ago 🤯🏹 🧪

A graph comparing the number of neurons in the telencephalon of reptiles, birds, and two estimates for T. rex. Even the lowest of these estimates suggests the telencephalic neuron count of T. rex to be similar to that of a pygmy falcon or blackbird - several times more than the largest telencephalic neuron count of extant reptiles.

New paper out! 🧪
On reconstructing dinosaur cognition through contemporary cognitive science - a primer on the function of neurons and cognition, the role of extant animals, thermobiology, tools, arms races, foraging, and model-based cognition.
anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A brief natural history of misinformation Abstract. The idea that organisms benefit by acquiring information through social connections is a cornerstone of our understanding of social evolution and

"misinformation is widespread in biological systems spanning levels of organization, and [...] is probably an inevitable property that inherits from fundamental constraints on biological communication systems, rather than a pathology"
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...

Cognitive Technologies and Their Histories Cognitive technologies are socially acquired and culturally evolved systems whose primary function is cognitive. There is a tremendous untapped opportunity for a broad range of disciplines across the...

At last, the final publication in 'Cognitive Technologies and their Histories': the editorial introduction to the issue in TopiCS, by myself and @helenamiton.bsky.social. 4.5 years since our initial @cogscisociety.bsky.social panel. Free access! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Super proud of this fabulous team for challenging old comparative frameworks and rethinking what makes language language.
Read more in the thread below 👇 or here 📖😊: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials - Nature Human Behaviour Howard-Spink et al. develop an empirically based model of orangutan diet development, which suggests that social learning is vital for orangutans to acquire varied diets.

Our New Paper is out in Nature Human Behaviour: 🚨 Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials! 🦧 www.nature.com/articles/s41.... See 🧵

A Voyage Into the Art of Finding One’s Way at Sea

The project about how indigenous navigators find their way across the Pacific Ocean, in which our researcher @pfvelasco.bsky.social participates, is in the New York Times.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/s...