Wow, great new empirical info, thanks.

Eastern Neanderthals who lived ~120,000 years ago and Western Neanderthals ~60,000 years ago were as genetically differentiated as the most divergent modern human populations today.

A lot from one “unremarkable” bone!

Here's the full publication:
doi.org/10.1073/pnas... 4/4

Again, they hired the wrong PR company that is giving them this strategy. If they had gone with someone competent, they might have a 180 approach, which is merited here.

Either way, they will need to adapt, given the discoveries coming out of Michael Levin’s lab.

Diagram showing the experimental approach, demonstrating four stages: 1. Analysing the production chain of Neolithic tools. 2. Production of replicas. 3. Hafting the replicas to a wooden handle. 4. Using the replicas to observe how they wear over time.

NEW How did prehistoric people actually design and use their tools? The WEAR Project combines experimental #archaeology with computational modelling to statistically analyse and predict how lithics were made, worn down and reshaped over time.

🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

🏺 #Archaeology

Quite a stretch.

"Million-year-old" fossil skulls from China are far older—and not Denisovans The revised age may help make sense of 2-million-year-old stone tools elsewhere in China.

My latest for @arstechnica.com explores what it means that we have 1.77 million year-old Homo erectus fossils in central China, and whether Homo erectus was really the first hominin to migrate that far. 🧪

Hey that’s a great article.

So many goodies coming out of central Italian water sources these days!

Rather, social animal intelligence is very likely to ingress into mourning as a consequence of that problem-solving approach.

Otherwise the people who look at behavioral parametrics or histories of them will stop at, “wow, whales are
more like us than we thought,” or “we’re alike,” or mourning has been “independently/convergently invented.”

But now, I think this material has to be understood through the frameworks
of studies in diverse intelligence and developmental biology for context, basically the sphere of scientists hanging around Michael Levin’s Lab.

When we launched Human Bridges, I thought that synthesis of recent findings in these fields plus gradual archaeology leading to
the present was the core information framework, and forge that produced deep-time and global perspectives.

Human Evolution and Behaviour MSc Develop the ability to generate, assess and synthesise empirical evidence and hypotheses related to human evolution and behaviour.

This MSc at UCL covers human evolution, human behavioural ecology, primatology and human evolutionary genetics www.ucl.ac.uk/social-histo...

Very good idea for a program. Wonder who guided the thinking there…💡🌝 It’ll be even stronger comingled w/ programs like Erdem Denk’s Arkeopolitics syllabus, taking from global U.Paleolithic to Iron Ages. And 🧨 when countries realize this is PPE curriculum^10.

I’m working toward that effort.

I’m sure fascinating, but you have to pay to learn about it.

Amazing, and what do they know at 4.5kya that they didn’t know at 25+kya? Kitsissut in that environment is like a moon landing. Would you deny those people the right to migrate to Atlantic along different Arctic pathways?

LBV is so good.

Keep it up!

Parameters of Animal Mortuary Behavior

Naledi evidence is easier to absorb in a wider context of parameters of animal mortuary behavior, as Cherene de Bruyn did for Human Bridges:

observatory.wiki/Parameters_o...

Could be turned into a gorgeous watch face

I subscribe to your AI summaries. Gotta say thr script that tells me, X wasn’t just Y, it was an (adjective) Z…. are tiring.

Even the teaser, … not chance. It comes off formulaic once you read it in 150-200 summaries (which are great, the less florid they are).

Publishing science with one’s parent is v. cool.

I can’t read this article. Can it be shared with the public?

If we took the Sulawesi rock art paper’s logic to the geometrically-marked 500kya Trinil shell, wouldn’t the null hypothesis be that it was made by a H. sapiens population?

Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus - Nature With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in east...

I am really excited to share news of this new jaw...until now Paranthropus had been conspicuously absent from the Afar.

Fieldwork at Mille-Logya is not easy, and this fossil is the result of years of very hard work (and a lot of days of dry screening by our team)!

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

We chose pencil and ink drawings by 10 visual creators of the 15th and 19th centuries. Future approaches and larger data sets will refine the confidence levels, and establish the limits of analysis. Our future test work goes from the 19th Century into the Upper Paleolithic, more results to come.

Bradford U. Prof. Hassan Ugail, myself and Irina Matuzava and other researchers are exploring how visual computing analysis can be useful for identifying a particular creator. With larger datasets, this tool could be used to find an image’s similar genres, periods, or regional styles.

Could computers help us distinguish whether a drawing was created by Raphael or Michelangelo? How about distinguishing if someone was trying to draw like Raphael, or draw in a 19th Century English Romantic style? Yes, according to our prelim analysis.
arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11627

We chose pencil and ink drawings by 10 visual creators of the 15th and 19th centuries. Future approaches and larger data sets will refine the confidence levels, and establish the limits of analysis. Our future test work goes from the 19th Century into the Upper Paleolithic, more results to come.

Bradford U. Prof. Hassan Ugail, myself and Irina Matuzava and other researchers are exploring how visual computing analysis can be useful for identifying a particular creator. With larger datasets, this tool could be used to find an image’s similar genres, periods, or regional styles.

Handcrafted Feature-Assisted One-Class Learning for Artist Authentication in Historical Drawings Authentication and attribution of works on paper remain persistent challenges in cultural heritage, particularly when the available reference corpus is small and stylistic cues are primarily expressed...

Could computers help us distinguish whether a drawing was created by Raphael or Michelangelo? How about distinguishing if someone was trying to draw like Raphael, or draw in a 19th Century English Romantic style? Yes, according to our prelim analysis.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.11627