Early humans turned favored rock sites into toolmaking assembly lines Such prescient planning started 50,000 years earlier than thought, study finds

A nice News piece in @science.org on our recent article about Jojosi with comments by some colleagues (featuring @huwgroucutt.bsky.social among others!). www.science.org/content/arti...

Integration of distal tibial shape and internal trabecular bone structure among catarrhine primates Abstract. Primates display a wide range of locomotor behaviours, each resulting in distinct mechanical demands on the ankle joint. This study examines how

What a great paper. Functional morphology has come a long way in the past 30 years!

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

The Tool Systems Approach: Measuring Complexity in the Primatological, Archaeological, and Ethnographic Records - Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory Measuring technological complexity across species, as well as across temporal and spatial scales, is an ongoing challenge among authors who work on primatological, archaeological, and/or ethnographic ...

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...

✨Thinking about a career beyond academia?✨
📢 Join us for #AltAc Paths on 11 May 16:00 GMT

🎤 Sarah-Louise Decrausaz – research strategy & funding
🎤 Alice Novello – project management & outreach
💬 Career stories + live Q&A

🔗 Join via Zoom | zoom.us/j/9429649076...

Vegetative Patients May Be More Aware Than We Knew

Nice article about our @CIHR_IRSC funded research in the New York Times today @westernu.ca www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/m...

The origins and development of mobile containers: Biocultural perspectives on Pleistocene containment Containers are ubiquitous and universal across all present-day societies. The substantial increase in the quantity and diversity of containers in the …

Awhile back I meet the brilliant Jenni French & and now been lucky to collab on a project w/ her for the last ~3 yrs. Along with Somaye Khaksar & @anthrofuentes.bsky.social our 1st project paper is out, on origins & development of mobile containers (1/n) 🧪 🧺
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Specialised and persistent raw material procurement by humans in the Middle Pleistocene - Nature Communications The authors here demonstrate that hominins were consistently and specifically procuring a single kind of raw material to make stone tools at the South African site of Jojosi between 220 and 110 thousa...

🚨 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...

Bioarchaeology, Activism and Social Justice This is an open access book. This volume is the first dedicated to action within bioarchaeology that can bring about social and political change.

We don't have enough open access resources for reading about ethics, and there's some really great looking chapters in there. I'm excited to spend some time with this! 🏺🧪link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-1...

What a great paper. Nice to see a collaborative effort by two researchers trained on two sides of a contentious issue 😃

📢 Scholarship for a student / PhD candidate in an NCN OPUS 23 project at PCMA UW!

Project: “Life in the Makurian Metropolis: A Bioarchaeological Inquiry into Medieval Old Dongola, Sudan” (PI: Dr Antonio Caruso).

⏰ Deadline: 1 April 2026
🔎 Details: pcma.uw.edu.pl/en/2026/02/2...

REMINDER: The Society for the Study of Human Biology 2026 call for grants is open, deadline 27th March. Details of how to apply & past awardees: www.sshb.org/funding-gran.... DM me with any questions.

Our new Tübingen research cluster 'HUMAN ORIGINS' is now on bsky: @humanorigins.bsky.social

Screenshot of our papers title.

Screenshot of the beginning of the faq section. Go to https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0305440326000154-mmc1.docx for the whole supplement, the faq section is near the end.

For our recent paper - on naive humans reinventing how to shape early stone tools - we did sth unusual and sth (hopefully) useful:

We included an FAQ section in the supplementary material

New methods may benefit from such FAQ's being included.

[available at ars.els-cdn.com/content/imag... ]

It has arrived, the day of the superb owl! Here's a 10,000 year-old eagle-owl talon, incised to be used an ornament. My team recovered it in a pit next to the burial of a newborn girl nicknamed 'Neve' at Arma Veirana, a cave in the Italian Maritime Alps. 🏺🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02804-z

The emergence of cooperative behaviors, norms, and strategies across five diverse societies Children’s cooperative behaviors and norms develop along distinct cultural pathways shaped by local norms.

Very excited that this paper is out!
www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Led by the fabulous @dorsaamir.bsky.social with invaluable contributions from many awesome collaborators.

Research Fellow in Biomolecular Archaeology at UCL Searching for an academic job? Explore this Research Fellow in Biomolecular Archaeology opening on jobs.ac.uk! Click to view more details and browse other academic jobs.

Job alert! 3 year post doc in my research group at University College London working on Roman Leather via biomolecular archaeology. #ZooMS #stableisotopes

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQJ187/r...

A plot from the wife's age at first birth to the end of her life showing the contributions to family energy production by her, the husband, and their children. Initially, with no children, all energy is produced by the couple. As children arrive and gain foraging skills, their total contribution to family energy production grows and then begins to decline at the age of menopause as they mature and leave the family. Mortality takes its toll as the parents age.

I was surprised by children's large contribution to family food production in my hunter-gatherer family simulation. Of course, they're eating most of this food, too! From this paper linking the evolution of menopause to family energy balance: menopause-preprint.wisp.place 🧪 #BioAnth

After the World Trade Center was attacked (just four miles from Trump Tower), more than 40,000 Canadians in uniform fought alongside their U.S. allies in Afghanistan.

More than 2,000 Canadians were wounded.

These 158 didn't make it home.

And now this guy is giving lectures on gratitude.

Fantastic! There's not much postcranial material known for Homo habilis or other early Homo species, so this is a very welcome addition to the record. Those are long forearms!

Have you ever wondered why human bodies and health look so different from one person to the next? Hi. I’m Dr. Alison Murray and I’m interested in how our evolutionary past and our everyday lives shape our bodies, our physiology, and our health. I grew up in Saskatoon, spent some time in the UK, and eventually made my way to Victoria, obtaining degrees in paleobiology, archaeology, and biological anthropology along the way. My research asks a simple core question with complicated answers: why do human bodies and health vary so much? To do this I study both archaeological and living people, including athletes like ultramarathon runners, rowers, and soccer players, to explore things like how physical activity across a woman’s life influences her bone health, how fetal growth and early life influences everything from our body fat to our organ function, why not just too little but too much exercise can be bad for health, how different bodies solve the problem of moving efficiently, and how having babies shapes aging at a cellular level. Investigating these types of questions involves a lot of collaboration across disciplines - from anthropology and aging research to mechanical engineering – with a central goal of challenging old evolutionary stories and rethinking why we are the way we are. I’m excited to share what I’m learning – let’s reimagine what it means to be human, together.

Have you ever wondered why human bodies and health look so different from one person to the next?

@uvic.ca @uvicsocialsciences.bsky.social

Canada-Impact-Plus - Research - Western University

🚀 Launched! Here’s our call for applicants to the Canada Impact+ Research Chairs Program at @westernu.ca. This is a remarkable opportunity for us to recruit outstanding scholars who are currently working internationally:

www.uwo.ca/research/can...

Earliest evidence for intentional cremation of human remains in Africa The world’s oldest in situ adult funeral pyre (~9500 years old) shows complex mortuary behaviors among ancient African foragers.

I'm happy to have been able to contribute, even in a small way, to the work of this fabulous team 😀
Earliest evidence for intentional cremation of human remains in Africa | Science Advances share.google/wEZTImBqzBgY...

OMG this is a good catch. We wrestled with this a long time ago when setting up Slice Geometry. The correct way to set slice spacing (pixel spacing in z) from a DICOM is to use the slice position info (0020,1041 or 0020,0032) and divide by (stack size - 1). It can be out by not much or quite a bit.

Why is there no acetaminophen in the UK? Because the parrots et em all. (Posted with apologies, I have studied Dad jokes on both sides of the Atlantic)

Cave dig expands to learn more about hunter-gatherers Humans inhabited Malta 1,000 years earlier than previously thought

Nice coverage of our ongoing research timesofmalta.com/article/cave...

It's Official: NASA Is Giving Up on Climate Change Science In a major blow to climate science, NASA is not continuing its work studying global warming and will instead just stick to space exploration.

Gonna focus on terraforming Mars rather than not venusifying Earth.

futurism.com/the-byte/nas...

Western expands PhD and postdoc funding - Western News Western is boosting funding for postdoctoral fellows and PhD candidates from the U.S. and other countries with expanded and new award programs.

To attract top global talent, #WesternU is doubling the number of Postdoctoral Fellowship Program awards and launching the new US-CAN Doctoral Excellence Awards. #CdnPSE #HigherEd

Trump is changing direction on Canada again. The Digital Services Tax is critical to the protection of Canadian news media. Without our media, we are left naked to US digital news disinformation, including Elon Musk's far right X influence. This is a tech oligarch move against Canada's sovereignty.

Two PhD positions open! Deadline end of June! Apply now!

Aging isn’t a disease—it’s a journey. #WesternU researchers say we should focus on health span, not just lifespan, by optimizing how we age through connection, movement and mindset.

Read more in the @westernualumni.bsky.social Magazine: buff.ly/r2Ao3XI