🏺Something strange...in your f3 stats...who you gonna call?

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Imagining ‘Our Ancestors’: Liberal Indigeneity and the Repudiation of Colonialism in Postimperial Britain - Ben Pitcher, 2025 This article examines imaginative connections to an indigenous ancestry in popular British nonfiction writing on nature, landscape, and environment. It coins th...

How does race figure in writing on nature, landscape, and environment? This new open-access article in @theoryculturesociety.org charts the rise of ‘liberal indigeneity’ as an expression of nativism in postimperial Britain. 1/2 doi.org/10.1177/0263...

Colour photo of an excavated, preserved tree stump of an oak that grew in the Early Bronze Age

The preserved stumps of oak trees survive below the Flag Fen post-alignment. Part of a submerged forest, these trees belong to a Early Bronze Age terrestrial landscape that pre-dates the rising groundwater table that turned these low-lying contours into a fen embayment. #BogOaks #Fenland #FlagFen 🏺

Wiltshire Museum puts Devizes at the centre of new tourist itinerary linking Stonehenge and Avebury. Launched on World Heritage Day.
www.wiltshiremuseum.org.uk/news-article...

Man, all gold standard stuff, but as if I didn’t have enough to read!

You have no choice.

Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia - Nature Analysis of 15,836 ancient West Eurasian genomes reveals hundreds of instances of directional selection, showing that sustained changes in allele frequency were widespread, rather than being...

Analyses of ancient DNA sequences from >15,800 West Eurasian individuals finds surprising evidence of natural selection acting on hundreds of different genetic loci over last 10 millennia, according to paper by @aliakbari.bsky.social et al, published online today at @nature.com.
💀🧬🧪

Revolution, modernity, and the dispersal of Homo sapiens beyond Africa In the recent past, evolutionarily speaking, every other kind of hominin, from the Neanderthals of western Eurasia to the ‘hobbits’ of Flores, became …

New paper alert. My new article just published in Quaternary Science Reviews, "Revolution, modernity, and the dispersal of Homo sapiens beyond Africa". www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Not that I’m a raging northern stereotype you I understand.

Used to play this regularly! One that you never got tired of playing…

In South Yorkshire they pronounce it ‘Jennil’. Don’t know how they spell it and I don’t care to know. They also call tig ‘tiggy’.

I ensured where we live means we have to go through a ginnel to get to school so I can reinforce the knowledge every day.

From Nelson with Love.

(I appreciate the Colne recognition and not flinching from the fact that Manchester is indeed in Lancashire).

We have a simple dream of a world where everyone understands the word ‘ginnel’ and (more importantly) pronounces it correctly.

Lancastrian sleeper cells in every city, waiting for their moment to reveal themselves…I’ve said too much already.

Boscawen-Un

Men-an-Tol

Nine Ladies

New on our website from Ian Simmons (Member no: 2866)

A “Withnail and I” visit to Cornwall

“I decided to be more ambitious and visit Mên-an-Tol, at least, in part, because it’s not every day you get to see a circular megalith with a hole in it”

stoneclub.rocks/more-stones/...

µCT scanning effects on aDNA and a multi-step workflow for archaeological petrous portions The petrous portion of the temporal bone (often informally referred to as the “petrous bone”) is a key element in human evolutionary studies due to its exceptional preservation of biomolecules and mor...

New study of the effects of micro-CT scanning on ancient DNA preservation in ancient bones: no significant effect on conventional preservation metrics.

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Building tombs and entombing the dead as technologies of descent and affinity in Neolithic northern Scotland | Antiquity | Cambridge Core Building tombs and entombing the dead as technologies of descent and affinity in Neolithic northern Scotland - Volume 100 Issue 410

Forgot the link…

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Diagram of genetic relationships between - blue outlined oblongs representing different labelled tombs with internal squares and circular representing lelle buried within goose tombs. Lines of red green blue and orange represent genetic relationships.

🏺New paper on web of close (although mostly more distant) genetic relationships between people buried in tombs in Orkney and northern Scotland 3700-3500 BCE, in the Early Neolithic.

I had exactly the same thought until I’d worked it out!

Thanks Cate, that’s very gratifying! I felt like we were very much just thinking aloud back then!

🏺How we can talk about kin in the archaeological record in a world where establishing genetic relatedness with aDNA is relatively routine and perhaps become somewhat domineering in the conversation.

Pleasure to appear on 'Big Picture Science' talking about possible Palaeolithic proto-writing (i'm on from 4.00 minutes) bigpicturescience.org/episodes/old...)

a man wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket says you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could ALT: a man wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket says you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could

Don’t make me point at the…etc. etc. etc.

Yeh it’s a tough challenge! I don’t mind ‘Britain and Ireland’ people often ask ‘what about the other islands’ but people tend to get what you mean from the context. Seems like the least worse option!

Haha I know I thought the same, to the extent that I initially misread it as the 2023 proceedings! That’s Slow Science for you…

Also includes stable isotopes and some relatively in-depth historical detail!

🏺Genetic ancestry in a relatively unusual trans-Conquest (9th-11th century CE) rural cemetery from Surrey looking at the demographic impact or the Normans - spoiler potentially not much although the population don’t look entirely unchanged either.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

There’s only one which claims the capitalised (North) Atlantic Archipelago, as opposed to ‘an Atlantic archipelago’! British and Irish Isles - largely a potential solution to some Irish people understandably being uncomfortable with being regarded as somehow ‘British’ as in ‘British Isles’.

Dynamic new edited volume on the Bronze Age in the Atlantic Archipelago.

I do enjoy that term just to for the opportunity to say ‘archipelago.’

www.jstor.org/content/oa_b...