ISBA Trustee Expressions of Interest This form is to record initial expressions of interest to become a trustee of the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology. You must be an ISBA member to become a trustee. The deadline for ...

🚨 Interested in joining our board of trustees?🚨
4 trustees position will soon be vacated and we are seeking expression of interest! You can fill this form by the 30th of April: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Any question? Contact us at secretary@isbarch.org

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

New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos

Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations

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

In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks

An example Tool Systems Diagram for chimpanzee nut cracking, schematising tool complexity. The Tool Systems Total (TST) is reported in the squares to the right of each sequence, with the Total Discrete Actions (TDA) reported in the circle below. There has been one observation of a second stabilising stone being used in combination with a stone anvil and hammer at Bossou (Biro et al., 2010), but we have not considered this a habitual behaviour

Ramifications for study of technological complexity as a whole

The Tool Systems Approach:
Measuring Complexity in the Primatological, Archaeological, and Ethnographic Records🏺🧪
@ceciliapad.bsky.social , @elliescerri.bsky.social , manuelwill.bsky.social , et al
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Check out our latest paper in JAMT on measuring tool complexity across different contexts 👇🏼 Big thanks to @jclark997.bsky.social for leading this project!

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 questions. Researchers in these individual fields have developed a number of innovative ways of approaching this issue that reflect the specific affordances of their data with a known set of limitations. However, comparability between these approaches is often difficult. One such field-specific approach is the techno-unit method of Oswalt et al. (1976), which has had a massive impact on our interpretation of ethnographic technology over the fifty years since its publication. Nevertheless, this method has issues with its compression of variability and the different pathways to “complexity”. Here, we review a number of different ways technological complexity has been measured in non-human primates, the archaeological record, and modern human foragers, in order to identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. We suggest that the approach deployed in any given study should continue to follow the data and research questions under consideration, but that we lack an easily-applicable method that allows explicit comparisons between fields of study. In this context, we introduce the Tool Systems Approach as one possible way of doing so, which decomposes tool manufacture into its constituent steps (i.e., Tool Systems Total) and discrete forms of action (i.e., Total Discrete Actions). We apply the approach to a number of different technologies across the three fields, to explore the practicalities of its application, as well as its limitations. Plotting these different technologies with regards to their maximum complexity through time reveals trends that may map onto important changes in cognitive evolution, which are also reflected in ever-growing variability in the complexity of individual artefacts. The ramifications for the study of technological complexity as a whole are discussed.

I am delighted to share our new paper on measuring complexity across the Primatological, Archaeological, and Ethnographic records, with an amazing team of co-authors - including the excellent @lucytimbrell96.bsky.social and @ceciliapad.bsky.social! Short 🧵 below /1

doi.org/10.1007/s108...

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...

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 ...

🚨🧪NEW PAPER!🚨 Led by the great @jclark997.bsky.social - We present the Tool Systems Approach: A method to calculate cultural complexity in a way that allows comparisons between the archaeological, ethnographic and primatological records, hence tackling big Qs in CE link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Excellent new special Issue on the challenges raised by the ancient DNA of kinship

Special Issue: Kinship Trouble: Traversing Interdisciplinary Boundaries between Archaeology, Archaeogenetics and Socio-cultural Anthropology

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

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Come and work with us for 16 months! Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in Evolutionary Anthropology with expertise in evolutionary medicine and quantitative methods. We are a friendly bunch. Deadline 30th of April! www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

I'm hiring! 2 x postdocs in Cognitive Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, to work on the cultural history of Australia and Papua. More details in link below, and please do repost or share elsewhere!
www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/post...

Pathways generating observed di6erences in measured germline mutation rates between populations from pedigree (trio) studies

The origins and extent of germline mutation rate variation is essential for reconstructing human evolutionary history.

What is the human germline mutation rate? methodological innovations, challenges, and evolutionary implications🏺🧪 @ceciliapad.bsky.social, Paco Majic
ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Inferring hominin history with recurrent gene flow from single unphased genomes and a two-locus statistic www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Really cool approach!

Speed networking between PIs and young researchers - April 2026 edition Interest and registration form for PI speed networking for April 13th, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CEST The following PIs are open to meeting with interested junior researchers (prospective masters, PhDs, pos...

Don't miss our virtual speed-networking event between PIs and young researchers (MSc/PhD/Postdocs) focused on the Americas! 🌎

🗓️ When? Monday April 13th 6pm - 8pm CEST

Registration deadline: April 9th. Grab your slot!

For more information and registration, check: forms.gle/uajZrCyrAoVa...

🚨New (very special) preprint! 🚨"What is the human germline mutation rate? methodological innovations, challenges, and evolutionary implications" doi.org/10.32942/X2T... The product of many coffees & pains au chocolat with @hhydrochaerus.bsky.social debating the knows and unknowns about mutations 🧬🧪

Importantly, we centre this question around an even bigger one: Are there stable, evolved differences in mutation rates across human populations? If so, what drives them? This has huge implications for how we build evolutionary models, but also predict disease risk, and even trait architecture.

We look into the history of mutation rate research, the ways in which we measure the rate at which mutations occur, persist throughout development and eventually through evolutionary timescales. We ask, what drives differences in rates at these three different scales?

🚨New (very special) preprint! 🚨"What is the human germline mutation rate? methodological innovations, challenges, and evolutionary implications" doi.org/10.32942/X2T... The product of many coffees & pains au chocolat with @hhydrochaerus.bsky.social debating the knows and unknowns about mutations 🧬🧪

A spread of today’s New York Times. My story about science replication is on the left. A story about a FEMA official claiming he has teleported to a Waffle House is on the right, complete with skeptical quote from a physicist

My story on science replication is in today’s print New York Times. The juxtaposition is interesting…

"Sapiens": One page at a time I've been co-teaching a course for several years in which we read Sapiens . I think I've read it eight times, now. That explains the gumband...

I love this! The brilliant Holly Dunsworth is reviewing Sapiens, one page at a time, separating myth from fact… Let’s dive in!

ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/03/sapi...

Thank you!!!

Thank you 🤗🤗🤗

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you!!! Yep, it happened.

Thank you!!

And finally, the only sad thing about this all is to leave the @eegcam.bsky.social , where I found the nicest humans, and the most inspiring colleagues and mentors I could have ever dreamed for. Thank you everyone, so so much! ❤️❤️

If these ideas sound interesting, please do reach out. There will be opportunities for collaboration, student projects advertised soon, and I’m always happy to hear from students and postdocs interested in joining the lab.

We’ll also keep doing fieldwork and engaging with communities around the world, so we can better understand why and how people make decisions and how those decisions shape evolutionarily relevant outcomes 🌍🧳