Prehistoric seal tooth pendant reveals ancient culture in Devon A reanalysis of a misidentified Stone Age seal-tooth pendant reveals new insights into ancient British technology and cultural connections, led by researchers from the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

A 15,000-year-old pendant is changing how we see Ice Age Britain.

Reanalysis of a Kents Cavern artefact shows it’s a modified grey seal tooth, likely worn as a pendant and transported over 100km inland.

#Archaeology #IceAge #Prehistory @ucl.ac.uk @nhm-london.bsky.social

Communicating changes in the intensity of UK heatwaves Communicating how a global warming of ‘just’ 1°C affects people is challenging. The hottest UK summer days have warmed more than 3 times faster than the rate of global warming in the past century, ca...

Communicating changes in the intensity of UK heatwaves

Global warming of ‘just’ 1°C does not necessarily sound like a problem. But in the UK, the hottest summer days are warming much faster than typical summer days, changing our experience of heatwaves

rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

'Enormous' cave under Pembroke Castle could rewrite history, researchers say Archaeologists have so far uncovered

Huge hidden cave under castle with prehistoric hippo bones 'once in a lifetime' find www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Temporary open access link for anyone with access! kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

Integration of age-at-death and novel peptide sex estimation reveals cattle culling practices at Yorkshire Iron Age shrine site Amelogenin peptide sex estimation is growing in bioarchaeological applications, with new studies focusing on developing rapid and inexpensive methods …

Really excited about our new paper that’s just been published. We’ve been working on developing rapid zooarchaeological peptide sex estimation and have applied this to a super interesting site from Iron Age Yorkshire! You can read it here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Oh perfect, thanks!

Hi Prehistoric Society - your "book now" button (on this page www.prehistoricsociety.org/events/2026-...) doesn't seem to be working? Thanks!

Britain breaks solar energy record twice as UK’s biggest solar farm gets approval Record high set on Monday and raised on Tuesday, with 14.4GW of electricity generated in sunny spring weather

A single line in this piece just made my day:

“The electricity system operator is understood to be preparing to run the grid without any gas for short periods as soon as this summer, in a first for the UK energy system.”

Renewables *work*. And progress matters🎉
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

*Call for papers extended to 18th April*

Europa 2026, 6th June online and in York.

Call for papers for the 2026 Europa, honouring the work of Professor Penny Spikins. The topic will be:

What can we learn from Neanderthals?

Further details here: www.prehistoricsociety.org/events/2026-...

Shell game: Neanderthal use of the European pond turtle (Emys orbicularis) in the Last Interglacial landscape of Neumark-Nord (Germany) - Scientific Reports Data on palaeolithic subsistence is often obtained through studies of faunal palimpsests, containing remains of animal processing activities accumulated over non-quantifiable amounts of time. Compound...

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

Call for ministers to curb ‘excessive risk-taking’ at universities - Research Professional News Former government adviser says Office for Students should be given “significant new powers”

Broken record here, but we cannot fix, save, improve, renew or whatever English universities if we only attend to taught students, DfE and OfS. Universities are major engines of research, innovation and civic good. Minimally DSIT must also be centrally in the frame.

They're not big schools.

Since 2019, HERI has run women-focused field camps for archaeology & geology students.

Female-led and hands-on, they provide field skills, mentorship, and safe spaces—building confident, resilient researchers ready to study #Africa’s rich heritage.

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...

A new paper led by Qian Ma (now in the Peking Radiocarbon Lab) and @lorenabecval.bsky.social on dating lipids in pots - with a way of getting rid of those pesky phathalates (plasticizers). Great work folks! @unioxarchaeology.bsky.social @isotopesuk.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Women and early-career researchers bore the burden of NIH’s funding disruptions Almost 58% of the studies the US National Institutes of Health suddenly cancelled last year were female-led

At Johns Hopkins University, women led half of the cancelled projects but lost more than two thirds of terminated funding.

@rebeccatrager.bsky.social
www.chemistryworld.com/news/women-a...

LCAB Postdoctoral recruitment The Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity (LCAB) is a major research centre funded by the Leverhulme Trust to increase knowledge of how the relationship between humanity and the natural worl...

TEN post-doc openings at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity. Yes, you read that right. TEN.

Got something to new to share about Neanderthal archaeology? The Prehistoric Society Europa conference in June this year is looking for papers (call will be extended):

A man sitting at a working desk, in 1540 setting, with a drinking cup, a few books, a writing desk with paper sheets, and lots of more details.

Working the morning shift as a scholar in 1540, a browser tab and a word document opened on two screens, other needed texts opened and handy, an overfull mail account nearby, and a hot beverage in reach to make for the best working condition. Bonus: wearing a thinking hat. #academicchatter

Although AI improves performance during assisted sessions, performance drops sharply once it's removed. And relative to controls, AI-assisted participants also gave up more frequently on test problems.

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning..

We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance.

And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use!

1/

Global warming is a slowly meandering ghost

A must read for many of us supervising (PhD) students and the use of AI for their development and critical thinking....

High resolution sampling along the growth direction (GD) of limpets (Patella vulgata) and topshells (Phorcus lineatus). The diagram highlights the shell apex and shell edges and shows high resolution cross-sections from samples.

New analyses revise theories about Mesolithic shell middens in northern Spain. The article usefulness of high-res sampling of growth structures in mollusc shells and measurement of oxygen isotope ratios as a sensitive measure of palaeotemperature variation
www.york.ac.uk/archaeology/...

A few years ago, using palaeoproteomics, we identified a tiny hominin bone from Denisova Cave and named it Denisova 17 (D17).

A rather unremarkable sliver.

At the time, I wondered, could it be Denny’s sibling (the Neanderthal/Denisovan hybrid we had just reported)?

Well, turns out: no. 🧵1/4

When a major climate event goes almost unnoticed: the elusive 8.2 ka signal in southern France stalagmites Around 8,200 years ago, the climate of the Northern Hemisphere experienced an abrupt disturbance. In Greenland ice cores, the signal is unmistakable: a rapid drop in temperatures, followed by a gradua...

🆕 New Blog Post

🪨 When a major climate event goes almost unnoticed: the elusive 8.2 ka signal in southern France stalagmites
by Isabelle Couchoud & Maddalena Passelergue

Limited, regional 8.2 ka event?

👉 Read more: blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cl...

#EGU #EGUBlogs #ClimateResearch #ClimateChange

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

There are two open positions for PhD students in my research group Uni Basel, working on climate reconstructions from the LGM, in the context of ice age refugia for temperate trees. Apply by 21. April. More information and application instructions here:

careers.unibas.ch/job/Basel-Ph...

The Ozone Hole Is Steadily Shrinking because of Global Efforts After nearly 40 years of global efforts, the ozone hole over Antarctica is continuing to heal

Remember when world leaders -- guided by science -- agreed to work together to solve an existential threat?

We do.

"men continued to publish the same number of papers after becoming fathers, women experienced a significant drop in research output (mothers had 31% fewer publications than did fathers 8 years after the birth of their first child)"

Universities are documenting inequality rather than preventing it Danny Clegg argues that equality impact assessments must shift from records of compliance to tools for co-production and foresight

'At the heart of this is a simple but urgent problem – equality impact assessments (EIAs) are being used as records of compliance rather than as tools for co-production and anticipatory design.'