Pregnancy vaccine reduces baby hospital admissions for RSV by 80% A study confirms the vaccine gives excellent protection for babies against life-threatening chest infections.

Vaccines are humanity’s greatest scientific achievement.

This is incredibly kind of you, thank you! I would love to take you up on this at some point!

Thanks Duncan, this means a lot. We were heavily influenced by your BBS paper from last year on how to consider the organic components that we largely do not see in the archaeological record - still more thinking to do!

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

Happy to be a part of this great new article on assessing and measuring complexity in archaeological, ethnographic and primatological contexts!

We think that this method has a lot of potential for exploring macroevolutionary trends across the primate (and hominin) clades, but there are questions to answer about accounting for missing data and scaling up from the artefact to the assemblage level. Hopefully more to come in future! /4

It is in this context that we put forward a new way of measuring complexity in each of these fields (and across materials!) - sacrificing some resolution for maximum comparability. The method involves breaking down a tool-using sequence into its constituent actions across 6 pre-defined domains /3

We explore some of the different ways complexity has been measured across these different datasets, with the aim of comparing their relative strengths and limitations. We underline that the use of method is best tailored to the specific data and research questions - but not all are comparable! /2

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...

Morez Jacobs et al used 45k genomes to localize Neandertal haplotypes w/i the British; used these to infer the SFS of the introgressing Neandertals; and then inferred population history parameters of the introgressing pop. Also lots about selection. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cliftonville (Kent) Council By-Election Result:

🌍 GRN: 38.8% (+26.7)
➡️ RFM: 33.1% (-7.0)
🌳 CON: 15.2% (-4.5)
🌹 LAB: 10.4% (-11.6)
🙋 Ind: 1.3% (New)
🔶 LDM: 1.2% (-1.9)

No Ind (-3.0) as previous.

Green GAIN from Reform UK.
Changes w/ 2025.

Far-reaching hunter-gatherer networks during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe Geochemistry of stone tools reveals unprecedently large social ties among European hunter-gatherers during the Last Ice Age.

Contactos entre grupos de cazadores-recolectores del Solutrense asentados en regiones de Iberia central y del suroeste de Francia:
Far-reaching hunter-gatherer networks during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe

A HUGE congratulations @ceciliapad.bsky.social - well deserved!!

🚨I couldn’t be happier to share that today I’m officially starting my own research group at the Human Origins Cluster of Excellence in Tübingen (@humanorigins.bsky.social)!🚨We’ll explore drivers of genetic, phenotypic and cultural evolution by integrating evidence from many fields in creative ways 🧬

🧪🦣 Pre-print Tsoupas et al. 2026 Tracing #Neanderthal ancestry patterns through successive population expansions in Europe

"admixture between hunter-gatherers and Neolithic populations was an order of magnitude higher than that between Neanderthals and modern humans"
doi.org/10.64898/202...

Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows Brown Swiss in Austria has been discovered using tools in multiple ways – something only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

Lovely new paper by @sarah-paris.bsky.social & Charles Higham "Ochre use in burial practices in Thailand, from Neolithic to the Iron Age" 😍!!

@cam-archaeology.bsky.social

"Normalcy bias is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings. Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalc...

🚨 Palaeo jobs alert!! 🚨

Two(!!) postdoc positions available in Cambridge!

1. Human Evolutionary Anatomy: cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...
2. Evolutionary Biomechanics: cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

As part of the @erc.europa.eu funded STEPS project!

Thank you, Lucy 😊

❤️

Thank you so much to @liverpoolevoanth.bsky.social for the chance to come and give a talk to the Evo Anth seminar series this afternoon! It was great fun to try and pull several threads of research together 😊

Wonderful talk by @jclark997.bsky.social for the great UoL Evo Anth Seminar Series - fabulous to see the synthesis of so much fantastic work and so many dxciting ideas and models 🤩

We hope you are enjoying the series so far! Please join us again next Thursday, 27th November 2025 at 13:00 GMT for a talk by Dr James Clark, University of Cambridge. More details 👇

If you would like to attend, please register here: liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Very grateful to everyone who joined our symposium and workshop last week, inspiring discussions and wonderful company all around!

A huge congratulations, John!

Today was the ceremony for new fellows at the #BritishAcademy - it was wonderful 🤩. I am thrilled and so grateful to the colleagues who nominated me, elected me, and the many colleagues, students, friends, our kids & family, & specially Rob 😍 who have so enriched my life and career ❤️

We are hiring a Project Co-ordinator! 🚨

Are you extremely organised with great interpersonal skills?
Able to multitask efficiently?
Interested in African prehistory?
Keen to work with an enthusiastic team?
We want to hear from you!

Closing date: 17 October, 2025