Bones_of_amber

Hello!
I run a live archaeology channel to discuss current news and research.

[Bones_of_amber @amber_bones]

@museoevolucion @ONCE_oficial @Fundacion_ONCE @ui1Universidad What were your findings? Sounds a bit dangerous. Flint knapping can already lead to cuts and abrasions.

[PaleoAnthropology @Qafzeh]

Australopithecus africanus family in forest 2.8 million years ago (RAUL MARTIN/MSF) Taung child's final moments

[Bones_of_amber @amber_bones]

@MatthewJDalby Is it working? Are you slowly wanting it?

[Chris Stringer @ChrisStringer65]

Neanderthal brain and cognition reconsidered | PNAS https://t.co/mabsQq4JPX

[Bones_of_amber @amber_bones]

@MatthewJDalby Mushrooms are really cool, but I wouldn't trust myself not to mistake one for another and end up sick or dead....or high.

[John Hawks @johnhawks]

Lots of interest in recent natural selection over the last week, with the new work from Ali Akbari and coworkers supporting the idea of pervasive selection on ancient genomes. A great step forward based on a foundation of work over more than 20 years.

https://t.co/Aaj229JhMi

[John Hawks @johnhawks]

I'm really pleased that my first coauthored article of 2026 is out. With some amazing folks we think through consequences of taking seriously behavioral ecology and emotional cognitive science in archaeology.

https://t.co/tdgsYNkswE

[Bones_of_amber @amber_bones]

@ChrisStringer65 They look like the carvings of Polynesian deities.

[Chris Stringer @ChrisStringer65]

From Bimalka Vindula, Facebook, sharks photographed upside down…

[Friendless Churches @friendschurches]

If you know someone who loves history and heritage, then please follow the link below to purchase a gift membership for the Friends of Friendless Churches.

https://t.co/YzwPnsjEhM

[EMBL @embl]

Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will deliver the 2026 EMBL Kafatos lecture.

The lecture will explore how traces of Neanderthal DNA might shape human biology and health today.

https://t.co/zDM5QuvQSl

[BonesLab @BonesLabUnibo]

PhD opportunity at BONESLAB in the ERC project Last Neanderthals! 🦴✨ Check the details and join us!
#PhD #Archaeology #ERC
https://t.co/4WHlyParDQ

[John Hawks @johnhawks]

Bringing the Harbin skull into the Denisovan fold has activated some interesting morphological comparisions. But most are forgetting a big bias: None of the tooth, jaw, or skull fossils tied so far to the Denisovans with biomolecular data are female.

https://t.co/LOe0S3jYyH

[Bones_of_amber @amber_bones]

@LeeRberger @Qafzeh One molar looks more worn than the other teeth

[Bones_of_amber @amber_bones]

@ThyRamMan @johnhawks @hbdchick I've never seen this graph before. Who designed it! 😂

[Bones_of_amber @amber_bones]

@johnhawks I read an interesting article recently (sorry authors I can't remember the names) but it discussed the high N values in neanderthal stable isotopes and put for the idea they weren't relying on meat, but bugs (particularly maggots) instead. Found it interesting.

[John Hawks @johnhawks]

The old saying is “Manners maketh man”. But many anthropologists of the last century approached the past with the idea that it was meat, not manners, that mattered to our ancestors.

For much of the past fifty years, the broad consensus has been that meat-eating became more important to human ancestors after two million years ago. The idea has been that hunting and eating meat is connected with evolution of larger brain size—in other words, meat made us human. Most would say it was early Homo erectus, which first appeared in the fossil record just around two million years ago, that was the first species to really rely on meat.

But that consensus has been challenged recently. A big turning point was a 2022 meta-analysis that took a hard look at the evidence for hunting and meat-eating in East African sites across the period from 2.6 million up to 1.2 million years ago. The study, led by Andrew Barr with four coauthors, focused on cutmarks, percussion marks, and other direct evidence of butchery on bones. They found that there was no trend or change across the whole period. Barr and collaborators explicitly wrote that the “meat made us human” hypothesis does not fit their data.

Not all archaeologists will agree that Barr and coworkers proved their case. But this kind of meta-analysis of evidence across sites is going to be more and more central to work in human origins over the next few years. I decided to take a look at the way the traditional story developed, and how the new approach may show that the importance of meat for our ancestors and relatives is much broader than we thought.

[Bones_of_amber @amber_bones]

@AntiquityJ Play it!!!

[Lee R Berger @LeeRberger]

Just a beautiful, transparent, rotating image of the Holotype skull of Australopithecus sediba from the original announcement in 2010. #Exploration #hominid #sediba #southafrica

[Bones_of_amber @amber_bones]

@ProfFeynman I'll build stairs, then I can travel to both places in never ending insanity. Lol!