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  X is full of the best Patrick Stewart as Lenin's advice this morning! Listen carefully. Here 👇 https://x.com/PhilipProudfoot/status/2115903934980403460?a=oOsUoicZMPfimBDa1jw&s=20 And here point 👇 https://x.com/MattHunterMCR/status/2115899195119059228?a=ng4Z4E_JblX9ZdHMQjo&s=20 The famous 'Fall of Eagles' series, a historic education of the class and imperialist causes of WWI in its own right

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  We're running an interdisciplinary workshop @UCL on the emergence of language: What made us "hunter-gatherers of words"? 🌑 Tues Nov 10 🌒 10:30-6pm A fantastic lineup of speakers -- details here, Contact me on c.power@ucl.ac.uk if you would like to attend. Very welcome

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  Well let's hope this racist act generates greater publicity for the missing history. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/oct/17/plaque-honouring-african-caribbean-prisoners-in-britain-stolen-portchester-castle

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  Study of faunal evidence as predictors of #Neanderthal occupation sites, long stay or brief stops? 'Anthropogenic modifications and the number of exploited taxa show the strongest correlation with occupation duration' #archaeology https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-026-09829-6

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  'Scientists have mapped in unprecedented detail the proteins that make up the mitochondria in six organisms — five single-celled parasites and one plant — spanning the eukaryotic tree of life.' #evolution #biology https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03195-9

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  13,800 year old dwelling -- and dogs -- in the Americas: 'At a site called Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ (which means "They Were There" in the Alaska Native Athabascan language), about 34 miles (55 kilometers) southeast of Fairbanks, archaeologists have excavated an encampment that some of the first people to settle in North America used off and on for a millennium.' https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/americas/archaeologists-discover-the-oldest-dwelling-in-the-western...

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  Very interesting #sociobiology conference on #cooperation here (it's usually sorting out problems caused by males -- but males can help with that!) https://current.fas.harvard.edu/stories/exploring-why-different-groups-people-zebras-and-even-ants-make-nice

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  Interesting evolutionary perspective on human mental illness. To what extent is this unique? https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/human-uniqueness-and-vulnerability-to-mental-disorder/A66A8AFF1513162A4076795B4388508D?

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  Elixir of life in Sardinia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/18/bolotana-sardinian-village-women-centenarians-longevity-long-life

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  Tuesday Oct 20 18:30 🌔 @UCL #anthropology All welcome LIVE and ZOOM Valya Marinova '21st century sex strikes, social reproduction struggles and liberal feminism' This talk explores struggles of social reproduction under patriarchy and western feminist responses to women's strategic sex strikes. Valya Marinova (SOAS) starts from a broad survey of existing literature on historic and recently reported sex strikes, with analysis of sex strike coverage by contemporary med...

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  Tomorrow morning, Defend our Juries will hold action outside Westminster Magistrates Court, joined by hundreds of people who have been called to a hearing ...or not? Despite cancelling hearings, never consulting or notifying us, still the Court lists 2200 people (self included, I think) on the cases for tomorrow. What a mess! We demand a hearing because we oppose genocide and support the heroes of Palestine Action! https://bylinetimes.com/2026/07/28/andy-burnham-faces-first-test-over-palestine-...

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  Lovely review in Counterpunch of Chris and Jerome's'The Revolutionary Origins of Language' by Julie Wark. https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/27/whats-revolutionary-about-the-origins-of-language/

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  This is the first #InternationalRabbitDay without Jack for 13 years! 🌈 Here he was last year #RadicalAnthropologyRabbits #RabbitsofMastodon

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  A triangle of big birds! #HollandPark #LastPeacock

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  Join us for free Fediscience LIVE and ZOOM 🌖 Next Tues evening Sept 29 🌗 18:30 London time @UCL Anthropology Chris Knight's classic structuralist decoding of fairytales 'The science of mythology: the "Sleeping Beauty" and other tales' The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was the first to discover that the world's magical myths and fairy tales all express the same underlying logic. Across all six continents, they are ultimately a single anonymous voice, &#3...

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  How a humpback whale mother responds to her stillborn calf https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/17/do-whales-grieve-scientists-research-off-australias-gold-coast-suggests-they-might

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  The amazing Mizyn female abstract figures of 18,000 years ago are found to mesh with mammoth 🦣 tusk patterns. And we know from #Bushman cosmology how intertwined in story and rock art women, girls and elephants can be #elephantidae #Europe #UpperPalaeolithic https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjvgy5ew3xkdo

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  Complex history of hybridization with #Denisovans '3 to 5 percent of their DNA came from an unidentified hominin lineage that diverged from ours roughly 1.8 million years ago' https://scienceblog.com/t-denisovans-superarchaic-dna-two-interbreeding-episodes/

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  What's the impact of speaking >300 fewer words each day, with people under 25 showing a steeper decline? 'the study couldn’t pinpoint why the spoken word was in decline, but noted that its timeframe – 2005 to 2019 – coincided with the rise of texting, email and social media, so some lost conversations may now take place digitally.' https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/losing-spoken-words

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  Arnhem Land paintings of giant ancestral beings 'to exert control over their land, traditions and community in the face of rapid change as early European colonization upended the world they knew'. #Indigenous #rockart https://phys.org/news/2026-08-aboriginal-artists-giant-ancestral-colonization.html

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  Communication with whales? https://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2026/sep/01/could-humans-ever-communicate-with-whales-video

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  Modelling of impact of intensive farming at Çatalhöyük from 9100-8100 years ago. Land stress resulted in fragmentation and movement 85-8400. #Neolithic https://archaeologymag.com/2026/08/farming-trapped-catalhoyuk-in-land-stress/

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  This is a decent outline on the critique of Dunbar's oft-cited 'number' -- when actually it would be a pretty broad range on the cognitive ceiling of number of relationships we can meaningfully manage. That's IRL and never mind parasocial social media! This doesn't undermine the 'social brain' neocortex ratio increase relating to group size (but even that is quite tightly refined by Lindenfors et al). https://siliconcanals.com/n-the-famous-limit-of-150-friends-a-hu...

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  This looks like an interesting paper on testing models of human directional evolution in terms of Tinbergen. They are looking at several models but have left aside key female strategic ones, including cooperative childcare (Hrdy) and Female Cosmetic Coalitions (us lot). But we can try to apply it ourselves. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/evan.70046

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  #Neanderthal bone tools in plain sight -- it used to be believed that only H sapiens produced bone implements. #MiddlePalaeolithic https://www.zmescience.com/science/anthropology/neanderthal-bone-tools-romania/

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  Some Communist University events this week with Chris and myself https://www.facebook.com/weeklyworker/photos/communist-university-2026central-londonzoomfriday-august-1410am-12noon-the-revol/1629717902405016/?set=communist-university-2026central-londonzoomfriday-august-1410am-12noon-the-revol

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  Well considering all the precious fossils dragged back as loot by our colonizing ancestors, how terrible is it that the Abu Dhabi NHM snapped up an extensive Lyme Regis collection? https://www.theguardian.com/science/ng-interactive/2026/aug/09/one-of-uks-best-fossil-collections-sold-overseas-in-loss-to-the-nation

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  #Invertebrate of the year series starting with the wood louse (Gwrach y Coed, “witch of the wood”, in Welsh). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/03/common-woodlouse-invertebrate-of-the-year

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  Truly weird shit going on in Battersea last night, for 5 or more minutes after 10 pm the whole landscape was being lit by orangey flashes right across the park to the US embassy and south to Clapham. Huge explosive noise almost rat at at! rhythm like machine gun, but sounding more like short circuiting than shots? Electrical discharges? It wasn't fireworks, or thunder. Wtf was it?

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  Fantastic action today! https://defendourjuries.net/press-releases/mass-arrests-underway-as-hundreds-escalate-support-for-palestine-action/