iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 14h

Honestly perfectly happy, I love a bit of experimental archaeology!

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 14h

it's all that peanut butter and jam put out at holiday cottages ;-)

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 14h

And re: horror of Nepal glacier collapse & similar recent events, there's evidence of megafloods on an almost inconceivable scale at various points, caused by bursting of ice-dammed lakes in Altai region; flows would have gone straight through region near Denisova link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Giant Pleistocene Ice-Dammed Lakes of Gorny Altai - Doklady Earth Sciences

Abstract— Middle-Late Pleistocene giant ice-dammed paleolakes occupied in the Pleistocene Uimon (lake volume 450 km3), Kurai (229 km3), Chuya (838 km3), and Kan-Yabogan basins of Gorny Altai, southern...

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 15h

🧪 🦣 Not most important angle, but seeing absolute climate carnage now and wondering if it played out anything like this during the Eemian c. 123,000 years ago, when similar immense warming was experienced by #Neanderthals, with continental-scale upheavals recorded in their DNA dispersal evidence.

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Ville Sinkkonen @villesinkkonen.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

There are some pieces of paleoart that to my eye are so fantastic that I regularly come back to them to just stare and marvel them. Peter Trusler has made many such pictures but these 3 particular ones are just of such exquisite quality that they take my breath away every time.

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 15h

Yes it's anthropomorphising but can't help think that the mothers might benefit as much from a rest as their youngsters do from socialising...

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 16h

Currently drying sheep shit for book research - supplied this morning thanks to my kind farmer neighbour 🐑 💩 (who has a very beautiful Kerry Hill flock if you appreciate these details) #Matriarcha

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Brendan Barrett @bjjbarrett.bsky.social · 22h

Our paper on how orangutan mothers plan and alter their space use at personal costs so their offspring may play with similarly aged offspring (independent of kinship and fruit productivity) has transitioned from preprint to peer reviewed publication doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

doi.org

Maternal ranging strategies facilitate offspring social play at energetic cost in the most solitary ape | PNAS

In most vertebrates, social play among peers is considered essential for behavioral development. Yet in solitary species bearing single offspring, ...

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

it's all coming my way soon too, not sure how it will go with my quite strong short-sighted prescription!

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yes actually, but haven't been able to carve out time to read it

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Lars Marius Garshol @larsga.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

We have a new candidate for oldest beer find in Europe: Solnitsata, Bulgaria, 4500 BCE. There is no archaeological report yet, so this still needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but sounds convincing so far. provadia-solnitsata.com/en/news/naso...

provadia-solnitsata.com

Провадия-Солницата - най-старият солодобивен и градски център в Европа

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Rachel Pope @prehistorian.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I’ve found Maud Cunnington’s presidential address! Well, actually a wonderful lady in Swindon Council has. And it was worth the hunt. In 1932, Maud is talking about the movement and repurposing of Iron Age human bones.

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Celestial meetings in a smoke-wisp dawn Each #EarlyMorningWriting there is a gift ✒️📚

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It is just a question, not the answer(s) which we don't yet have!

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

🧪🏺🦣 V. happy to contribute to this great feature on unanswered questions in science for @nytimes.com I'm at no. 32, with "Did #Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens share their lives and cultures as well as their genes?" 🧬🪨🤝 www.nytimes.com/2026/10/05/s...

nytimes.com

What Are the Biggest Questions in Science Today? 100 Scientists Weigh In.

We asked 100 scientists about unsolved problems in their fields. They sent back provocations — on the origins of life, the possibilities for human progress and much more.

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

sheep/goat, as domesticated before cattle

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

specifically rennet cheese, not just souring-milk cheese :-)

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Do people still buy the milk-in-a-goat-stomach theory for the origin of cheese?

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Hah I considered that exact Q as one of my other two suggestions but chose Naledi instead (though they ended up going for the Neanderthals one)

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

We were asked for up to three questions, so here's my others (with short explainers for all three in image): - Who painted the world's oldest art? - What were the lives of Homo naledi like?

Screengrab, text:

"- Did Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens share their lives and culture as well as their genes?

We’ve known for over 15 years that we met and made babies with Neanderthals, but evidence for what that looked like socially has remained elusive: while claimed ‘hybrid’ archaeological cultures have turned out to be from sites with mixed sediments, it’s still possible we might find evidence pointing to more long-term interactions, or even cohabiting communities.

- Who painted the world’s oldest art?

The past two decades have seen the earliest representational images and hand stencils pushed backwards in time to before 67,000 years ago, and away from Europe to Indonesia, but who exactly made them isn’t a simple question: early Homo sapiens had begun dispersing beyond Africa many tens of millennia earlier, but could other hominins already in Asia, such as the Denisovans, have been responsible?

- What were the lives of Homo naledi like?

The 2013 find of a species of quite recent, small-bodied hominin was extraordinary enough, but it’s been almost overshadowed by questions over what their remains were doing in relatively deep cave chambers; discovering more Homo naledi sites will hugely advance our understanding of this, and so many other unknowns including their range in time and space, and how they lived as well as died. "

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I was disappointed for someone who self-describes as a historian that his go-to downside to Nazi rule was that we'd be speaking German. We know exactly what they'd have done here because we saw it in the Channel Islands: they starved and killed and shipped people off to the camps.

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

oh I like yours! I don't subscribe though so I only know what my own Q was 😂

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

nytimes.com

What Are the Biggest Questions in Science Today? 100 Scientists Weigh In.

We asked 100 scientists about unsolved problems in their fields. They sent back provocations — on the origins of life, the possibilities for human progress and much more.

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

And this evening, a sunset infused with honey and rose

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Fun ceramics styles thread but these especially are v Bronze Age Iberia

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alix e. harrow @alixeharrow.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

10yo asked what i did at the festival and i said oh it's a book festival, so i just talked about my books, and he said "yikes" under his breath

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Spun-sugar morning sky, punctuated by a fiercely bright moon, and misty tendrils down in the valley.

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

And I absolutely loved what you did with it 😍

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Alison Atkin @alisonatkin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Hey, remember that time I did chapter-opening illustrations for a book? It didn't go exactly like this, but: You want me to draw a dead horse floating in a pond staring lifelessly at the reader, but like, in a tasteful way? No problem mate! 😄

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Article says they apparently are using it to read all the generated logs because there's too much for people to check.

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

(These were only four of the sixteen images)

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I really wish that audiobook included images for people who can see them

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

It was such fun working together on it!

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

📚 Q for my #Kindred readers (print editions) - what was your favourite chapter-opening artwork*, and why? *drawn by the talented @alisonatkin.bsky.social, patiently interpreting my crazy visions and bad sketches... #BookSky #BookIllustration #Ilustration

Drawing in mono, cut-through style, of a small skeleton lying in layers beneath a staircase, upon which a woman in a skirt is ascending. by Alison Atkin

Drawing in mono of an imaginary lithics factory where conveyor-belts are moving discoid flakes around. By Alison Atkin.

Drawing in mono of an archaeologist excavating a hearth, around which are gathered shadowy presences of Neanderthals. Site is based on Abric Romani. By Alison Atkin.

Drawing in dark mono of the chamber inside Bruniquel, where a bear stands beside a circular arrangement of snapped stalagmites. It's dark. By Alison Atkin.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

New from @timnitgebru.blacksky.app and me: "It is high time for us to regulate usage of systems sold as “AI”, not because they are magical machines, but because they are error-prone products that shouldn’t be used in high stakes scenarios." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

theguardian.com

Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month | Timnit Gebru and Emily M Bender

The risks of AI aren’t what we think they are, as a recent security incident between China and the United States reveals

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Currently sofa-bound, felled by a cold so vicious that the headache still claws its way through a paracetamol-ibuprofen daisychain

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Roberto Sáez @robertosaezm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Cerramos el 3er trimestre con la reseña de 34 nuevos trabajos que siguen completando, y a veces cuestionando, nuestra visión de la evolución humana. La imagen es el fragmento de parietal de Ruidera, importante adición al fragmentado registro fósil hominino del Pleistoceno medio.

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