iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

I am so proud of my PhD student Kate Fish who just succesfully defended her dissertation today. Congratulations Dr. Fish! @kfish28.bsky.social

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

I am really excited to share news of this new jaw...until now Paranthropus had been conspicuously absent from the Afar. Fieldwork at Mille-Logya is not easy, and this fossil is the result of years of very hard work (and a lot of days of dry screening by our team)! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus - Nature

With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in east...

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

this never stops feeling real this time of year

The title of the image is "College Faculty". Two side-by-side images of Tom Hanks appear. On the left Hanks appears as Mr. Rogers, with the label "Fall Semester Week 1". On the right Hanks appears bedraggled as in the movie Castaway, with the label "Week 16."

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

I am finally willing to admit I was wrong and revise my position. Growth is hard, but….I am just going to come out and say it. Swedish Fish are actually pretty OK.

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

House continuing res will force DC Gov. (funded by taxes on DC residents, not fed. funds) to revert to FY24 spending levels, though we are halfway through FY25. This means DC will be forced to cut $350+ million from our public/charter school budget, leaving more than 95,000 kids high and dry.

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Niles Eldredge @nilese.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

I am deeply saddened to have learned of the death, on Feb 5, 2025, of Elisabeth Vrba—a fantastically creative scientist and a warm, wonderful human being. She leaves us a legacy of original macroevolutionary thinking that is still fresh and illuminating.

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

pretty fun to see my recent paper (Barr and Wood, 2024) listed in this list of 100 significant paleoanthropology papers compiled in honor of the 100th year anniversary of the naming of Australopithecus.

nature.com

100 years of Australopithecus

On 7 February 1925, Nature published a curious paper on a ‘missing link’ – the fossil of a form intermediate between apes and humans.

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Rob Denton @rddenton.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Best grant writing advice I ever received: "Write your proposal as if someone from a completely different field will search through it looking for 100 banned words"

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

Feeling inspired after an awesome lab meeting this morning with a great group of undergrads, Masters and PhD students in my lab. Just in case you needed a reminder that amazing things are happening in Washington DC, in addition to all the other things.

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

I am very proud of my PhD student Nick Rosas for successfully defending his dissertation proposal! Lots of cool research on Middle Miocene bovids biogeography and ecology coming soon!

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Once again, the seasons change, and this old meme feels 100% accurate.

Left panel - picture of Tom Hanks as clean-shaven Mr. Rogers, illustrating college faculty in Week 1 of the semester. Right panel - picture of Tom Hanks from Castaway, bearded and screaming, illustrating college faculty in Week 16 of the semester.

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Maija Karala @maijakarala.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

The rhinos we have and the ones we lost. In the late Pleistocene, about two thirds of the worlds terrestrial megafauna went extinct. Rhinos fared better than average, but still, all the temperate and cold climate species are gone. Those that remain are endangered and in dire need of protection.

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Andy I.R. Herries at La Trobe Archaeoogy @ozarchaeomaglab.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Paper led by my now-graduated PhD student Jesse Martin where we argue that the SK 54 cranium from Swartkrans in South Africa is Homo, not Paranthropus. www.scielo.org.za/pdf/sajs/v12...

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Human evolution is not out of the woods yet! Congrats to Enqu on this landmark paper! In it, we present a new model for predicting woody cover based on an Africa-specific soil dataset. Results show hominin sites were ~13% more wooded than previously predicted! authors.elsevier.com/a/1k5a6_14mM...

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 22/08/2024

In my paper, coauthor Bernard Wood and I explore the potential impacts of a spatially limited fossil record on understanding human evolution. We do this using two "thought experiments", focusing on the Eastern African Rift Valley. (1/4)

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 11/12/2023

postdoc on hominin postcranial morphology to work on the Woranso-Mille hominins with Yohannes Haile-Selassie et al! apply.interfolio.com/137850

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

As true this year as every year.

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 05/12/2023

what kind of person are you? A) there is no more toothpaste B) there's DEFINITELY at least one more squeeze in there!

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 06/11/2023

So proud of Kate Fish for successfully defending her dissertation proposal today. We are looking forward to exciting research on modeling biases in the fossil record!!

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 25/10/2023

any other biological anthropologists getting calls from the hospitality union in Los Angeles calling for a general boycott of the city and telling us not to go there for #AABA24?

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 12/10/2023

I was just making a map in QGIS and accidentally zoomed out on my digital elevation model base layer, and accidentally 'discovered' that Antartica has the highest average elevation of any continent! Genuinely very surprised.....no idea.

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 09/10/2023

hey geometric morphometrics folks who use the R package geomorph. When I do a gm.prcomp, does the function automatically project the points into tangent space before doing the PCA? I assume so, but I wasn't able to 100% convince myself that it does while reading the help file. Thanks!

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 23/09/2023

Such an amazing lecture hall here in Aarhus for #ESHE2023. Feels like a church dedicated to human evolution.

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 21/09/2023

interesting and detailed 3D morphometric study of two hominin mandibles from Baringo from Clement Zanoli at ESHE 2023. The results show they are more likely Australopitheucs, Paranthropus and Homo aff. habilis, rather than Homo aff. ergaster as previously argued.

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 21/09/2023

congrats to Stine Keibel Blom on an excellent first conference presentation: "Signatures of incomplete lineage sorting in the phenotypes of great apes at the ESHE 2023 conference in Aarhus, Denmark!

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

Statement from the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists regarding the transport of two hominin fossils aboard the recent 3rd Virgin Galactic commercial space flight.

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 16/09/2023

Statement from the Eastern African Association for Palaeoanthropology and Palaeontology on the launch of hominin fossils into sub-orbit

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 12/09/2023

does anyone have a recommendation for an accessible introduction to geometric morphometrics (e.g. shape, size, landmark types, procrustes). Looking for something not very mathematical, with lots of figures, for undergrads. Thanks!

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Flint Dibble @flintdibble.bsky.social · 12/09/2023

Reviewer #2: This paper adequately presents its data and conclusions, but its impact could be increased by launching some of the artifacts into space for the hell of it

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liz murdock @nerdbird.bsky.social · 12/09/2023

Erin already got ya, but here it is in meme form:

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W. Andrew Barr @wabarr.bsky.social · 11/09/2023

Hi there! I am giving blue sky a try! I study the environmental context of human evolution. I'm a Assistant Professor at the George Washington University in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.

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