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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/

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  Review article on aDNA: 'synthesizes significant findings from the paleogenomic era (2010–2025), demonstrating how ancient DNA has resolved persistent debates across four interconnected themes: (i) human migration and admixture, ...; (ii) adaptation, tracking allele frequency changes during domestication and selection; (iii) pathogen history, clarifying the origins of pandemics and the evolution of microbiomes; and (iv) ecosystem dynamics, identifying extinction causes ...' https://www....

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  Odysseus Lout, by Dennis Knight. He was a noted war poet of his experiences in the WW2 antifascist tank Frontline. This is his take on the real Homer text.

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  'The Asháninka people, who have faced threats from intruders for decades because of their efforts to protect the forest and eject narco smugglers, say this is the worst danger they have faced, prompting an emergency delegation to Brasília this week to appeal for support from the government of the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.' https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/24/gangs-taking-villages-on-brazil-peru-border-hostage-say-indigenous-leaders

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  7,000-year-old fish traps in southern Norway indicate hunter-fisher-gatherers were moving brown trout into mountain lakes by 5000 B.C., long before farming reached the region. #mesolithic https://phys.org/news/2026-07-centuries-farming-hunter-fish-norwegian.html?

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  RE: https://todon.eu/@regendans/116946165259516557 Beyond belief! Reading a poem criminalized...

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  A #bunnybuttFriday special with Jack admiring a cushion cover with fluffy tail, which my long lost niece knitted for me back in 2020.

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  Oops...another female shaman: Bronze Age Wiltshire where she may have been metalworking. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/14/ancient-dna-analysis-reveals-upton-lovell-shaman-was-woman-wiltshire

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  Thanks to everybody fur your lovely messages for Jack! This is over 12 years ago, he was nearly two, his first spring as new husbun of Molly. He's looking so proud while she snacks on her pear blossom! #RadicalAnthropologyRabbits #rabbitsofmastodon

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  We are in mourning, devastated to have lost our beautiful rabbit Jack. He was 14 years old -- 99 in human terms -- a very brave old boy. Last of the #radicalanthropologyrabbits standing, he hopped up every now and then on #rabbitsofmastodon our favourite community on the Fediverse. 🌈

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  Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir draw attention to children's innovative role in 'peer cultures' "In this paper, we bring attention to the important role that children play in cultural adaptation by highlighting the structure, function, and ubiquity of the large body of knowledge produced and transmitted by children, known as peer cultures" https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/children-as-agents-of-cultural-adaptation/F14F6E1809BE...

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/116893541666491703 Don't fuck with the night sky!