Radical Anthropology

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

A Google drive link if you can't get in easily https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TNc01DaAHxLlclK-YzSzZVk8BSeA3ZpkGGvHTcsJGt4/edit?usp=sharing

A triangle of big birds! #HollandPark #LastPeacock

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/

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

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. 🌈

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, 'One Myth Only', or so many variations on a theme. Rather as astronomers can still detect an echo of the Big Bang with which the universe began, so by listening to these myths we can detect an echo of the momentous events in which human language and culture were born. When Levi-Strauss' insights are applied to a familiar fairy story from the Brothers Grimm, the picture which emerges is breathtaking. LIVE in Daryll Forde, Room 230 2nd Floor, UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, WC1H 0BW and ZOOM ID 948 6108 7055 passcode Wawilak

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

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

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

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

An amazing migrant descending from the earliest winged insects. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/08/fearless-and-quietly-astonishing-the-dragonfly-that-migrates-further-than-any-other-insect

The super rare Lord Howe stick insect "Climate change is rampant, fascism on the rise, corporate greed uncontrolled, but despite it all, those 24 stick insects on a rock show us that it is never over until we give up.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/07/lord-howe-island-giant-stick-insect-tree-lobster-invertebrate-of-year-2026

@DoomsdaysCW@kolektiva.social the enormous Orinoco snake painting in Colombia-Venezuela could have similar aspect of demonstrating claim to country. A whole lot better than fighting fucking wars! Just summon the monsters in your rivers and waterholes. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/colombia-venezuela-rock-art-giant-snakes-b2556860.html

The flamboyant algae- and solar-powered sea-slug https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/05/leaf-sheep-sea-slug-invertebrates-of-year-2026

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

ODYSSEUS, LOUT Odysseus, lout, sucking up to Goddesses, lording it over women. Male chauvinist incorrigible, Vain, vengeful, humourless, dull Spinner of complex lies for their own sake, Ill at ease with the day's truth. Merciless sacker of cities beyond necessity, Generous with your companions' lives. Raconteur. Survivor. Deliberately Homer Re-strings his lyre to Woman's waning Moon. Loosens those gold hexameters To praise, half-praise the mercenary Soldier's sly return to Ithaca. Penelope at mysterious forty Among her chattering maids in that sea-open, Sun-filled, salt-sweet chamber In her high tide of beauty spins, unspins. Toes neatly spliced in sandals of soft gold On marble, silk, fleeces of new-born lambs She lunches with the girls on pomegranate-seeds, On milky kid, and amber wine. Sometimes alone, Sometimes with men. Thug, Odysseus! Having slaughtered without compunction Despite their frank and winning, well-phrased pleas All the young Suitors your competitors (Boy-bard excepted, spared to sing your praises) Unconcernedly you arranged to strangle Those twelve of your wife's maidservants Who'd had affairs (so said the old nurse spitefully) With twelve young men you'd just shot arrows through Using that monstrous bow no man but you (Hero Odysseus) could bend to string. Odysseus, you forced those women Moaning with fear, to wash down with sea-sponges All that blood from the terrace, clean the tables, Then collect and put tidy the warm bodies of the killed. This done, you got Telemachus, your subservient son, To hang the girls up on their own washing-line Drawn taut, like "a row of skylarks caught in a net." The girls' feet, you noticed, for some moments danced Odysseus, you should have died at Troy In flight from Hector. Or in your mocking Horse. Stayed with those pigs on Circe's isle, Aeaea, Or in the wounded Cyclop's cave with rams. And left Penelope to love again in Ithaca, And every woman choose in the sun her man. [Piboulède, Summer 1987]

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

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

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 #UpperPalaeolithichttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjvgy5ew3xkdo

@DoomsdaysCW@kolektiva.social serious envy here!

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?

A very noisy invertebrate https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/06/greengrocer-cicada-decibels-human-pain-threshold

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

Meanwhile, on the invertebrate front, let's hear it for cockroaches https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/05/cockroach-lord-cristian-lucanas-new-species-tolkien-pokemon-aoe

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

Decolonizing #palaeoanthropology '“Indonesia is now taking the lead in palaeoanthropology research.” In the past.. Dutch scientists would have come to Indonesia with a grant from the Netherlands and a brief instructing them to hire local people to help dig up a site, make discoveries, write papers and leave — a phenomenon called parachute research.' https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01357-3

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

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.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1687157X26001228

'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

@DoomsdaysCW@kolektiva.social lucky you!

And some good news on the ban going to be heard at the Supreme Court https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c87n321w9qlo

More celebrated invertebrates here 🐛 🪲 🐞 🐌 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/aug/03/revealed-top-10-invertebrates-of-the-year

@rooftopjaxx@kolektiva.social so what're we going to do about it?

@rooftopjaxx@kolektiva.social we think some things are sacred and some lines should never be crossed. This is one for sure. There are some tactics as old as the moon is to humanity.

Here a look at the controversy on the Elephantidae hunting hypothesis of Barkai/Ben Dor. They take it back a very long time, too far? https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2026-08-27/ty-article/brouhaha-in-academia-did-we-really-hunt-mammoths/000001a0-428d-d840-abbe-7afd6ec80000

This is one of the finest papers giving the 'social brain' a hard time with focus on 'embodied social brain', movement and actions which support sociality. Louise Barrett, who worked a lot with Dunbar, knows whereof she speaks! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8710874/

@danielmipne@mastodon.social of course, if we call that communicating. Sure the cetaceans are reading the cues and being bludgeoned. This has a slightly different intent, to listen more and try to get it.

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

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

@alex_p_roe@mastodon.world melting glaciers, wildfire, floods, food scarcity, water shortage...bit of an apocalypse. More than a four-horse race

Paper here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44338-026-00232-9