Claudio Tennie
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ctennie.bsky.social
Claudio Tennie
@ctennie.bsky.social
3.9K followers 1.3K following 210 posts
Group Leader, Uni Tübingen | Humans, hominins, and apes | Evolution of human cultural evolution

-> When and how did we get from ape-like cultures to deep, broad & open-ended cultural evolution?

https://sites.google.com/view/claudiotennie
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ctennie.bsky.social
Claudio Tennie @ctennie.bsky.social · Dec 13
Bsky is growing - follower lists do, too.

Let me introduce myself.

I study archaeology, biology & psychology. The common theme: evolution of cultural evolution (especially of: tools).

Two recent interviews give an overview:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8UK...

&

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB31...
#700 Claudio Tennie: Tool Behaviors in Great Apes, Cultural Transmission, and Cumulative Culture
YouTube video by The Dissenter
www.youtube.com
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
opensciencenl.bsky.social
Open Science NL is funding 27 replication studies with €5.2M. Projects will reanalyse data, repeat experiments, and explore variations across many fields. Read more 👉 www.openscience.nl/en/news/27-s...
27 studies re-examined | Open Science NL
Open Science NL has awarded funding to 27 applicants to replicate earlier studies. They will reanalyse original data, repeat experiments, and replicate studies with slight variations to the original design. A total amount of 5.2 million euros was granted.
www.openscience.nl
December 17, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
martinhebart.bsky.social
Ok, this is nuts. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Do you see it?
(OP @drgbuckingham.bsky.social )
December 16, 2025 at 7:39 PM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
antoinevernet.com
The anti trip breaker is an INUS condition of your house burning down
papawoof.bsky.social Papa Woof und Krampus und Bleaken @papawoof.bsky.social · 24d
Introducing the Anti Trip breaker......rid yourself of that pesky breaker that's constantly tripping with Anti Trip. Not sold in stores everywhere
December 13, 2025 at 7:08 PM
ctennie.bsky.social
Machine learning in archaeology (open access) doi.org/10.5334/jcaa...
Machine Learning Applications in Archaeological Practices: A Review | Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology
doi.org
December 13, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
ruben.the100.ci
Want to make nice graphs with me, starting next year? I'm hiring for a position at the University of Witten/Herdecke.
uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/61280592...
‘A fragmented field: Construct and measure proliferation in psychology.’ (2025) From ‘Language models accurately infer correlations between psychological items and scales from text alone.’ (2025) From ‘Not within spitting distance: salivary immunoassays of estradiol have subpar validity for predicting cycle phase.’ (2023) Work in progress with cycle tracking data from the app Clue
December 3, 2025 at 12:48 PM
ctennie.bsky.social
14 2y postdoc positions to rescue you from the US:

Early Career Rescue Fellowship Programme 2026

uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...
FRIAS, CoF and ZuKo: Early Career Rescue Fellowship Programme 2026
uni-tuebingen.de
December 8, 2025 at 4:06 PM
ctennie.bsky.social
This is part of a thread on a paper in a predatory journal. But this absolutely happens in non-predatory journals, too. I have noticed *several* examples already.
cfiesler.bsky.social Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · Dec 5
Here's the reality this example illustrates:

It's not even just about people blindly trusting what ChatGPT tells them. LLMs are poisoning the entire information ecosystem. You can't even necessarily trust that the citations in a published paper are real (or a search engine's descriptions of them).
December 7, 2025 at 9:02 AM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
evoneuro.bsky.social
One of the undergrads in my lab cited a paper in their Honours thesis that doesn't exist. I am guessing they are trying to use AI to "help" with their lit review and didn't bother trying to download the actual paper.

Thanks tech-bros for making academia worse.

#academicsky
December 3, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
kevinlala.bsky.social
I am pleased to announce that from Jan 1 2026 I take over as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biological Theory. My first act, with the support of the editorial team, is to bring the journal to BlueSky from X.

Please follow us @biologicaltheory.bsky.social. We will be posting about all our articles.
December 3, 2025 at 11:01 AM
ctennie.bsky.social
Currently spreading in Tübingen...
allbugsgotokevin.bsky.social Kevin Wiener @allbugsgotokevin.bsky.social · Nov 30
Chilean Recluse (Loxosceles laeta)
November 30, 2025 at 1:18 PM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
mh-christiansen.bsky.social
📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity
🧵 1/8

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Social Tinkering: The Social Foundations of Cultural Complexity | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Social Tinkering: The Social Foundations of Cultural Complexity
www.cambridge.org
November 28, 2025 at 3:36 PM
ctennie.bsky.social
Just saw this in my inbox. It seems to make a claim for biologically predisposed (due to natural selection) anatomy for nutcracking using hammers with power grips in west African chimpanzees.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Morphological variation in the manual distal phalanges of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in relation to tool-use behavior
www.sciencedirect.com
November 28, 2025 at 5:12 AM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
gidmk.bsky.social
There were 18/167 Influenza A infections in the intervention and 31/167 in the control. There were 39/167 influenza B infections in intervention and 28/167 in the control.

Overall lab-confirmed influenza was 57/167 vs 59/167. About as null an effect as you can imagine.
November 26, 2025 at 9:15 PM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
comparativeminds.bsky.social
We’re looking for a motivated & curious researcher to join our team as a PhD candidate! You’ll work with Prof. Bridget Waller, Dr. Annika Bremhorst, & me at the Dog Cognition Centre, UoP.
Are you fascinated by the dog–human bond & dog-human communication? 🐶
Interested? Get in touch with me.
Shaped by domestication: Did the evolution of facial muscle anatomy and ear morphology in dogs reflect adaptations to humans’ unconscious preferences?
eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com
October 21, 2025 at 6:16 PM
ctennie.bsky.social
I had not seen this before. Very interesting, by Jane Goodall - taken from the transcipt of this interview: freakonomics.com/podcast/jane...
"LEVITT: I think it’s fair to say that the most impactful single insight from your early work is that the chimps in the wild use tools. They make tools. They take objects and intentionally alter those objects to make them better at accomplishing a task. Like stripping away at blades of grass until they’re just right for dipping into the anthills. And before you observed that, there was a thought that humans were the only species that made these tools. To you personally, is that the most notable insight? GOODALL: When I started in 1960, nobody had studied chimps in the wild. No scientist, that is. If, at that time you had gone into some of the indigenous people living deep in the rainforest, they would’ve told you chimpanzees used to make tools. They knew it. But, of course, now we are back on the scientific bandwagon. So when I saw David Greybeard using and making tools, I knew it was really exciting. It was what enabled Leakey to go to the Geographic to get funding when my six months of money ran out. But there’s a wonderful book written by a psychologist, called The Mentality of Apes, Wolfgang Köhler, and he studied this colony of captive apes, and he described so many innovative use of objects. But at that time, the scientific community said, “Oh, well, these were chimpanzees in captivity. Therefore, our human characteristics had rubbed off onto them. It’s nothing to do with what they, as wild individuals, would be capable of.” So when I observed that momentous day of David using and making tools, I knew that it was going to make a big impression on the science of the time. But I wasn’t surprised because I, unlike the other scientists, had believed that what Köhler was reporting was the ability of chimpanzees to use and make tools."
November 25, 2025 at 6:27 AM
ctennie.bsky.social
Orangutan youngsters reach the broad diet they need to survive only if they culturally learn what to eat & where to find it

-> This is the first clear evidence for cultural dependency of any kind in apes <-

More info, and link to the paper in this thread by Elliot [the master-modeller behind this]
November 24, 2025 at 11:32 AM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
pnas.org
After the Ngogo chimpanzee group killed 21 members of neighboring groups and expanded their territory by 22%, female birth rates more than doubled and infant survival increased sharply—showing clear fitness benefits from intergroup killing. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/TKmf50XuPjY
Jolie, an adult female chimpanzee of the Ngogo community in Kibale National Park, Uganda, with sleeping infant son, Zawinul. CREDIT: Kevin Langergraber
November 22, 2025 at 12:00 AM
ctennie.bsky.social
A very interesting twist to a thing that just went up and down bsky. Looks like the AI part here was more like thin icing on a human artist's cake:
tecumsehfitch.bsky.social Tecumseh Fitch @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social · Nov 21
I am very proud of the artwork on the cover of our recent Phil Trans issue on consciousness. It is based on watercolor paintings and ink drawings on paper I did myself, based on published diagrams by recognized experts on comparative brain anatomy (detailed in the caption which it seems no one read)
hand drawn animal images by tecumseh fitch
November 21, 2025 at 10:30 PM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
booksofm.com
If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features."

There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.
November 20, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
tobiasdienlin.com
Glad to see that in the criteria for tenure our department now explicitly includes #openscience. There’s hope!

@ikmz.bsky.social @esserfrank.bsky.social
November 17, 2025 at 4:40 PM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
statsepi.bsky.social
We did a thing. 😬
cellpress.bsky.social Cell Press @cellpress.bsky.social · Nov 13
The link between the gut #microbiome and autism is not backed by science, researchers say.

Read the full opinion piece in @cp-neuron.bsky.social: spkl.io/63322AbxpA

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @statsepi.bsky.social, & @deevybee.bsky.social
First page of Opinion piece: "Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism"
November 13, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
cursortue.bsky.social
TU/e has gained a new research centre: META/e. Daniël Lakens and Krist Vaesen were among the founders of this knowledge hub for metascience—research aimed at improving the practice of science itself. “We want to be a home for every researcher who occasionally wonders: what are we even doing?”
Knowledge centre META/e: home for those improving science
TU/e has gained a new research centre: META/e. Daniël Lakens and Krist Vaesen were among the founders of this knowledge hub for metascience—research aimed at improving the practice of science itself. ...
www.cursor.tue.nl
November 13, 2025 at 2:50 PM
ctennie.bsky.social
Strong response to recent critiques of the sequence-struggle hypothesis. Chapeau!
johanlind.bsky.social Johan Lind @johanlind.bsky.social · Nov 13
For this reason, we wrote this comment, published yesterday. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
We reason that 1) their data supports rather than rejects the sequence hypothesis, as monkeys and chimps did not perform with any precision in these sequential tasks. 7/n
November 13, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Claudio Tennie
brittanytrang.com
A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.
www.statnews.com
November 8, 2025 at 1:39 PM
ctennie.bsky.social
Teaching this on Monday
gregpriest.bsky.social Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · Nov 8
Conrad Hal Waddington was born OTD in 1905.

His “epigenetic landscape” is a diagrammatic representation of the constraints influencing embryonic development.

On his 50th birthday, his colleagues gave him a pinball machine on the model of the epigenetic landscape.

🧪 🦫🦋 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci #evobio
November 8, 2025 at 4:28 PM