Finn Stileman
@finnstileman.bsky.social
Archaeologist & PhD candidate @ University of Cambridge
He/him
He/him
Reposted by Finn Stileman
The artwork that illustrated our PNAS paper on the oldest wooden tools was made by Gleiver Prieto, who has also worked with me on illustrations for previous projects, including the paleoenvironmental reconstruction of Marathousa 1.
Gleiver's art really brings Pleistocene Megalopolis to life ✨ 🤩
Gleiver's art really brings Pleistocene Megalopolis to life ✨ 🤩
January 27, 2026 at 5:19 PM
The artwork that illustrated our PNAS paper on the oldest wooden tools was made by Gleiver Prieto, who has also worked with me on illustrations for previous projects, including the paleoenvironmental reconstruction of Marathousa 1.
Gleiver's art really brings Pleistocene Megalopolis to life ✨ 🤩
Gleiver's art really brings Pleistocene Megalopolis to life ✨ 🤩
Reposted by Finn Stileman
It was such a privilege to get to work on this amazing material from an incredible site and team - now the earliest handheld wooden tools in the archaeological record, taking evidence back to 430,000 years! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Evidence for the earliest hominin use of wooden handheld tools found at Marathousa 1 (Greece) | PNAS
The Middle Pleistocene (MP; ca. 774 to 129 ka) marks a critical period of human evolution,
characterized by increasing behavioral complexity and th...
www.pnas.org
January 27, 2026 at 11:01 AM
It was such a privilege to get to work on this amazing material from an incredible site and team - now the earliest handheld wooden tools in the archaeological record, taking evidence back to 430,000 years! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Reposted by Finn Stileman
Early humans in central China may have been making sophisticated stone tools as early as 160,000 years ago, according to research in Nature Communications. This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period. 🏺 🧪
Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China ~160,000–72,000 years ago - Nature Communications
Stone tools illustrate behavioural complexities in Middle Pleistocene hominin populations. Here, the authors present small dimensional flakes and hafted tools from Xigou, central China, dated to ~160–72 thousand years ago that demonstrate early, complex technological advancements.
go.nature.com
January 27, 2026 at 8:34 PM
Early humans in central China may have been making sophisticated stone tools as early as 160,000 years ago, according to research in Nature Communications. This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period. 🏺 🧪
Reposted by Finn Stileman
🧪🏺 WOWWWW
New dates in SE Asia for rock paintings - major implications:
- nature of early aesthetics, innovations
- relationship to oldest known Australian settlement?
- and (IMO) impacts claims that cave art in Europe >50 Ka is necessarily work of #Neanderthals
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New dates in SE Asia for rock paintings - major implications:
- nature of early aesthetics, innovations
- relationship to oldest known Australian settlement?
- and (IMO) impacts claims that cave art in Europe >50 Ka is necessarily work of #Neanderthals
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi - Nature
A hand stencil painted on a cave wall on a small island off the coast of Sulawesi more than 67,800 years ago suggests a very early occupation of Wallacea.
www.nature.com
January 21, 2026 at 7:07 PM
🧪🏺 WOWWWW
New dates in SE Asia for rock paintings - major implications:
- nature of early aesthetics, innovations
- relationship to oldest known Australian settlement?
- and (IMO) impacts claims that cave art in Europe >50 Ka is necessarily work of #Neanderthals
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New dates in SE Asia for rock paintings - major implications:
- nature of early aesthetics, innovations
- relationship to oldest known Australian settlement?
- and (IMO) impacts claims that cave art in Europe >50 Ka is necessarily work of #Neanderthals
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
My mum just came back from a walk around a field with this, saying it’s probably not old but she wanted to show me just in case. It’s an early medieval stirrup mount! Landowner contacted and shortly off to local Finds Liaison Officer! Always worth keeping one eye on the ground!
January 22, 2026 at 4:02 PM
My mum just came back from a walk around a field with this, saying it’s probably not old but she wanted to show me just in case. It’s an early medieval stirrup mount! Landowner contacted and shortly off to local Finds Liaison Officer! Always worth keeping one eye on the ground!
Reposted by Finn Stileman
More Breaking Palaeo-news!
🐘 Boxgrove preserved oldest Elephant Bone beyond Africa.
🐘 Early Neanderthals using bone to shape beautiful tools.
🐘 New research from Simon Parfitt @uclarchaeology.bsky.social Silvia Bello of the @nhm-london.bsky.social.
🦣🏺🐘https://share.google/20WUjY5TybDAr4QoT
🐘 Boxgrove preserved oldest Elephant Bone beyond Africa.
🐘 Early Neanderthals using bone to shape beautiful tools.
🐘 New research from Simon Parfitt @uclarchaeology.bsky.social Silvia Bello of the @nhm-london.bsky.social.
🦣🏺🐘https://share.google/20WUjY5TybDAr4QoT
Prehistoric tool made from elephant bone is the oldest discovered in Europe
A remarkable prehistoric hammer made from elephant bone, dating back nearly half a million years ago, has been uncovered in southern England and analyzed by archaeologists from UCL and the Natural His...
share.google
January 22, 2026 at 10:46 AM
More Breaking Palaeo-news!
🐘 Boxgrove preserved oldest Elephant Bone beyond Africa.
🐘 Early Neanderthals using bone to shape beautiful tools.
🐘 New research from Simon Parfitt @uclarchaeology.bsky.social Silvia Bello of the @nhm-london.bsky.social.
🦣🏺🐘https://share.google/20WUjY5TybDAr4QoT
🐘 Boxgrove preserved oldest Elephant Bone beyond Africa.
🐘 Early Neanderthals using bone to shape beautiful tools.
🐘 New research from Simon Parfitt @uclarchaeology.bsky.social Silvia Bello of the @nhm-london.bsky.social.
🦣🏺🐘https://share.google/20WUjY5TybDAr4QoT
Reposted by Finn Stileman
Latest paper: Boxgrove is a key European site dating to 480,000 years ago. At GTP17, hominins knapped handaxes and then butchered an adult female horse. A fragment of the horse's scapula appeared to have evidence of impact from a wooden spear.....
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
November 8, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Latest paper: Boxgrove is a key European site dating to 480,000 years ago. At GTP17, hominins knapped handaxes and then butchered an adult female horse. A fragment of the horse's scapula appeared to have evidence of impact from a wooden spear.....
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reposted by Finn Stileman
Please join us next week, Thursday 13h November, for our next talk. We will be joined by Finn Stileman, University of Cambridge. More details 👇
Please register here: liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
We hope to see you there!
Please register here: liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
We hope to see you there!
November 4, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Please join us next week, Thursday 13h November, for our next talk. We will be joined by Finn Stileman, University of Cambridge. More details 👇
Please register here: liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
We hope to see you there!
Please register here: liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
We hope to see you there!
Reposted by Finn Stileman
📣 PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS 📣
An international team, including our own Finn Stileman, have published a new study in Nature Communications on a monumental rock art tradition in northern Arabia dating between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📸 @finnstileman.bsky.social
An international team, including our own Finn Stileman, have published a new study in Nature Communications on a monumental rock art tradition in northern Arabia dating between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📸 @finnstileman.bsky.social
October 10, 2025 at 2:09 PM
📣 PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS 📣
An international team, including our own Finn Stileman, have published a new study in Nature Communications on a monumental rock art tradition in northern Arabia dating between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📸 @finnstileman.bsky.social
An international team, including our own Finn Stileman, have published a new study in Nature Communications on a monumental rock art tradition in northern Arabia dating between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📸 @finnstileman.bsky.social
Reposted by Finn Stileman
New discovery! Here @mariaguagnin.bsky.social and our team report on 12,000-year-old life-size camel rock art engravings in the Saudi desert. #GreenArabia @griffith.edu.au www.nature.com/articles/s41...
September 30, 2025 at 3:34 PM
New discovery! Here @mariaguagnin.bsky.social and our team report on 12,000-year-old life-size camel rock art engravings in the Saudi desert. #GreenArabia @griffith.edu.au www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reposted by Finn Stileman
Our new paper is out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 12,000 year old camel engravings marked water sources in the desert. A great team effort @mdpetraglia.bsky.social @finnstileman.bsky.social @stewiestewart.bsky.social et al!
Monumental rock art illustrates that humans thrived in the Arabian Desert during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition | Nature Communications
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www.nature.com
September 30, 2025 at 3:24 PM
Our new paper is out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 12,000 year old camel engravings marked water sources in the desert. A great team effort @mdpetraglia.bsky.social @finnstileman.bsky.social @stewiestewart.bsky.social et al!
Happy to share the first paper from my PhD! Open access in a special issue of JAS, 'The Mind in Deep Time: Interdisciplinary explorations of cognitive evolution'
When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill
share.google/hj43OR6QWXtc...
When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill
share.google/hj43OR6QWXtc...
When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill
As the most numerous manifestations of technology across the Palaeolithic record, linking stone tool artefacts to past hominin cognition and expertise…
share.google
September 4, 2025 at 9:10 PM
Happy to share the first paper from my PhD! Open access in a special issue of JAS, 'The Mind in Deep Time: Interdisciplinary explorations of cognitive evolution'
When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill
share.google/hj43OR6QWXtc...
When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill
share.google/hj43OR6QWXtc...
Reposted by Finn Stileman
Thrilled to share our latest article on the Lower Palaeolithic occupation of Fordwich Pit, Old Park - including at least one likely glacial occupation in MIS12! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Hominin glacial-stage occupation 712,000 to 424,000 years ago at Fordwich Pit, Old Park (Canterbury, UK) - Nature Ecology & Evolution
The authors report Acheulean hominin occupation of eastern Britain during glacial marine isotope stages 17–16 and again in glacial marine isotope stage 12 via stone tools in sediments dated to 712,000...
www.nature.com
September 1, 2025 at 10:43 AM
Thrilled to share our latest article on the Lower Palaeolithic occupation of Fordwich Pit, Old Park - including at least one likely glacial occupation in MIS12! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
More ceramics! So fun to work with!
July 8, 2025 at 1:54 PM
More ceramics! So fun to work with!
Picked up a stone-textured dish at a pottery market that perfectly nests a porcelain handaxe; makes me think of the tool latent within a nodule before being shaped to fruition
July 7, 2025 at 2:59 PM
Picked up a stone-textured dish at a pottery market that perfectly nests a porcelain handaxe; makes me think of the tool latent within a nodule before being shaped to fruition
Reposted by Finn Stileman
🏺🧪🦣
#Neanderthal Fat Factory!
V. exciting to see new, massive evidence of this grease-rendering behaviour which we've long believed was going on.
(someone once commented I use the word "fat/fatty" a lot in the narrative/poetic sections of #Kindred, THIS IS WHY)
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#Neanderthal Fat Factory!
V. exciting to see new, massive evidence of this grease-rendering behaviour which we've long believed was going on.
(someone once commented I use the word "fat/fatty" a lot in the narrative/poetic sections of #Kindred, THIS IS WHY)
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
July 3, 2025 at 9:39 AM
🏺🧪🦣
#Neanderthal Fat Factory!
V. exciting to see new, massive evidence of this grease-rendering behaviour which we've long believed was going on.
(someone once commented I use the word "fat/fatty" a lot in the narrative/poetic sections of #Kindred, THIS IS WHY)
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#Neanderthal Fat Factory!
V. exciting to see new, massive evidence of this grease-rendering behaviour which we've long believed was going on.
(someone once commented I use the word "fat/fatty" a lot in the narrative/poetic sections of #Kindred, THIS IS WHY)
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Reposted by Finn Stileman
#Neanderthals Ran “Fat Factories” 125,000 Years Ago. Groundbreaking discovery by @paleomonrepos.bsky.social @unileiden.bsky.social @leizarchaeology.bsky.social and the LDA in Saxony reveals large-scale fat processing by Neanderthals:
idw-online.de/de/news854632
#archaeology #paleolithic #prehistory
idw-online.de/de/news854632
#archaeology #paleolithic #prehistory
Neanderthals Ran “Fat Factories” 125,000 Years Ago
idw-online.de
July 3, 2025 at 6:23 AM
#Neanderthals Ran “Fat Factories” 125,000 Years Ago. Groundbreaking discovery by @paleomonrepos.bsky.social @unileiden.bsky.social @leizarchaeology.bsky.social and the LDA in Saxony reveals large-scale fat processing by Neanderthals:
idw-online.de/de/news854632
#archaeology #paleolithic #prehistory
idw-online.de/de/news854632
#archaeology #paleolithic #prehistory
My latest weekend pastime has been to model clay replicas for my little museum! Particularly fond of the Neanderthal (La Ferrassie 1) skull!
June 30, 2025 at 11:13 AM
My latest weekend pastime has been to model clay replicas for my little museum! Particularly fond of the Neanderthal (La Ferrassie 1) skull!
Reposted by Finn Stileman
40,000-year-old mammoth tusk boomerang is oldest in Europe — and possibly the world www.livescience.com/archaeology/...
Stone Age boomerang is oldest in Europe — and possibly the world
A new analysis of a carved mammoth tusk first discovered four decades ago reveals it may be the world's oldest boomerang.
www.livescience.com
June 26, 2025 at 9:07 AM
40,000-year-old mammoth tusk boomerang is oldest in Europe — and possibly the world www.livescience.com/archaeology/...
Reposted by Finn Stileman
Finally got round to finishing this drawing of a 300,000 year old #handaxe from Stoke Newington, London, found by S.H. Warren in 1894. Now this little-un, along with others from Stoke Newington that I've drawn, lives at the British Museum
June 23, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Finally got round to finishing this drawing of a 300,000 year old #handaxe from Stoke Newington, London, found by S.H. Warren in 1894. Now this little-un, along with others from Stoke Newington that I've drawn, lives at the British Museum
Reposted by Finn Stileman
'Scientists discovered a new kind of human with its pinkie bone. Now we have a skull' www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...
This is the first ever confirmed skull of a Denisovan
Finally, we can put a face on a Denisovan.
www.nationalgeographic.com
June 18, 2025 at 3:36 PM
'Scientists discovered a new kind of human with its pinkie bone. Now we have a skull' www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...
Reposted by Finn Stileman
Calling all palaeolithic archaeologists. Come and work with me on a really exciting new survey and excavation project in Uganda: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/348570
INTERNATIONAL TENDER FOR THE RECRUITMENT OF A POST-DOCTORAL ASSOCIATE RESEARCHER
International tender to recruit one (1) ) post-doctoral initial level researcher to perform duties in the scientific area of Palaeolithic Archaeology or related areas, under the research project “ERC ...
euraxess.ec.europa.eu
June 18, 2025 at 4:14 PM
Calling all palaeolithic archaeologists. Come and work with me on a really exciting new survey and excavation project in Uganda: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/348570
And here's the scan from the same handaxe! A razor (tranchet sharpened) tip!
June 9, 2025 at 7:32 PM
And here's the scan from the same handaxe! A razor (tranchet sharpened) tip!
Reposted by Finn Stileman
Giant egos, hidden fossils and Machiavellian scheming in the academy - in this tale about what might (or might not) be the oldest hominin. A thrilling read!
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins
The long read: When fossilised remains were discovered in the Djurab desert in 2001, they were hailed as radically rewriting the history of our species. But not everyone was convinced – and the bitter...
www.theguardian.com
May 27, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Giant egos, hidden fossils and Machiavellian scheming in the academy - in this tale about what might (or might not) be the oldest hominin. A thrilling read!
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...