Beautiful clear day at the top of British Camp

Feeling lucky to have played a part in two great teams both of which have papers out in Nature this afternoon - and where better to celebrate some fantastic work than by getting back out to the field for more

Back in India for the first time since 2019! And spent the afternoon looking at lithics from the Thar Desert

Inspiring lecture and debate at the Centre for the Study of International Slavery (CSIS, University of Liverpool) annual lecture last night by Prof Toby Green

Went to the Silk Road exhibit at the BM with the intention of taking lots of photos but only managed this as I was too busy looking at the incredible collection of artefacts brought together

Great turnout for tonight's 120th Anniversary Keynote Lecture for Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool

Looking forward to this semester's MENDLS lecture,from Prof Sally Reynolds, hosted by Liverpool John Moore's and the University of Liverpool

@elliescerri.bsky.social launching the Human Palaeosystems group this morning

At the scale of individual elements of stone toolkits, altitude and mean annual precipitation had a repeated impact on the presence or absence of blade technologies, bifacial tools, scrapers, core tools and core axes - explaining between 22-40% of variability in their appearance

Differences in toolkit composition were found to be best explained by differences in site altitude, precipitation seasonality, ecology and between open air and cave or rockshelter sites - accounting for up to 20% of the variability present in the data

Turning to the use of biome4 outputs, we show a distinct change in modelled habitats occupied by forager populations, with marked shift towards more forested landscapes from 14ka and from upland conifer forests in the Late Pleistocene to Deciduous to Evergreen tropical forests in the Holocene

Working with the palaeoclimate datasets made readily available in R through pastclim we were able to quantify the climatic conditions associated with forager stone tool assemblages, going beyond what is possible from unevenly spaced proxy records

Central Africa is too often overlooked in studies of recent human evolution, and this paper was a great opportunity to explore what is known about the region

Two great days of talks at the Mostly Out of Africa meeting at the NHM - looking forward to the Huxley Lecture to be delivered by @chrisbstringer.bsky.social this afternoon!

Ivinghoe Beacon - you can just about make out the bronze age barrow sitting on the top, the hillforts embankments are now relatively subtle

From the rampart of Caer Caradoc with the Wrekin in the distance