Caley Orr

The hobbit book is finally real and you can preorder it, which feels completely wild. Coming August 2027.

🦖 Happy Natl Fossil Day (today) AND World Anatomy Day (tomorrow)! As a paleontologist, I ❤️ anatomy because it helps us connects living organisms to their evolutionary history As an anatomy journal editor, I'm amazed about how much there is still to discover about the structure & diversity of life

If you're studying muscle attachment sites on bones, our new paper might be helpful.

Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.

African apes--still quite informative about the ancestral hominin anatomy, despite persistent rumors otherwise. Our new paper out now led by the talented Dr. Laura Hunter.

Revealing Denisovan anatomy bit by bit. The proximal radius doesn't tell us a lot about the postcranial skeleton, but it has a few helpful little clues.

Strange 'hobbit' species walked more like us than like 'Lucy,' hip bones reveal www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

🏺🦣 Ancient Adriatic: in 2027, our team will run CU Denver's new archaeological fieldschool on the Island of Vis off Croatia's Dalmatian Coast. Students will learn techniques of modern field archaeology & explore European prehistory. Open to all applicants: studyabroad.ucdenver.edu/_portal/tds-...

Nice new paper from Lewton et al. on Homo floresiensis pelvic morphology. Comparative Morphometric Analysis of the Pelvis of LB 1 (Homo floresiensis). onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

"The evolution of a bigger brain is therefore a story of carbohydrate foods as much as animal foods: from sweet sugars to cooked starch, from chewing to processing, and from wadging to advanced nutrient extraction." 🧪

The irony being that a new Dinosaur Jr album is gonna make me so happy. #EarBleedingCountry

"enhanced visual processing, not expansion of the frontal lobe, drove the major increases in neocortical size [in primates]." (from Editor's Summary)

"These findings support the hypothesis that selection resulted in shifts to P. robustus dental morphology to increase mechanical resistance, consistent with an expanding dietary niche that incorporated increasingly challenging foods."

JOB AD: Assistant/Associate Professor, Anatomy This is a great opportunity for an anatomist with evolutionary/paleobiological research interests to join a nice group of folks who do cool work.

Smoking gun: "Ancient #DNA [from Chilean mummies] confirms historical accounts of how #smallpox got to the #Americas" (Spoiler: It's exactly who you might've been suspected.) 🏺🧬 www.science.org/content/arti... by @lizziewade.bsky.social via @science.org

New paper: Mesolithic mariners in the Central Mediterranean made sustained, long distance sea journeys. Not accidents, one offs, and not rare events. See thread in the comments. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar..., led by @jblinkhorn.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/d41... "We can almost look through the eyes of the Aurignacian people and see how they viewed the environment around them,” says Amy Clark, a palaeolithic archaeologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

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How did primate hand function evolve? 🐒 Hamate bone morphology suggests natural selection shaped key hand traits linked to grip & locomotion. Suspensory behaviors evolved independently in gibbons & great apes Hunter et al.: anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

📢 New #openaccess paper out! Exploring the evolutionary drivers of encephalization and facial reduction in the genus Homo. 🧠💀 Check it out here: rdcu.be/fsgmj Congrats to Mark and Katerina @katharv.bsky.social for this work! ✨️ #humanevolution @humanorigins.bsky.social

JOB ALERT! We are recruiting at @ucl-c4ia.bsky.social - a lecturer (Grade 8) or associate professor (Grade 9) in primate or human evolutionary anatomy (research and teaching). Contact Susan Evans or myself for further details. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRZ412/l...

🐘 check out our newest paper from Liang Bua! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Did H. floresiensis hunt Stegodon? 🔪 Did they also had control use of fire? 🔥 We tested these early claims of complex behavior using taphonomy, experimental archaeology, and zooarchaeology of the Stegodon assemblage.

A few words from archaeologist Jamie Hodgkins on the latest H. naledi paper, which is cool and impressive overall (congrats to the proteomics team on this) but risks being overshadowed by claims from some team members that are a reach. 1/2

New study on the evolution of primate cognition, brain size, sensory and motor functions, prompted by "recent work showing fishes perform as well as primates on various cognitive tests." 🐟🦍🧪 Great to see such broad comparative perspectives driving research. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Damnation and hellfire be upon us. We've earned it.

You can feel anything you want to feel and call it real. *SEBADOH*

46 years ago today Joy Division filmed "Love Will Tear Us Apart" music video in Manchester, England, April 28, 1980. Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart, 1995 Remastered Version (Official Video) #punk #punkrock #postpunk #joydivision #history #postpunkhistory #otd

Excited to share our new paper published today in @natcomms.nature.com! We find that the crust beneath the Turkana Rift is extremely thin, and that the rift’s maturation played a key role in shaping the accumulation of Turkana’s world-famous hominin fossil record. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Majoring in anthropology as an undergrad at CU Boulder is the single best decision I've made in my life.

The Lufthansa Group is cancelling 20,000 short haul flights through October. Not what you want to find out just as summer fieldwork plans are advancing.

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New evaluation of the taxonomic affinities of the Late Pleistocene fossil hominin from Kabua, Kenya. Very happy to finally have the chance to finish and publish this work, nearly a decade after a very happy time in Tuebingen working on it with excellent colleagues. doi.org/10.1111/1467...

1/7 Our papers may seem to address different themes, but they coalesce around the deep human past as a process of niche expansion and feedbacks, into the transition to human dominated landscapes. A starting point was the pan-African structured theory of human origins: www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

✨NEW INTERVIEW✨ ANCESTOR OF THE APES ~ The Masripithecus Discovery ~ with DR ERIK SEIFFERT @gutsickgibbon.bsky.social @erikseiffert.bsky.social #evolution #evolutionsoup #fossil #science #primates 👇🏼👇🏾 youtu.be/vGdkAOO32rg

No evidence that hominin dispersal across Eurasia was part of a wider turnover in mammal distributions

Wow. This is an amazing cover of Butthole Surfers' song "Pepper."

hms.harvard.edu/news/massive...

New paper alert. My new article just published in Quaternary Science Reviews, "Revolution, modernity, and the dispersal of Homo sapiens beyond Africa". www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...