🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Now working with James Winters and Rebecca Sear on this very topic to systematically understanding grandmothering 👵 This paper just is the first step in using the Agta case study to point out the fertile ground for theoretical innovation🚶‍♀️

Paper is: invention of modern innovation. Neffke et al They are going to ask how human societies learn as the sum of knowledge expands ideas.repec.org/p/egu/wpaper/2…

Do whales optimize their vocalizations for efficiency, just like human language? 🐋🎶 My latest study in Science Advances suggests they do—following linguistic laws seen in human speech. 🧵science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

New cultural evolution modelling paper with Benoît de Courson on PNASNews! "Weak individual preferences stabilize culture" A quick 🧵 pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

we think this has big implications: ✔️ Culture isn’t just about copying—individual-level, non-social, forces are (more) important (than what sometimes thought) to explain culture

I will give a seminar later today at the Durham Department of Anthropology (online) about my research on sentiment shifts in books, songs, etc. Slides at the link below! acerbialberto.com/talk/2025_durh…

21/ 👶 Ever wondered why humans rely so much on cooperative parenting and social networks? Dr Abbey Page Abbey Page explores fertility 🚼, social support 🆘 and how grandmothering is influenced by demography 👵✨ with Rebecca Sear & James Winters osf.io/76eka_v2

🚀COSMOS is BACK!!!💫 The Computational School on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS) will take place in RIKEN, Tokyo, between 29 Sept - 3 Oct, organised by me and fantastic Charley Wu (@thecharleywu.bsky.social) ! Application deadline: 25th April. More details 👉️ cosmossummerschool.github.io

One of the most fascinating websites for comparative linguistics: CHIELD (correlation-machine.com/CHIELD/variabl…)

Deadline in 5 days! Work with Chiara Bonacchi and myself for a 3-year postdoc based in Edinburgh. Cultural evolution + social media data to study how archaeological content fuels (or not) contemporary hostility online.

Very pleased that this paper led by Will Gervais is now out in PNAS. Philosopher Dan Dennett coined the phrase 'belief in belief' for believing that belief in God is a good thing. In this paper, we document just how widespread it is, even among atheists. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Kanzi the bonobo, who learned language, made stone tools, and played Minecraft, dies at age 44. Read all about Kanzi’s remarkable life and contributions to linguistics in this free issue of the Linguistic Discovery newsletter: linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/kanzi/

Kanzi, the bonobo who learned language, made stone tools, and played Minecraft, dies at 44 🦍 A visual thread 🧵 #Kanzi #apes #primates #primatology #evolution #linguistics #language #science

New study highlights the active role of humans in the hunter-farming transition. Varying population growth and mortality rates, driven by competition between hunter-gatherers and farmers, shaped agricultural development in these regions. Andrej Spiridonov pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

arXiv was created almost 35 years ago... wired.com/story/inside-a…

🤩📣 New paper on participant-led methodological development for collecting high-resolution data on the post-natal period 👩‍🍼 with Sarah Myers, Emily Emmott, Rebecca Sear and the Best Beginnings ❤️ funded by The British Academy summary 🧵👇 Brunel University of London Brunel Research

🧵 1/ How well do LLMs actually do on Olympiad-level math? We evaluated frontier models on 455 problems from the IMO Shortlist. Unlike most benchmarks, we emphasize proof validity, not just final answer correctness. Here’s what we found 👇

Men everywhere love to impersonate animals and supernatural creatures, one of the most important and under-theorized cross-cultural patterns around

Ouch.

📣 CCE's final seminar of this year is by the amazing Gillian Brown on "Are human mate preferences ‘universal’? A critical evaluation" 🌏👥 📣 📅 21st May / 13:00 - 14:30 / Online and in person (ESGW 111) Joining info below 👇 🔓 Open to all 🧡💚💙