Doktor Overcomma 
Benjamin Carr, Ph.D. 👨🏻💻🧬#Neanderthal #brains measure up to ours—literally
If you look at Neanderthal and #HomoSapiens #skulls, they’re visibly different: Neanderthal are lower and longer, ours tend to be rounder.
New results suggest there’s more variation in brain size among modern people than between Neanderthals and #Pleistocene Homo sapiens. And because brain size is actually a terrible way to predict cognitive capability, Neanderthals could have be more like us than previous studies claimed.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/neanderthal-brains-measure-up-to-ours-literally/
LM Little"If there happened to be nuts and seeds and their favorite plants, that was great. If there happened to be a dead mammoth over there or a dead horse or whatever else, they ate that. Or if there happened to be some poop of a horse over there, they ate that." https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/frozen-squirrel-poop-9.7230087
Frozen squirrel poop from Yukon is full of woolly mammoth, horse DNA | CBC News
Scientists have reconstructed genomes of woolly mammoths, horses, steppe bison and ground squirrels that roamed the grasslands of the Canadian Arctic as far back as 700,000 years ago using DNA found in frozen squirrel poop from the Yukon.
AltonDooleyNew blog post! Sometimes a fragment of a bone is all you need:
https://life-from-a-certain-point-of-view.ghost.io/more-mall-fossils/
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More Mall Fossils
A commonly found and easily identifed part of a mammal skeleton is the head of the femur. This is visible in the Pacific mastodon femur below, as the large knob at the upper right end of the bone: The femoral head is a large hemispherical mass that generally sits on
Marcus Brandel🐴 #YearOfTheHorse #FossilFriday 🐟🐘🦥🐴🐪 Specimen SMM P2025.8.6 — originally MNH 779 in the Minnesota Historical Society collection — comes from Nicollet County near St. Peter, Minnesota.
Molar #11 of 12 in the statewide Ice Age horse project. All twelve will be heading to UC Irvine’s KCCAMS Facility for radiocarbon dating this summer.
Follow the full 12 tooth journey in Lost Bones #4 and its updates through the link in my bio.
#LostBones #Pleistocene #Equus #Paleontology #CitizenScience
🐘 #MuseumSpotlight #FossilFriday 🐟🐘🦥🐴🐪 How often do you see a life‑sized mastodon full reconstruction?
I happened across this fantastic display recently in the Entering the Ice Age exhibition at the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery in Dayton, Ohio. If you have nature‑ or paleo‑curious kids—I highly recommend a visit.
They also have an excellent giant ground sloth and short‑faced bear skeletal replicas.
🐂 #LostBones #FossilFriday 🐟🐘🦥🐴🐪 This month I'm back out #CountingBones. At the Winnebago Area Museum a quiet storage room revealed bison and horse remains from two Blue Earth River sites
Shout out: this museum has been entirely volunteer run for half a century — the kind of stewardship that will help keep Ice Age stories alive.
Museum: https://www.winnebagoareamuseum.org
Learn about the Lost Bones project: https://marcusbrandel.substack.com/about
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#Pleistocene #MnMuseums #Bison #Horse #Palaeontology #CitizenScience
ResearchBuzz: FirehoseAnthropology.net: The Bag Before the Bowl: Pleistocene Origins of Mobile Container Technology. “The new database, published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, documents 739 Pleistocene mobile containers drawn from 210 sites across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.”
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/05/15/the-bag-before-the-bowl-pleistocene-origins-of-mobile-container-technology-anthropology-net/
The Bag Before the Bowl: Pleistocene Origins of Mobile Container Technology (Anthropology.net)
Anthropology.net: The Bag Before the Bowl: Pleistocene Origins of Mobile Container Technology. “The new database, published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, documents 739 Pleist…
🐂 Happy #Minnesota #FossilFriday! 🦥🐴🐘🐪 These large upper bison molars — plus partial maxilla — are part of a 2024 donation to the Melrose Area Museum. The collection, contributed by a museum board member, also includes horn cores, mandibles, individual teeth, and other Ice Age materials.
If you’re into Midwest deep time stories, follow along and explore the full project in my bio.
#MelroseAreaHistoricalSociety #Pleistocene #Bovid #Bones #Palaeontology #Fossils #CitizenScience
𝓛𝔁𝓼 / 𝔸𝕝𝕖𝕩𝕚𝕤 🏵🇪🇺💫How I wish that the journal was called
«FLOSS ONE»
Simply for the opportunity for a little giggle given the recently published research article on ancient #dentistry 🦷😬
…dating back > 40,000 year
= from #Neanderthal period
( Middle–Late #Pleistocene )
«
Earliest evidence for invasive mitigation of dental caries by Neanderthals
»
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0347662
My source:
FT article «Neanderthal dentist drilled into decayed tooth almost 60,000 years ago» https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/6f237a3b-d55f-4f24-9fad-8fdef503cf21
Earliest evidence for invasive mitigation of dental caries by Neanderthals
Neanderthal medical knowledge has long attracted scholarly interest. Evidence suggests they cared for sick, injured, and elderly group members, with possible use of medicinal plants. However, it remains uncertain whether such practices reflect deliberate medical strategies or instinctive self-medication akin to that observed in non-human primates. Here, we analyze and interpret traces of deliberate artificial manipulation of Chagyrskaya 64, a Neanderthal lower left second molar found in Chagyrskaya Cave (Altai Krai, Russia). The tooth exhibits a large human-generated concavity on the occlusal surface, created during the lifetime of the individual. Traceological and microtomographic analyses of the observed modifications, combined with experimental verification, reveal that the concavity in Chagyrskaya 64 is indicative of the earliest documented instance of caries treatment involving the drilling/rotating with a lithic perforator, ca. 59 ka. Evidence of two distinct types of manipulations requiring different tools, in addition to the drilling/rotating technique, necessitating complex finger movements, indicates that the Chagyrskaya Cave Neanderthals possessed the cognitive capacity to intuit the source of pain, comprehend the feasibility of its elimination, and deliberately select the most efficacious dental intervention. These patterns bring Neanderthal behavior closer to modern humans and differentiate that behavior from the instinctive actions of other primates.