Katya Herberg

Congrats Emile! Really cool stuff! 🥳🤩

New publication, and first one as a first author for me! 🥳

Have you heard of the brutal chimpanzee and "hippie" bonobo dichotomy? ☠️🕊️

Today, we report similar aggression magnitudes in 22 captive chimpanzees and bonobos groups - be it all aggression or restricted to contact.

Picture of women on a beach John Leech, ‘The mermaids' haunt’. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1854 - 1869. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. Picture Collection, The New York Public Library.

Call for Papers: Women’s Fieldwork and the Making of Nineteenth Century Natural History Collections
We seek articles to complete a special issue on women’s field collecting, and contributions to nineteenth century natural history for Nuncius.
#Histsci #NaturalHistory #WomensHistory #Fieldwork

Portrait of Lise Meitner taken in 1928. She is smoking a cigarette and looking impatient to get back to her experiments.

Last week, I mentioned this in passing in a workshop:

In 1938 Enrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize for discovering two new elements of the periodic table.

Lise Meitner shortly showed that Fermi was mistaken and instead had produced known lighter elements by fission.

She did not win a Nobel prize.

For a long time, Prehistory was told from a partial perspective: hunters, explorers, male protagonists.

Women appeared in the background, almost invisible.

@erc.europa.eu @cenieh.bsky.social #FECYT

Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...

2026 Call - MPG African Mentorship Program The ARTEMIS MPG African Mentorship Program invites early career researchers in Africa to apply for a transformative mentorship experience.

📢 Talents wanted. Are you a graduate, doctorate or an early career researchers at a research institution in #Africa?

The @maxplanck.de offers mentorship by Max Planck scientists at various MPIs through its ARTEMIS program.

Here is the 2026 call – application deadline is April 13, 2026.

A green graphic of illustrated animals surrounding the text: "Now Hiring Education Manager (Parental Leave Cover). £34,000 per annum. Application deadline: Sunday 8 March 2026, 23:00 (GMT)". A cartoon of Carl Linnaeus looks up towards some of the animals through binoculars.

One week left to apply for our Education Manager role!

Inspiring young people about nature and ensuring their voices are heard is vital to achieve our vision. We are looking for parental leave cover to manager our educational workshops, events and grants.

Apply by midnight 8 March: buff.ly/M2qGvt2

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

My post-doc Charlotte King will be starting her own Minerva research group in September and is looking for PhD students. Click here if you are into experimental biomechanics, apes and hominin evolution.

www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

Fully funded PhD project available at Nottingham Trent University. Linked to a BBSRC funded grant, this project will investigate how primates perceive and respond to infants, combining cutting-edge cognitive testing with behavioural data. See 🧵

20 years of microfluidic technology for advancing plant sciences Understanding how plants respond to dynamic and spatially variable stimuli is a key goal in plant sciences. Traditional imaging methods often involve a trade-off between environmental control and spat...

I’m happy to share that the first paper of my PhD - "20 years of microfluidic technology for advancing plant sciences” has been published in Lab on a Chip.

Many thanks to Dr Claire Stanley and Dr Eleonora Moratto for their support throughout this work.

doi.org/10.1039/D5LC...

Amazing work Kirsten!

Excited to share this work done with @alex-primate.bsky.social and Daniel Haun @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social (the first publication from my PhD!), where we found that chimpanzees sustained a collective resource for longer in groups of four compared to dyads rdcu.be/e0qPR

📢 We're hiring a postdoc (33 months) in human evolutionary genomics / paleogenomics / statistical genetics, Paris 🇫🇷
Project on selection on disease-associated variants, integrating ancient genomes, GWAS, and Ancestral Rec. Graphs.
Start May 2026 (flexible).
Apply here: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

The Stanley Lab is hiring! For anyone looking for a post-doc and interested in mycorrhizal fungi 🍄, this could be of interest. Deadline 4th Jan.

www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Social learning leads to inflexible strategy use in children across three societies - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Social learning leads to inflexible strategy use in children across three societies

Thrilled to share our latest open-access study published in Scientific Reports! We examined how social versus asocial learning influences children’s ability to override previously learned strategies across three cultural settings—BaYaka, Bandongo, and Germany: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

super cool study!

Old age variably impacts chimpanzee engagement and efficiency in stone tool use Long-term standardized data collection on wild western chimpanzees reveals late-life changes in stone tool use, and the extent of these changes varies between individuals.

New paper out in eLife! 🎉 Old age variably impacts chimpanzee engagement and efficiency in stone tool use elifesciences.org/articles/105... (including videos of wild elderly chimpanzees using tools! 🪨 🌰)

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

Peer review harassment is making early career researchers and minorities leave academia.
👉 Check my last article based on Farid Saleh's work with Raoul Ganty's drawings for @unil.bsky.social

The orangutans and bonobos are the first two illustrations of a series on behavior and movement of animals in their environment. #SciArt
More coming soon! :)
For @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Very different mammals follow the same rules of behavior Research hints at an underlying architecture that orders the movements of animals

Cross-species teamwork from @livingingroups.bsky.social reveals unexpected similarities in three social mammals 🤔

By lead author @pminasandra.bsky.social with Emily Grout, Katrina Brock, Meg Crofoot, Vlad Demartsev, Amlan Nayak, Eli
Strauss, Ari Strandburg-Peshkin🧵1/2

www.ab.mpg.de/679000/news_...

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Interested in great ape cognition? Come join our fantastic department at the Max Planck @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social studying self-recognition!

www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

@mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social are seeking a PhD candidate in the field of psychology focusing on self-awareness in nonhuman great apes drawing from different methods such as touch screens experiments, playback experiments, eye tracking, and behavioural experiments www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

Do you have anyone reviewing Human Peoples by Lluís Quintana-Murci? Or Being Human by Lewis Dartnell?

Been really wanting to read ‘Eve’ by Cat Bohannon since it was published about a year ago!

I’m looking for new books out there (broadly) in the field of Human Ethology, and for people that would be keen to review them for the journal of the International Society of Human Ethology! 📚 Have ideas?? 🧐 Let me know!

The poster version of my primate drawings that I presented at #AABA last year. I think I'm going to start selling this as a poster, but I'd need a better count of interest to see if it's worth it. LMK!

#primate #monkey #ape #anthropology #primatology testing out tags

Tool use by a wild bonobo in LuiKotale, a report of water scooping: Since I was in the remote Congo when our paper with my mentors Barbara Fruth and Gottfried Hohmann came out, I will catch up now! link.springer.com/article/10.1... -->