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Jean-François Cudennec

@jfcudennec.bsky.social

2.6K followers 610 following 1K posts

PhD. Old mollusks lover : Sclerochronology and isotopes in archaeological or paleontological context. #PaleoSky curator and limpet nerd. Also nature photographer: https://bsky.app/profile/jfcphotos.bsky.social

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · Oct 26

Fresh off the press and in open access !

Our latest paper investigates the seasonality of Atlantic shell middens, from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. Not familiar with sclerochronology, and why it's cool ? A short thread !

#AcademicSky #PaleoSky 🧪

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Limpet shell oxygen isotopes as markers of seasonality in shell middens: The case of Molène Archipelago (Brittany, France) from Late Neolithic to Early Middle Age

The stable oxygen isotopes ratio (δ18O) from marine mollusk carbonated shells is widely used as a palaeo-thermometer, as the main driver of this ratio…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 7h

📝Any fellow Medium users here ?

Looks like one of my early threads just turned into a full article !

medium.com/@jf.cudennec...

Soil, Stones, and Suffrage: Geological Roots of Electoral Behavior

Can rock shape vote ? Discover the surprising ties between geology, history, and political choices across continents.

medium.com

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Reposted by Jean-François Cudennec

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

1/ It is Nobel week: the giants of world science gather beneath gilded halls of leading global institutions.

But what about those whose approach to knowledge is radically different? Those who base their science on lived experience, fragments from human worlds, often silent or marginal ?

Close up photo of a Nobel Prize gold medal

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Reposted by Jean-François Cudennec

Exeter Marine @exetermarine.bsky.social · 18h

Clam shells sound warning of Atlantic ‘tipping point'.
New research from @exeter.ac.uk using centuries-old clam shells has found signs that key Atlantic Ocean currents may be losing stability.

Full paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🦑🐟🧪🌐🌍🌊 #AcademicSky @uniofexeternews.bsky.social

a closeup of bivalve shells. text overlaid in a bold white font: Clam shells sound warning of Atlantic ‘tipping point’. New Uni of Exeter study finds evidence of "stability loss"

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 18h

Just sayin

Chart comparing the number of camera, the number of giant squid footages and the number of bigfoot footages.

Number of giant squids rises as the number of camera increase, but not the number of bigfoot.

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

And acknowledge that research is a creative work !

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

17/ So, this Nobel week, we celebrate the lights of science, the crowning of intellectual ascent.

But remember: wisdom isn’t always found in cozy halls, nor genius in a calm laboratory. Sometimes it walks through Bakhmut’s fields, with a pen, convictions, and hope not to become what it hates.

Evheny Osievsky. Photo from Facebook: Evheny Osievsky

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

16/ He was born in 1993, just two years after me. Though our academic fields differed, we shared the same bedside books.

He sharpened his ideals in the harsh reality of the world, while I moved within one of the most protected social categories.

And now, only one of us lives to continue.

Дерева Донбасу, дерева війни.

Source : https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=9156408411095698&set=pb.100001798916472.-2207520000&type=3

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

15/ Osievsky did not hate. He deplored how war sanctifies hatred. In homage to his friend the Russian anarchist Dmitry Petrov, also an anarchist anthropologist killed while fighting for Ukraine, he wrote: “We did not choose this history. We have only ourselves and the freedom not to become monsters”

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

14/ discussing the disastrous political misuse of genetic concepts, filling pages of his notebook he always kept close. He doubted determinism, biological or historical. He believed in freedom, not as a grand universal, but as lived, fragile, always threatened by circumstance, ideology, violence.

Transcript of the interview in a notebook

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

13/ Just five days before his death, he published a last interview with the famoud UK geneticist @adamrutherford.bsky.social,

www.kunsht.com.ua/articles/hen...

Генетик, колишній редактор Nature Адам Радерфорд про спадковість людської поведінки, шкільну генетику й співпрацю з Наталі Портман.

www.kunsht.com.ua

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

12/ After Russian forces withdrew from Kyiv region, he volunteered for Ukraine’s army, trained as a rifleman-medic in the UK.

Remaining loyal to anarchist ideals, he refused officer rank and focused on carrying wounded or fallen comrades. He did not stop his intellectual work though:

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

11/ And I can't help but draw a parallel between the conditions under which he and I read the same books: classical Greek history, Graeber, Latour, Clastres... It reminds me of Konrad Lorenz studying fleas behavior on his own skin while held as a prisoner by the Soviets.

Abdullah the cat. Author of the article visible in the background: gray sweater, e-book in hand.

Source : https://commons.com.ua/en/dva-tizhni-v-okupaciyi-pid-kiyevom/

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

10/ He focused on this miniature society: survival mechanisms, role distribution, cigarettes as currency, rumors...

After a few days of shock, he finally recover his ability to read : "You can sleep under artillery fire, you can read under artillery fire, you can do chores under artillery fire."

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

9/ During Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Evheny was trapped with about thirty others in the university in Irpin under Russian occupation. He documented this in “Six cats, thirty people, and four shells. Two weeks of occupation near Kyiv”

commons.com.ua/en/dva-tizhn...

Six cats, thirty people, four mortar shells. Two weeks in the occupied Kyiv suburb

Life is possible even in the besieged Vorzel - says our author. Read the story of how the community lasted two weeks of occupation in the basement of a Kyiv suburb.

commons.com.ua

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

8/ This constant analysis was not mere academic exercise but tied to a strong political commitment: leftist, feminist, vegan, anarchist. Evheny participated in the Maidan protests from 2014 and was involved in Ukraine’s Social Movement.

The Social Movement (Ukrainian: Соціальний рух, romanized: Sotsialnyi rukh;[a] abbreviated SR) is a Ukrainian left-wing community organization founded in 2015, which stands on the principles of democratic socialism, opposing capitalism and xenophobia.

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

7/ A true "touche à tout", with a characteristic critical mind, humor and irony, never falling into cynicism. He described his work as “gonzo anthropology.”

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

6/ But also the behavior of birds and octopuses; genetics; popular culture including cinema and comics; placebo effects; or hunger strikes.

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

5/ plus popular writings marked by insatiable curiosity and rigorous science, in the spirit of historic polymaths. His subjects included para-religious and sectarian communities (neo-pagans, Scientologists, Hare Krishna, in which he immersed himself for months);

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

4/ His master’s thesis already focused on the John Frum cargo cult in Tanna, Vanuatu, but at the dawn of his academic career, he had published widely on a stunningly diverse range of subjects: Foucauldian behavioral economics, Melanesian ethnography, cycad ethnobotany...

Tanna island, Vanuatu, february 15, 2016. Isaac One, Leader of John Frum Movment in the village of Lamakara. John Frum adepts are wearing old us army uniforms during the John Frum day, every february 15. Photograph by Theo Rouby / Hans Lucas.

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

3/ He was not a Nobel laureate. Perhaps because there is no Nobel for anthropology, and also because he was still a doctoral student.

He started in 2018 but he's dreamed fieldwork in the Melanesian islands was indefinitely postponed, first by the pandemic, then the war.

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

2/ Evheny Osievsky was one of them. He died near Bakhmut, killed by shellfire on May 22, 2023, while serving as a volunteer rifleman-medic in the 77th Air Assault Brigade. His body was identified not by uniform or papers, but by a vegan tattoo on his wrist and a cinema magazine in his pocket.

Selfie of Evheny Osievsky in full military gear, when he was serving as a volunteer in the ukrainian army.

Source : https://x.com/ahatanhel/status/1662719233699053568/photo/1

Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 1d

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Reposted by Jean-François Cudennec

c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 1d

The global whaling industry experienced a boom c. 1840-1950 as technology allowed whalers to hunt the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.

Under standard models, we would have expected krill populations to have *exploded*.

Instead, they DROPPED exponentially.

Let's talk about the KRILL PARADOX.

Change in distribution and abundance of southern right whales. (A) Shows historical and contemporary wintering distributions (Figure 1 from Carroll et al., 2018), and (B) shows decline in abundance and subsequent recovery (solid line is the mean, dashed line shows upper and lower 95% CI). Modified Figure 1 from Jackson et al. (2008). Contemporary sightings are divided into regions where large aggregations are seen during winter: Argentina (ARG), Brazil (BZL), South Africa (SAF), southwest Australia (SWA), south central Australia (SCA), and New Zealand sub-Antarctic (NZSA) and regions where sightings are typically of small numbers of individuals per year. The large aggregations are IWC management units and correspond to historical whaling grounds, although another 5 whaling grounds show little sign of recovery. Summer feeding areas are poorly described and so not shown.

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Reposted by Jean-François Cudennec

Stephen Lokier @lokier.bsky.social · 1d

Our new #OpenAccess paper 'Sediment-stressed reefs over the past 420 Myr', led by Tanja Unger, has been published in The Depositional Record

Understanding natural and anthropogenic sediment influx to reef systems is critical to planning protection strategies
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · 2d

#UnrelatedPicsWednesday !

Left : 28 late Cretaceaous dinosaur eggs from China, deposited 85 million years ago

Right : 27 Mesolithic skulls from the "Skull nest" of the Ofnet Cave in Germany

Egg clutch sampled for chronological studies. Credit: Dr. Bi Zhao

Part of great skull burial at Ofnet, Bavaria. Copied from Hugo Obermaier, Fossil man in Spain, Newhaven, 1924, figure 143, page 338. (After F.R. Schmidt). Mesolithic level. General Collections Keywords: disposal of the dead; pre-historic; Archaeology; funerary techniques

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