I’m Dr Michael Haslam, an Australian archaeologist and ethologist based in Orkney. Twig technology is my investigation into what the evolution of animal tool use can tell us about ourselves.

Why should you trust what I have to say on this topic? That’s a fair question.

I’ve worked as an academic on questions of tool-use for over two decades. I’ve excavated archaeological sites made by our hominin ancestors, by humans both modern and ancient, and by wild monkeys, crows and more. I helped reveal evidence for archaeological sites made by wild sea otters. I led a research team at the University of Oxford that laid the foundations for what’s now known as Primate Archaeology, I’ve taught at the Universities of Queensland and Cambridge, and I’ve directed fieldwork on every continent except Antarctica.

I’ve even tried (unsuccessfully so far) to find a way to study dinosaur tool use, a subject for which we have only debatable evidence. But I’m not giving up.

Throughout my research career, my central goal has been to link the way that tools are used—their function—to the wider world that we inhabit. There are fundamental questions about human evolution that only our three-million-year record of stone artefacts can address. And yet there are numerous other species that use tools, including stone tools. Why are we so different? Is it luck, intelligence, sociality, none/all of these? And what can tool use tell us about how animals themselves see the world?

I’ve set out some more of the rationale behind my Twig Technology project over on the about us page. And for an overview of my 60+ research publications—in Nature, Journal of Human Evolution, PNAS, Current Biology, eLife, Proceedings of the Royal Society and many more—please click here or the Research link in the menu. This site is a hobby, so it won’t be updated to a strict schedule, but over time I hope it will help add new blocks to our foundational knowledge on why and how tool use evolves.

Thanks for joining me on the journey.

P.S. Want to get in touch? Find me on bluesky. And here’s a picture of me that appeared in Scientific American, in which my glasses are skewed because I’d sat on them…