In a new paper published in the journal Psychological Review, Cory Cobb, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, and colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin, proposed a cultural continuity hypothesis stating that humans are universally motivated to retain and preserve key parts of their cultures across time and space.

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), together with international partners, have developed a software called “AutArch”. It harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and big data to revisit old archaeological collections — and could thus revolutionize archaeological data analysis. The researchers published their results in the high-impact journal Journal of Archaeological Science on June 3, 2025. AutArch is available as open source software on GitHub and Zenodo.