Tom Booth

@boothicus

Bioarchaeologist. Amateur Scarecrow. Ancient DNA Lab @ The Francis Crick Institute Associate Lecturer in Quantitative Archaeology and Later European Prehistory @ UCL Institute of Archaeology

3.438 Folgt6.072 Follower1.945 Posts

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Tom Booth@boothicus· 10d

“It’s a run, not a race…”, except the times when it’s not. This is unlikely to ever happen again, so for the sake of posterity, you understand…

A list of parkrun finishers. At number 1 is one Thomas Booth, finishing in a respectable time of 19:13.

Tom Booth@boothicus· 25d

Paying a visit to Auntie Beeb! About to talk to Robert Elms on BBC London about the We Go Way Back exhibition at The Crick!

A modern looking sitting room with brown cylindrical tables a red settee and a screen. A couple of glasses sit on a small precarious table.

Tom Booth@boothicus· 26d

What!? Now there’s two of them!? This is getting out of hand. Had a blast last night at the ‘We Go Way Back’ exhibition launch on ancient DNA. Come and see it at The Francis Crick Institute. IT’S FREE!

A bespectacled man in a bright t shirt stands behind a bright orange cardboard cutout of the same man around 2/3 the size

Tom Booth@boothicus· 26d

Alert! They found the Star Gate behind the British Library!

Tom Booth@boothicus· Jul 12

Startled my boy by squealing in delight when I saw one of these beauties in the wild - Tooting Bec.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Jul 10

Tapestry? What tapestry?

Simpsons meme of fidel Castro taking the trillion dollar note from Mr Burns and claiming no knowledge of it when asked for it back

Tom Booth@boothicus· Jul 8

🏺🧪Update! Open one week from Now!

Orange tiled wall of the Francis crick
institute behind a silver railing a grey tamp and an ale stone floor tiles. On the wall is a multicoloured image of superimposed side-on human faces and text reading ‘free exhibition We Go Way Back’.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Jul 6

🏺🧪There are brewings afoot at the Francis Crick Institute …looking forward to the big reveal next week. www.crick.ac.uk/news/2026-05...

Front of The Francis Crick Institute. Pale stone paving leads underneath Red and white stripy warning tape in front of the Institute’s main sign. Above the sign is another sign black writing on white background reading ‘Free exhibition - discover how ancient ancestors live on in our DNA’. Behind is the orange facade and glass foyer of the Francis Crick Institute.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Jun 20

40th Solstice and Wedding Anniversary celebrations:- Golden Circle wanker for Gorillaz.

A stadium stage bathed in red light from within a crowd. Dozens of people stand on the stage in front of a red mountain symbol.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Jun 18

Outrageous BBC DEFIES World Experts Suggesting NO STONES at STONEHENGE until 2500 BCE! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

‘The monument at Bulford dates to the same time as the earliest phase of activity at Stonehenge, when the earthworks were first built half a millennium before the stones were placed.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Jun 17

Cool cover though, and that’s what counts!

Tom Booth@boothicus· Jun 13

Yup! The DNA was published in this study: elifesciences.org/articles/797... and the details were taken from Suplementary Data File 1. Bear in mind though this is the best available source, not the 'true' one.

Tom Booth@boothicus· May 30

🏺Have had a pleasant few days pratting around Skipton including jogging up to what felt like the top of the world to inspect this handsome Early Bronze Age ring cairn (Ringstones or Hare Hill Cairn). A collared urn containing a cremation was recovered from the centre and is in the Craven Museum.

Prat in a blue vest and shorts stood with his arms outstretched on some rounded lumps and bumps making up a Bronze Age ring cairn in a grassy field with hills in the background.

Two prays in the middle of some lumps and bumps in a grassy field making up a Bronze Age ring cairn. A landscape of green rolling hills stretches out in the background

A prat in blue shorts and vests sits astride a dead, rotten partial tree trunk in a grassy field, an arch look on his face.

Rolling grassy hills divided by grey dry stone walling under a blue sky.

Tom Booth@boothicus· May 21

The latest in my son’s line of bee-themed ‘Hapee Berfda’ cards.

A colourful child’s drawing of some bees around a flower with trees in the background. A blazing unforgiving sun burns in the background, igniting the sky around it.

‘Hapee berfda’ in colourful writing followed by pink love hearts and kisses.

Tom Booth@boothicus· May 12

!!!

Tom Booth@boothicus· May 6

This is all I could find out about it at the time - bear in mind that there is a bit of uncertainty about the date, as it hasn't been directly dated and its original context is not known with confidence. Not wanting to burst your uncle's bubble, while it's fun that he shares that bit of DNA...

Tom Booth@boothicus· Apr 14

🏺New paper on web of close (although mostly more distant) genetic relationships between people buried in tombs in Orkney and northern Scotland 3700-3500 BCE, in the Early Neolithic.

Diagram of genetic relationships between

- blue outlined oblongs representing different labelled tombs with internal squares and circular representing lelle buried within goose tombs. Lines of red green blue and orange represent genetic relationships.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Apr 11

Cheeky wink, or my tribute to Harold Godwinson?

Two men running in a field, one in the foreground and one in the background. The main in the foreground is wearing a floral multicoloured running kit. The man in the background is wearing an orange t shirt and black shorts.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Apr 4

Quick whoosh around Romney Bay. Each pair of beach houses shares a megalith.

A path next to a grey way running by a sea front. Houses telegraph poles and a brick tower in the background.

Colorful striped beach houses on a pebble beach with the sea in the background.

A row of beach houses on a pebble beach. A row of large black stones run in front of the beach houses, one for every two beach houses.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 24

LAST LECTURE of ARCL0078: Age of Stonehenge. Covering the development of the meaning of Stonehenge over the last c.2000 years. Voyages of Pytheas, judiciary executions, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Williams Stukeley and Blake, Battle of the Beanfield, Stonehenge tunnel. It's been an absolute pleasure!

Historic images of Queen Elizabeth II projected onto Stonehenge in celebration of her diamond jubilee. ARCL0078: Age of Stonehenge written in yellow across the sky.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 20

Name that band.

Mike Parker Pearson (foreground) and Ramilisonina (middle distance) standing amongst the stones at Stonehenge.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 19

And we are done.

Blue tinged close up image of a zebra crossing

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 19

For the completists…

Blue tinted image of some houses and lots of blue sky

Blue tinted image of the sun shining brightly behind some trees

Blue tinted image of a house surrounded by scaffolding from behind a pillar

Blue tinted image of the exterior of a row of terraced houses one with a green wheels bin outside

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 19

While I was out running the other day my phone decided to take a few snaps while set within my blue fabric armband. Behold the indigo haze of my phone’s vision…

Blurry blue jaunty tinted image of a road lined by houses and trees and a wooden fence

Blue tinted image of a railway bridge with a block of red brick flats behind

A blue-tinted image of a railway bridge in the foreground with flats in the background

Blue tinted image looking up at some leafless trees behind some railings and a traffic light.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 17

Long day I'm late today! Dense stretch of material from the Middle Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age. Proper field systems. Proper settlements. Wacky funerary rites. Must Farm. The Invisible Dead. Hillforts, DNA & intrusive thoughts of celtic languages. Did Stonehenge mean (whisper it) nothing?

John Piper's painting of Stonehenge - the ruins of the trilothon horshoe up close rendered in greys, yellows and blacks. Made of streaks and lines it almost looks abstract. the ARCL0078: Age of Stonehenge title is in the grey sky in yellow.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 10

The Age of Stonehenge: 8th lecture down, 2 more to go. Today we covered the Early Bronze Age, how tin and copper mining in Britain and Ireland possibly drove the development of the Bronze Age proper across Europe, and how this enmeshed Britain births the ultra-blinged 'Wessex Culture'.

16th-century watercolor illustration of Stonegenge by Lucas de Heere, made for an early guidebook for England. Watercolour painting of the Stonehenge monument with the surrounding ditch. A person id depicted lying on a green hill in the foreground. Another person stands by one of the stones and anoth (slightly our of proportion) rides a horse in the middle of the stones.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 10

I put this figure of Needham's model of a Bell Beaker/Corded Ware fusion into PowerPoint, and I kid you not the auto-generated caption was 'Map of the Battle of Brexit'. @urbanprehistorian.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/service...

Greyscale diagram of northwestern Europe with arrows detailing movement and interaction of material cultures linked to Bell Beaker and Corded Ware around the Rhone-Rhine corridor.

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 3

I found this half finished one. I have no memory of the context.

Archer meme half finished presumably it was supposed to say “do you want mentions full of clay pipes, because this is how you get mentioned full of clay pipes!”

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 3

Treating you to a sneak peak - this is the kind of rich, concise content that I'm delivering.

An image of a lecture slide. The automatic transcription of the lecture reads 'And. uh. Um. Yeah. Um. You know.'

Tom Booth@boothicus· Mar 3

This Week! On Age of Stonehenge! All the different ways in which this image is wrong, the development of the Chacolithic Britain, defined not just by metalworking but migrations of Beaker-associated groups and interactions with local people who are in the middle of a massive monument binge.