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John Hawks

johnhawks.net

Our origins shape our future. Click to read John Hawks, a Substack publication.

ScienceHistory

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
309 from 31 Oct 2004 to 24 Oct 2026
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weekly (38 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 31

  1. Woman the hunter, bonobo style
  2. Denisova Cave mystery yak
  3. A visit to Vanguard Cave, a Neanderthal workshop
  4. Grieving for infants by primate and hominin mothers
  5. New Denisovans from China’s southwest
  6. Modern humans evolved from an 80-20 mixture of two deep streams
  7. Legs of the last Denisovans
  8. How Neanderthal ancestry affects growth and muscle
  9. The big feet of Paranthropus boisei
  10. Traces of insect DNA in dental calculus may reveal bug-eating past
  11. The first molecular data from Homo naledi
  12. How many Denisovan ancestors?
  13. The ancient mixture in cave lion genomes
  14. Rethinking Homo erectus and Denisovans with ancient proteins
  15. A new age for ‘Ubeidiya
  16. How human evolution has been speeding up
  17. U.S. federal support for human origins research may be over
  18. Ancient handaxes made from geodes
  19. Looking into a Neanderthal gallery at La Roche-Cotard
  20. Did Levallois tools make Neanderthals human?
  21. A look at the Neanderthal deep cave structures from Bruniquel
  22. Genomes from tombs of the Golden Horde, and the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan
  23. Matrilineal networks may be the key to understanding Neanderthal mixture
  24. How Sahelanthropus tchadensis moved
  25. Complex fiber and wood technologies of the first Great Basin peoples
  26. A Neanderthal time capsule from Grotta Guattari
  27. What the heck are chins for?
  28. Tracing the wave of Neanderthal-modern interactions
  29. Rock art may be far older than modern humans in Sulawesi
  30. A deep record of unknown hominins from Sulawesi
  31. Fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés, Morocco, and crossroads of human evolution

2025 55

  1. A possible archaic human from Borneo
  2. Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2025
  3. Sparking ancient fires
  4. Bringing emotional cognition to deep time
  5. What explains the long stasis of Oldowan sites?
  6. Human skull shape evolved faster than any of the apes
  7. Finding hormone biomarkers in ancient skeletons
  8. Informal hominins, from Denisovan to superarchaic
  9. Deep history from the genomes of India
  10. The problem skulls from Yunxian
  11. A shorter, sharper Out-of-Africa story is emerging
  12. Ten years of Homo naledi in my world
  13. Will humans start living to 150 soon?
  14. Expanding the “Cradle of Humankind”
  15. The gene from Denisovan to Neanderthal to modern mucus
  16. New hominin teeth from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia
  17. Denisovan HLA and its role in immunity
  18. Hominins voyaged to Sulawesi before one million years ago
  19. Bizarre foods: Neanderthal edition
  20. How archaeologists are missing Pleistocene cultures
  21. Human origins science in 1925: the good, the bad, and the fake
  22. Members' briefing, July 10, 2025
  23. A visit to Malapa, ancient site of Australopithecus sediba
  24. The humanity of a new Denisovan
  25. How evolution became a uniquely American controversy
  26. Members' briefing: June 10, 2025
  27. The Olduvai effect: New questions about meat-eating in human origins
  28. Dire wolves are just the beginning
  29. New clues about human cardiovascular evolution
  30. The ancient Egyptian legacy of anatomical science
  31. Lucy's upcoming Prague visit brings memories of controversy
  32. More hominins raised from beneath the waves
  33. Ghost populations in human origins
  34. The problem when all the fossils are male
  35. What I told my students about the threats to evolutionary science
  36. Consilience, convergence, and consensus
  37. How do hominin fossils get their numbers?
  38. How Homo naledi got into the Dinaledi Chamber
  39. Flexed burials on the right: A sign of Neanderthal-modern exchange?
  40. Research highlight: Burials by Homo naledi
  41. Lactase and the Neandertals
  42. A look at the Sima del Elefante face
  43. Plant-eating and meat-eating in Australopithecus
  44. Gathering the Ancestors
  45. Pounding water chestnuts on Jordan's ancient banks
  46. Ancient travois use by some of the earliest Americans
  47. Seeing Neandertal teeth as art
  48. Another look at selection and the Black Death
  49. Research highlight: Brain of the Taung Child
  50. Research highlight: Understanding how Homo naledi walked and ran
  51. The circumstances of the Taung discovery
  52. A hard ceiling on modern human dispersal
  53. A look at the Maba hominin skull
  54. The contribution of segmental duplications to human diversity
  55. A look at the fossil skull from Steinheim

2024 19

  1. Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2024
  2. A sad end for the Journal of Human Evolution
  3. Did scientists miss a fake Neanderthal for 25 years?
  4. Footprints of two hominin species hours apart on the same shoreline
  5. “Lucy”, superstar of evolution, at fifty
  6. A look at the Neanderthal from Altamura
  7. A look at the “Thorin” Neanderthal
  8. What do we know about the ancestry of Homo erectus?
  9. Julurens: a new cousin for Denisovans and Neanderthals
  10. The evolutionary mystery of the German cockroach
  11. New insights into the biology of Homo luzonensis
  12. Why did the ancients make gigantic handaxes?
  13. Four amazing Stone Age sites with wooden artifacts
  14. How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
  15. Eclipses for the ancestors
  16. A remembrance of Frans de Waal
  17. Vagrant birds and ancient human habitats
  18. Guide to Paranthropus species
  19. Secrets within the teeth of the first Homo fossils

2023 27

  1. Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2023
  2. A visit to the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City
  3. All the hominins made tools
  4. Tracing the signature of African-to-Neandertal gene flow
  5. Lecture: Opening new frontiers in human origins
  6. Homo erectus keeps getting older
  7. Guide to Sahelanthropus, Orrorin and Ardipithecus
  8. Interaction and mixture: big picture and small
  9. Guide to Australopithecus species
  10. The real story of myosin, jaw muscles, and ancient brains
  11. When did human chromosome 2 fuse?
  12. Climate models, Neandertals, and Denisovans
  13. Tracing the genetic histories of ghost apes
  14. Research highlight: Growth and development in human origins
  15. Ancient apocalypses and limits of evidence
  16. What did Neanderthal visual culture mean?
  17. Research highlight: Homo naledi teeth
  18. Ghostbusters of human origins
  19. Did two pulses of evolution supercharge human cognition?
  20. Lecture: Finding ancient minds in the human evolutionary tree
  21. What color were Neandertals?
  22. New evidence is revealing the ages of death, birth, and menarche in Neandertals
  23. Explaining the X chromosome hole in Neandertal ancestry
  24. Many people have a little Neandertal in the brain. Does it matter?
  25. When did our ancestors start looking up to the stars?
  26. Solving the mystery of the Red Deer Cave people
  27. Probing the pathogens that afflicted ancient humanity

2022 25

  1. Ancient amputations tell remarkable stories of survival and care
  2. Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2022
  3. The Nesher Ramla site: a third way between Neandertals and modern humans?
  4. Finding ancient fire use in the Rising Star cave system
  5. A Neandertal recipe with lentils and grain
  6. Bison bones show butchery practices 400,000 years ago
  7. Research highlight: The frontal sinuses of fossil hominins
  8. Panel: Who or what is Homo naledi?
  9. Understanding numbers as cognitive technology
  10. Research highlight: Vertebral wedging in Homo naledi
  11. Neandertals hunted dangerous prey. How they killed them.
  12. How I build ethics into my introductory course from the first day
  13. How the new White House policy on public access to federally funded research may affect data
  14. A transition to a new platform for my words and video
  15. Different transport strategies for different large prey species at Abric Romaní
  16. Why anthropologists rejected the aquatic ape theory
  17. Research highlight: The limbs of Homo naledi
  18. Humankind's last common ancestor lived a surprisingly short time ago
  19. Kabwe: A famous fossil and the human costs of mining
  20. Research highlight: Taking human origins research into the next decade
  21. Research highlight: Pelvic fragment from the Lesedi Chamber
  22. Why I moved to Ghost instead of Substack
  23. Research highlight: Mandibles from Malapa
  24. Research highlight: Strategizing public-facing work within an academic career
  25. Lecture: Are we the last Neanderthals?

2021 13

  1. Fossil profile: AL 400-1 mandible and the curving line of human evolution
  2. Research highlight: A partial skull from Rising Star
  3. Fossil profile: Skhūl 1 and the mixing of populations
  4. Zlatý kůň and the Neandertal heritage of first Europeans
  5. Lecture: New mysteries of human origins
  6. Fossil profile: Sangiran 31 and the exceptionally thick skulls of Homo erectus
  7. Ancient genetic introgression between cave hyenas and spotted hyenas
  8. Brain-body allometry revisited across mammals
  9. Fossil profile: U.W. 101-258 and humeral torsion
  10. Fossil profile: BOU-VP-16/1 and mortuary practice
  11. Research highlight: Looking at what Darwin knew about primate relationships
  12. Research highlight: Accurate depiction of uncertainty in ancient DNA research: The case of Neandertal ancestry in Africa
  13. How the lives of mothers matter to offspring survival in wild primates

2020 22

  1. A palimpsest of artifacts on a glacial landscape
  2. Looking at the traces of wear on tools used by capuchin monkeys
  3. Research highlight: Making ancient DNA more ethical
  4. An update to the 23andMe ancestry algorithm, how it constructs a model of ancestral populations
  5. Why does ethical ancient DNA sampling seem so complicated?
  6. Research highlight: A look at the questions raised by Homo naledi
  7. Research highlight: How the pandemic must change field research
  8. Research highlight: Sexual dimorphism in the relationship between the gut and pelvis
  9. Goat immunity modified by introgression during and after domestication
  10. Neandertals got 6% of their genomes from Africa
  11. The genetic ancestry of modern lions
  12. How much Neandertal DNA do today's African peoples have?
  13. Did the Middle Stone Age make any difference for hunters?
  14. An enormous sample sheds light on the Denisovan ancestry of people in Iceland
  15. Chicken ancient DNA and artificial selection during medieval times
  16. How much have baboons and geladas hybridized during their evolution?
  17. There are no “anatomically modern” elephants. Why do we treat humans differently?
  18. Lecture: How Homo naledi matters to our origins
  19. Research highlight: Introducing a juvenile skeleton of Homo naledi
  20. How old is the "early Homo sapiens" skull from Florisbad?
  21. Cooking rhizomes in the Middle Stone Age
  22. Part of a Denisovan mtDNA resides in the nuclear genomes of many living people

2019 14

  1. Did Acheulean hominins have long-distance obsidian trade?
  2. Denisovan traits bring up the old problem of understanding morphological continuity
  3. Research highlight: Use ancient remains more wisely
  4. Recounting the repatriation of aboriginal remains from Lake Mungo
  5. A mid-century observer wrote about hybridization and Neandertals
  6. Geneticists work to understand how skeletons wound up in a mysterious Himalayan lake
  7. How will ancient proteins change paleoanthropology?
  8. Homo luzonensis: a new species of hominin from Luzon
  9. How much do scientific societies fear Plan S for open access?
  10. How capable were early human ancestors of crossing open water?
  11. How much do Y chromosome haplogroups shape our views of modern human origins?
  12. How did English come to have different words for "ape" and "monkey"?
  13. Three big insights into our African origins
  14. A critical look at the idea of Australopithecus prometheus

2018 10

  1. Lecture: Who were the ancestors of the Neandertals?
  2. How collagen fingerprinting is changing the way archaeologists understand ancient sites
  3. Artifacts of a pre-Clovis tradition from the Gault site, Texas
  4. A perspective on how media marginalize scientists from developing countries
  5. Should archaeologists really fear and loathe geneticists?
  6. The so-called Toba bottleneck simply didn't happen
  7. What's the deal with the Sahelanthropus femur?
  8. Lida Ajer, early modern human remains in island Southeast Asia
  9. My photo of the Neo skull is named one of the top science images of the year
  10. How many students in paleoanthropology can see casts of Australopithecus afarensis?

2017 6

  1. Scientists doubted the Piltdown hoax from the beginning
  2. Lecture: How Homo naledi is changing human origins
  3. When anthropologists argue about species, is it evidence, or ego?
  4. An unusual rate of dental chipping may give clues about Homo naledi's diet
  5. Features of the Grecian ape raise questions about early hominins
  6. Can we build a science of human evolution that people can trust?

2016 9

  1. New footprints from Laetoli shed light on how the science has changed in 40 years
  2. Why are humans evolving to lack their wisdom teeth?
  3. Should we be surprised if Neandertals, Denisovans, and modern humans didn’t form stable hybrid zones?
  4. My article giving an overview of our symposium on Homo naledi
  5. Looking at the hypothesis of deliberate deposition for Homo naledi
  6. An possible ancestor of Homo floresiensis from the Middle Pleistocene of Flores
  7. Neandertals built a circle out of stalagmites deep underground. What does it mean?
  8. A revised chronology for Liang Bua places Homo floresiensis earlier than 60,000 years ago
  9. How much sex did it take for Neandertal DNA to enter modern populations?

2015 12

  1. A paleoanthropological Thanksgiving
  2. Did humans approach the southern tip of South America more than 18,000 years ago?
  3. Another Denisovan from Denisova Cave
  4. What is the ‘braided stream’ analogy for human evolution?
  5. A modern look at pollen from Shanidar and the question of "flower burials"
  6. Two anthropologists float some curious notions about Homo naledi
  7. Why do male bonobos have such low body fat?
  8. How the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is slowly turning into a dissertation grant
  9. Stephen Jay Gould and the role of provocation in science
  10. Recent adaptive evolution to resist the toxic effects of arsenic
  11. The Manot 1 skull and how we now look at Neandertal ancestry in early modern humans
  12. An ancient human pulled from the bottom of the Taiwan Strait

2014 15

  1. A look at the intentional markings of Homo erectus
  2. Castmaking and early data dissemination in paleoanthropology
  3. Secrets of the genome from Ust'-Ishim
  4. Presentation on species concepts and the hominin fossil record
  5. Describing the Great Rift Valley
  6. Becoming human: Presentation on Mount Carmel sites and cultural origins
  7. An interview with Clive Finlayson about Neandertal lifeways
  8. Interview with Dr. Jill Pruetz about chimpanzees in a savanna habitat
  9. Did Homo erectus get herpes from chimpanzees?
  10. Interview with Dr. Agustín Fuentes about primate cooperation and human origins
  11. Should there be a new genus to contain Homo habilis?
  12. Have Sahelanthropus and Orrorin been written out of existence?
  13. Chimpanzee communities are hundreds of years old
  14. The Kebara 2 hyoid speaks for itself, but is it a Neandertal?
  15. Seven things about evolution

2013 2

  1. David Attenborough says humans have stopped evolving. He's wrong
  2. The FoxP2 protein sequence from Neandertals and Denisovans is shared by many people today

2012 4

  1. New findings from the Denisova 3 genome at high coverage
  2. Remembering my journey among the kurgans
  3. Some say humans are apes, but I disagree
  4. Public interests in data from federally funded research

2011 5

  1. Growing genetic data suggest a two-phase model for prehistoric population expansions in Africa
  2. Did Neandertals live at or above the Arctic Circle?
  3. Modern human origins was more interesting than a single point of dispersal
  4. Did humans colonize the northern latitudes without fire?
  5. Did human language evolve as a spandrel?

2010 8

  1. How much of human evolution was due to polygenic adaptation?
  2. Why do some invasive species start to succeed only after a delay?
  3. What is the temporal bone from Darra-i-Kur, Afghanistan?
  4. New fossil material from Luzon suggests another small hominin may have lived on that island
  5. My reactions on the publication of the first draft Neandertal genome
  6. The "blooming, buzzing confusion" of William James
  7. A mysterious mitochondrial sequence from Denisova Cave, Russia
  8. Return of the “amazing” Boskops

2009 10

  1. Remarkable preservation of an Acheulean campsite at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov
  2. An in-depth look at the pelvic reconstruction of Ardipithecus
  3. A new study of old shells shows shoreline resource use by Homo erectus
  4. Gertrude Caton Thompson within the history of archaeology in Africa
  5. Have human lifespans been constant for the last 2000 years?
  6. Sahelanthropus: The femur of Toumaï?
  7. Did somebody bury the bones of Toumaï?
  8. Did Neandertals evolve in a population sink?
  9. Notes on Ashley Montagu, recent human evolution, and human equality
  10. How much was migration a creative force for culture change?

2008 3

  1. Human evolution stopping? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
  2. Book review: Spook, by Mary Roach
  3. The “amazing” Boskops

2007 9

  1. Our new paper on why human evolution accelerated
  2. Howler hybrid hunting
  3. HIV susceptibility locus protects against an extinct virus
  4. Why did some Polynesian island societies lose their pigs?
  5. Darwin witnessing the plagues of European colonization
  6. For Linnaeus, classification followed from the new idea that species were fixed
  7. High adult mortality in some contemporary hunter-gatherers
  8. How research into the causes of health disparities matters to cancer
  9. Ninety percent of your brain is (not) useless

2005 9

  1. The legend of Henry Ford's kingpins in evolutionary biology
  2. A case study of race and medicine: the BiDil trial
  3. Who first inhabited the European Arctic? A look at Mamontovaya Kurya
  4. Data access to fossil hominins, reflecting on the NSF policy
  5. The earliest stone toolmakers had some technological sophistication
  6. Did giant humans walk the Middle Pleistocene earth?
  7. How the PhyloCode would change names in human evolution
  8. Are the "earliest modern human" skulls really modern?
  9. Ardipithecus ramidus remains from a second field region, As Duma

2004 1

  1. The Homo floresiensis discovery, an initial FAQ