John Hawks

“It’s probably just chance — when the climate was nice enough, they could make it there,” Dr. Hawks said. “They kept trying, again and again, and to me that’s the bottom line of humans, that throughout the Pleistocene, we just kept coming.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/26/s...

I love this. Dissection is such an important part of the curriculum, as we need health providers to understand the amazing variation and history written into the bodies of their patients. Here, the daughter of a donor writes beautifully about her experience of grief and honoring her mother's wishes.

Anthropologists have often assumed hunting was a male activity for hominin relatives. New research adds strong statistical support to the data for female hunting dominance in bonobos. Is this a better model than the male-dominated chimpanzees for ancient hominins? www.johnhawks.net/p/woman-the-...

Fantastic opportunity for the right person, very important collections, wonderful staff, inspiring students, and tremendous scientific opportunities.

The evolution of cattle and their relatives is such a fascinating story. It’s great to see some of the same sites in the Altai providing information about unexpected bovines, after already highlighting the unexpected diversity of human ancestors. www.johnhawks.net/p/denisova-c...

BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physics to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.”

Vanguard Cave, Gibraltar, is known today for Neanderthal behavioral evidence, including a remarkable controlled hearth for production of pitch from gum rockrose. In 2021, the team discovered a chamber sealed for more than 40,000 years, results to come! www.johnhawks.net/p/a-visit-to...

From 50-year behavioral archives at Gombe to multi-site studies across Africa, primatologists are uncovering how maternal attachment, social risk, and cognitive awareness shape responses to loss in wild populations. www.johnhawks.net/p/grieving-f...

Rather than filtering based on an overstretched handful of editors and peer reviewers who cannot possibly have the time to get deep enough into every paper to know if it is actually helpful in terms of generating new understanding of the works, we need a post publication collaborative approach.

10,000 year old Warthog molar from Kenya for #FossilFriday

Always happy to add new Denisovans. This is quite a record now from ancient proteins, five sites that span a geographic area encompassing all of China. These people had remarkable stories we are starting to understand how to tell. www.johnhawks.net/p/new-deniso...

“In broad strokes, the modern human population evolved from a merger of two ancient groups around 300,000 years ago, roughly 80% from one, and 20% from the other. The uniformity of this signal in all living populations suggests that it was a true formative event.” www.johnhawks.net/p/modern-hum...

"Anthropology Needs to Be in Better Conversations with the World" from Devi Snively, Laura McLauchlan, and me as part of the awesome @wennergrenorg.bsky.social "On The Futre of Public Anthropology" wennergren.org/forum/public...

An oldie but goody for #fossilfriday, KMN-ER 406. This skull of Paranthropus boisei is one of my all-time favorites! It's one solid mass: dense and heavy. Now curated beautifully by Tom Mukhuyu at National Museums of Kenya.

I wrote about the impending end of U.S. federal funding for archaeology and anthropology in April. August numbers (reported in Nature www.nature.com/articles/d41...) show that no new grants have been awarded this year. www.johnhawks.net/p/us-federal...

Two new Denisovan fossils have emerged from the seafloor of the Penghu Strait, near Taiwan. I look at what these tell us about the survival of Denisovans into the time frame of the “classic” Neanderthals. www.johnhawks.net/p/legs-of-th...

Had a great email question on superarchaic gene flow this morning and the possible implications of human chromosome fusion. I did address in this post on the fusion of chromosome 2: Introgression and gene flow often happens despite differences in karyotype. www.johnhawks.net/p/when-did-h...

“An average effect size of 285 grams per copy means that around 200,000 metric tons of human muscle can be attributed to this Neanderthal inheritance. That’s two aircraft carriers worth of mass.” www.johnhawks.net/p/how-neande...

The story of “The petite bodies of the robust australopithecines” is changing in light of the last 15 years of evidence, and footprints are leading the way. www.johnhawks.net/p/the-big-fe...

Interesting twist in a new paper: Introgression deserts aren't actually deserted. “Our findings suggest that ghost ancestry is often present in previously defined archaic deserts, providing additional context to putative Homo sapiens–specific selection.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I’m fascinated today reading a recent article about insect-eating and ancient dental calculus. In brief, Neanderthals have as much insect DNA in their dental calculus as western chimpanzees, while ancient European modern people have a lot less. www.johnhawks.net/p/traces-of-...

The face-stabbing community was old, but the leopards-eating-faces community still older

Just reading this article and realizing it's ten years and nothing has changed. www.nature.com/articles/537...

Open access opens the skull of Homo naledi lawnchairanthropology.com/2026/07/02/o...

The first molecular evidence of Homo naledi from at least 20 individuals shows that none are male. I've taken a deep dive into how the paleoproteomics works, what it says about naledi relationships, and why this result is less surprising than it sounds. www.johnhawks.net/p/the-first-...

Nice summary of our recent paper on the brain of Homo naledi www.iflscience.com/homo-naledis...

excited about this one: using longitudinal movement data and dyadic models, we show that orangutan moms adjust their ranging patterns so their kids can play with age-mates independent of kinship, at personal costs. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's a tough question: How many groups of Denisovans were there, and which were ancestors of living people? Recent studies had me thinking we might be approaching an answer, but after looking at the details I'm not so sure. www.johnhawks.net/p/how-many-d...

What does the most complete endocast of Homo naledi tell us about the brain and behavior of this most unexpected, recently extinct human species? #FossilFriday link.springer.com/article/10.1...

8/ we have objectively, empirically *improved knowledge* in a very anthropological way: by showing that reductionism misdescribes reality. That, I think, is what makes these critics uncomfortable; they like certainty and universal dicta, and anthropology says “it depends”.

It is a very challenging position that @neilshubin.bsky.social walks into as leader of @nasonline.org with partisan division over many areas of scientific work. Illuminating interview with @carlzimmer.com as he takes office. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/s...

Academia is not a zero-sum game. You can do rigorous scientific work AND care about the problems of other people. Wild, I know. Not that I expect the authors of the vanderbilt report to have ever helped anyone with their scholarship.

This is really the frontier of anthropology and genetics in my opinion. Culture is to humans as water is to fish; essential, in contact with our every surface, so that it becomes unnoticed until it suddenly changes. www.johnhawks.net/p/how-human-...

In response to the report, I want to make an observation followed by an argument. My observation is this: The contents of this report are totally disconnected from the scholarship they're talking about. These authors didn't engage in good faith with the fields they're discussing.

Almost every time we look at the DNA from ancient creatures, we find signs that their evolution involved surprising mixtures. New work on cave lions finds they’re not as different as long thought. www.johnhawks.net/p/the-ancien...

I’d hammer with enamel… all over this land

theconversation.com/why-do-male-... Here's a summary of our recent field work studying the accumulative stone throwing behavior of chimpanzees. Thanks to @sshrc-crsh.canada.ca for funding this research!

Next week Sunday May 24, I'll be in Kraków, Poland at the 2026 Copernicus Festival. I'll be talking about "A new history of Homo sapiens", deep time Africa and the intricate history of mixture underlying humanity's origin. Free and open to the public! copernicusfestival.com/events/nowa-...

I feel a little heretical in saying that the headlines may say Homo erectus, but the Denisovan connection is pointing me a different direction. The connections over time within China are an old topic, and protein data has made them resurface again. www.johnhawks.net/p/rethinking...

Really neat writeup by @carolynyjohnson.bsky.social of the new work showing that a Neanderthal from Chagyrskaya Cave, Russia, sat for a dental drilling almost 60,000 years ago. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...

Nice explainer of the H. erectus protein study, by @killgrove.bsky.social, with helpful commentary from @johnhawks.net on complex overlaps of ancient human groups in Africa, Europe & Asia. “Scientists used to call it ‘the muddle in the Middle Pleistocene’; now we know that muddling is just mixing.”🧪

So my read on this new proteomic work is that we don't know what Homo erectus is. I'll share more, but an early and good article is this one www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

I think this is because Science is sadly no longer publishing technical responses to articles bsky.app/profile/wsde...

Wow, this is maybe the first time I've seen academics use the "eLetters" section as if it weren't just blog comments. It only took two decades for post-publication review to get started. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Love this quote: "We used to make fun of Edgar Anderson by saying that he was finding hybrids under every bush. Then we realized that even the bushes were hybrids." academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

“Few archaeological sites have undergone such geological contortions. Its sediments may have formed in even, flat layers, but in a million-plus years the falling center of the Jordan Rift upended them, so that some tilt upwards almost vertically.” www.johnhawks.net/p/a-new-age-...