John Hawks
@johnhawks.net
Paleoanthropologist | Chair and Professor of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin–Madison 🧪🏺💀https://www.johnhawks.net
“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...
How Neanderthal ancestry affects growth and muscle
Study of a Neanderthal-derived haplotype of GHR show effects on height and lean body mass
johnhawks.net
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...
The big feet of Paranthropus boisei
New analysis of footprint trackways suggest a larger body size than previously thought for this Early Pleistocene human relative.
johnhawks.net
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/...
Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs
Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unad...
science.org
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-...
Traces of insect DNA in dental calculus may reveal bug-eating past
A study finds that Neanderthals had comparable insect trace evidence as gorillas and western chimpanzees.
johnhawks.net
The face-stabbing community was old, but the leopards-eating-faces community still older
Jennifer Ouellette@jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · 4w agoThis Fossil Might Be the Earliest Known Case of Face-Stabbing in Human History gizmodo.com/this-early-h...
Just reading this article and realizing it's ten years and nothing has changed. www.nature.com/articles/537...
Print your own 3D Lucy to work out how the famous hominin died - Nature
Digital scans will help researchers test whether she fell out of a tree.
nature.com
The funniest thing to me is that nobody knows when hominins lost the baculum, and I've spent a lot of time carefully examining odd bone fragments thinking that I had a better chance of finding one from Rising Star than anyone's ever had anywhere else.
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-...
The first molecular data from Homo naledi
Protein data from the Rising Star cave system show the known sample of this species is entirely female.
johnhawks.net
Nice summary of our recent paper on the brain of Homo naledi www.iflscience.com/homo-naledis...
Did This Small-Brained Hominin Have The Neural Wiring For Burying Its Dead?
A reconstruction of the hominin's skull reveals an enlarged region linked to language and tool use, though what that means for its alleged funerary practices remains an open question.
iflscience.com
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...
How many Denisovan ancestors?
New studies magnify the observation that three groups of Denisovans may have contributed to many living people's genomes, but I find some unanswered questions.
johnhawks.net
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...
Neil Shubin on Trusted Science in a ‘Deeply Partisan Age’
nytimes.com
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.
Susan Greenberg@susanhgreenberg.insidehighered.com · 2mo agoVanderbilt University commissioned a report on the state of humanities scholarship. Now some of the scholars accused of producing work driven by political ideology rather than the pursuit of truth are fighting back. @emmawhitford.bsky.social has the scoop. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
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...
The ancient mixture in cave lion genomes
Introgression is widespread among lineages of big cats. Our ancestors encountered one of the biggest products.
johnhawks.net
Today an illustration I made end 2007 for a story about the devastating effect ebola had on the gorilla population in a Dutch scientific magazine. It turned out to be my last real pen and ink illustration. I love this illustration and it hangs in my living room. The magazine doesn’t exist anymore 🧪
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!
Why do male chimpanzees throw rocks at the same trees for more than a decade? We travelled to remote Guinea-Bissau to find out
To study accumulative stone throwing among wild chimpanzees, researchers hike deep into the savanna-woodland of Boé — a habitat increasingly threatened by industrial mining.
theconversation.com
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-...
Nowa historia Homo sapiens - Copernicus Festival
Ludzkość ma afrykańskie pochodzenie. Najnowsze odkrycia oparte na analizach DNA pokazują, że współcześni ludzie krzyżowali się z neandertalczykami i
copernicusfestival.com
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...
Rethinking Homo erectus and Denisovans with ancient proteins
Mixture demonstrated for old fossil teeth hints that anthropologists may have mixed ideas.
johnhawks.net
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...
A 59,000-year-old tooth reshapes what we know about Neanderthal dentistry
Neanderthals used rock drills to treat an infected tooth, according to a study that pushes back the earliest known evidence of dentistry by more than 40,000 years.
washingtonpost.com
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.”🧪
Homo erectus genetic material sequenced for the first time, and it shows 'deep genetic links' with modern humans
A new study of six Homo erectus individuals from China reveals one amino acid variant that distinguished this archaic human from all other human lineages and one that it passed on to modern humans via...
livescience.com
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/...
Homo erectus genetic material sequenced for the first time, and it shows 'deep genetic links' with modern humans
A new study of six Homo erectus individuals from China reveals one amino acid variant that distinguished this archaic human from all other human lineages and one that it passed on to modern humans via...
livescience.com
I think this is because Science is sadly no longer publishing technical responses to articles bsky.app/profile/wsde...
William DeWitt@wsdewitt.github.io · 3mo agoIt was announced in this editorial that technical-comment-and-rebuttals will be ceased in favor of what they call “eLetters”, which are not indexed in the scholarly record, and appear to be nothing more than blog-style comments that can't include substantive technical content like figures/data/math.
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/...
A mid-Holocene age for Monte Verde challenges the timeline of human colonization of South America
Our understanding of the timing of the human colonization of South America has been anchored by the Monte Verde II site in Chile, reported to date to ~14,500 years before the present (B.P.) and regard...
science.org
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/...
Hybridization and speciation*
Abstract. Hybridization has many and varied impacts on the process of speciation. Hybridization may slow or reverse differentiation by allowing gene flow a
academic.oup.com
