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-...

A remarkable sequence of artifacts in layers upended by the Jordan Rift represent some of the oldest hominins in Eurasia. With a new estimate around 1.9 million years, the Acheulean artifacts from ‘Ubeidiya approach the earliest known in Africa. www.johnhawks.net/p/a-new-age-...

Half of the papers I read about ancient and medieval genomes: "And, SHOCKINGLY, it appears that people from different places and cultural origins were having children together." It's like we never stop being surprised by intermarriage and hybrid identities, despite millennia of examples.

In this piece I go into a 20-year history of looking at selection on human genes. It's a foundation for the recent work on ancient DNA showing fast evolutionary change. That's been a well-supported conclusion from anthropology for a very long time. www.johnhawks.net/p/how-human-...

Was argued that this would be the case by @johnhawks.net and others 20 years ago. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

In 2015, the late Paola Villa and collaborators described a stone flake from Sibudu Cave, 49,000 years old, encrusted with an ancient paint made from powdered red ochre and milk from an antelope. They speculated the milk came from a kill of a lactating female. Image: Villa and coauthors

The National Science Foundation has proposed eliminating the directorate that includes most of the federal funding for fieldwork and research in human origins. It's a sudden acceleration of a decades-long trend. I comment on what this means. www.johnhawks.net/p/us-federal...

Could Antoni Leeuwenhoek have discovered Mendel’s laws if he had run a little experiment with rabbits? Fascinating historical detail here. matthewcobb2.substack.com/p/two-misint...

New Anthropology Watch page from @americananthro.bsky.social is tracking program closures and suspensions of admissions at universities and colleges. Currently listing six graduate programs with admissions pauses, six impending program closures. americananthro.org/anthropology...

I took some time to wonder at the beautiful newly-described handaxes and other artifacts from near Sakhnin, Israel, where Acheulean artisans used geodes and fossil-bearing nodules for knapping. www.johnhawks.net/p/ancient-ha...

There's a book for this! Probably we're adaptable in a reasonable time, with trade-offs. mitpress.mit.edu/978026205151...

Burial of the dead is one of the few ways that people’s skeletons can tell us directly about their cultures. When very different kinds of people share similar burial practices, it raises the possibility of cultural exchanges between them. www.johnhawks.net/p/tinshemet-...

Since this #FossilFriday is 3/27, check out StW 327: a hardy left lower jaw of a juvenile Australopithecus africanus from Sterkfontein, South Africa. Might display tooth eruption like humans and Homo naledi (doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...) Image: human-fossil-record.org/index.php?/c...

La Roche-Cotard is a remarkable cave site used by Neanderthals before 51,000 years ago and then closed. Inside are enigmatic parallel lines, geometric patterns, and ochre dots. Outside, a strange stone resembling a human face was unearthed. www.johnhawks.net/p/looking-in...

Clovis-first is March of Progress applied to the Americas. No failures, everything steady exponential growth. Life didn’t happen that way. But the Clovis phenomenon was important and real. No contradiction there.

“Ancient peoples who could trade genes could surely also trade ideas. Understanding such multiregional connections has long been important to my own work: Episodes of gene flow, idea exchanges, and coevolution of genes and cultural adaptations.” www.johnhawks.net/p/did-levall...

A new preprint from the geneticist David Reich focuses on the interactions of Neanderthal and African ancestral humans 250,000 years ago. Many parts I wholly agree with, but the key idea about Levallois technology is out of step with today's data. www.johnhawks.net/p/did-levall...

"Preprint servers are a time machine, they move everyone forward 12 months and speed up the exchange of ideas" ht @pedrobeltrao.bsky.social www.evocellnet.com/2021/06/a-no...

My university does not subscribe to Nature Ecology and Evolution, and I typically do not read or write about articles in the journal, even when written by good colleagues. I know people may be chasing that one for the name and prestige, but sorry, I'm priced out.

Early Neanderthals walked into this cave, went three football fields into the earth, created 15-foot-wide bubbles of rock, lit and tended small fires upon them. Then they left. This unique find has implications for how we underestimate many past peoples. www.johnhawks.net/p/a-look-at-...

A boomerang made from mammoth ivory, from Obłazowa Cave, Poland. Dating to around 40,000 years ago, the object was shaped and well-used, with signs of polish in the areas where a right-handed person would have handled and thrown it. Photo: Sahra Talamo and coworkers (2025, scale=5cm)

Saw another article today headlined, "The Real Paleo Diet". Is there any more hackneyed concept at this point? Do people still click on this?

I love reading John's substack, but this one has me particularly chuffed since he is highlighting the part of this new paper that got me most excited (and was ignored in a lot of the coverage). He gives a great summary of identifying matrilineal kin networks/ -based migration in the human genome.

I'm pretty excited about a new study of the African influence on Neanderthal X chromosomes. It's because a pattern of dispersal of early modern people based on matrilineal kin networks makes a lot of sense. www.johnhawks.net/p/matrilinea...

Busts of the ancestors watching over my work this week. They seem confident it will all work out.

The question of “is it a hominin” is much less relevant than it was 20 years ago. “But in the period between 8 million and 5 million years ago, the genetic evidence suggests the ancestral populations were mixing with each other, occasionally exchanging DNA.” www.johnhawks.net/p/how-sahela...

Great day today working in the lab with this guy and many other classic fossils. As always, remarkable what they have to teach us. (MH1, holotype of Australopithecus sediba)

I’ve been trying to understand this fossil for more than twenty years. The femur and ulna are the first real clues about its locomotion, but specialists who have studied the bones all disagree about what they say. I took a deep dive to understand the big picture. www.johnhawks.net/p/how-sahela...

Really happy to see this collaborative work led by my student Ayken Askapuli published now in @pnas.org Ancient DNA from a Golden Horde tomb!

My latest for @arstechnica.com explores what it means that we have 1.77 million year-old Homo erectus fossils in central China, and whether Homo erectus was really the first hominin to migrate that far. 🧪

Not a bad morning working on site today. Always grateful for this beautiful place.

Anthropology the Gathering #3: From Blade Runner to Luis Arraez Edition (plus Star Wars and power, democracy, anthro community, coastal anthropology, and the value of drawing cell phones): anthropologia.org/2026/02/15/a... #anthrosky #anthropology #roundup

I love it when new archaeological research is coupled with beautiful photographs of the artifacts. Exciting work on the exceptional Younger Dryas-age organic technologies of some of North America’s first peoples. www.johnhawks.net/p/complex-fi...

“Paisley Caves and Monte Verde contained perishable items that predate the Younger Dryas.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Darwin's writing has spoken to me over the years in many ways. One rabbit hole took me deep into the writing of the historian Alfred Crosby, who found Darwin’s keen observations about the effects of plagues on the demographic destiny of peoples. www.johnhawks.net/p/investigat...

New excavations at the Grotta Guattari, just south of Rome, have yielded beautiful new Neanderthal fossils. They may add a lot to our knowledge of how Neanderthals maintained their populations as they fled the advance of the ice sheets. www.johnhawks.net/p/a-neandert...

Really wonderful story about Lazarus Kgasi, a leader in South African paleontology at the Ditsong Museum of Natural History. www.npr.org/2026/02/04/g...

The history of evolutionary ideas about chins took me to Darwin, Pliny the Elder, Stephen Jay Gould, and Theodore Roosevelt. It's an irresistable subject that has befuddled scientists all this time. www.johnhawks.net/p/what-the-h...

Pretty sure it’s a “no shadow” kind of day

An absolutely fascinating exploration of what genomes tell us about the interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals 👇🧪🏺

This is a deep dive into the details of how Neanderthal ancestry is patterned across ancient genomes of modern people. A wave of mixture starting in the Near East kept mixing as long as the expanding group kept meeting Neanderthals, from France to Central Asia. www.johnhawks.net/p/tracing-th...