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 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-...

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...

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 🧪

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-...

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.