Omg. This is why evolutionary science (including especially in its popular understanding) is so much “hallucination” too! www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

“[N]otions of things that we need to do as a ‘service’ can be more dispiriting than motivating. Ideas of service need not be the primary force that drives us to select scientific communication from the massive pile of things to which we might devote our time.” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human cardiovascular systems have some changes compared to our close relatives like chimpanzees and gorillas, suggesting that our ancestors may have been under selection for greater cardiovascular endurance. www.johnhawks.net/p/cardiovasc...

“Nothing changed. These weren’t bad people. That’s the hardest part. They were playing by the rules of a system that rewards extractive collaboration — especially when it’s wrapped in the language of equity.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A new study of genomic ancestry in Papua New Guinea supports a short timeline for the dispersal of modern people www.johnhawks.net/p/a-shorter-...

Advice to Lego teams is now becoming my second job. Archaeologists: it would be really wise for us to make more people aware that this is a big deal this year.

"I think it’s more important to remember that we have the ability today to extend lifespans around the planet" 👇

“The find was not to fall into the wrong hands again. How could this be prevented? By bringing the precious skull home – and where was it safest? In the bedroom.” The remarkable discovery and concealment of the ancient skull from Steinheim an der Murr. www.johnhawks.net/p/a-look-at-...

Great crowd here tonight at Badgers on Tap for Anthropology Night. My students and I are sharing some new research and celebrating 10 years of Homo naledi!

Jakob von Uexküll was born OTD in 1864. Each animal inhabits its own individual "umwelt," comprising only those aspects of the world that are relevant to its survival and flourishing. 🌱🐋🦫🦋 #HistSTM #evolbio #philsci #psychsky 🧪

“The journal system is on the verge of collapse—not because scientists are abandoning it—but because funders have lost patience with subsidizing a bloated and ineffective publishing apparatus rapidly being rendered irrelevant by new technologies.” thescientistpapers.substack.com/p/how-to-be-...

We're experiencing an unbelievable deluge of submissions. At our journal we got ~200 per year in 2020. Last year it was 600. This year it's 800 with several months to go. So that's why we're slower to get stuff out for review.

Excellent 🧵by @paleobyliam.bsky.social exploring a pet peeve of mine with "traditional" dinosaur ichnology, where tracks in peer-reviewed articles were illustrated as mere outline drawings with no accompanying photos or more detailed depictions. Tracks = landscapes, & especially dinosaurs'! 🧪🎨🦖🦕🐾

Publishing 3-D photogrammetry models is the future! Particularly, as this ability is built into every phone. Just remember, the scale.

When Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are caught on an open microphone talking about organ replacement and living to 150 or more, I wanted to provide a bit of a reality check on how human lifespans have changed and what really matters to health around the world. www.johnhawks.net/p/what-matte...

Signs point to a great semester!

Thank you for the write-up @johnhawks.net in particular for dedicating space to explaining mucin structure and function. The gene from Denisovan to Neanderthal to modern mucus open.substack.com/pub/johnhawk...

This is exactly why I prefer spending my weekends in Kenya hiking through the forest than doing the typical savanna safaris--African tropical forests might be the most underappreciated ecoregion on the planet--and home to their OWN antelopes, buffalo, elephants, cats, etc.

Only a handful of fossils of human relatives from the period before 2 million years ago come from outside of two narrow parts of Africa that cover less than one percent of the continent. But these few outlier sites represent great diversity, suggesting more. www.johnhawks.net/p/geographic...

Sorry, I’m still on my BS here. The AI thing is a red herring. This fabulism exploited a known vulnerability: the digital freelance desks paying pennies, desperate for content, facing cadence pressures that militate against fact checks. Fault lies not with ChatGPT but with the economics of online.

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

While no extinct hominins lived in North America—as far as we know—institutions in the United States do hold several of them. The most spectacular is Shanidar 3, from the cave in northern Iraq. The skeleton is on public exhibit at the Smithsonian NMNH in the Hall of Human Origins.

Our distant ancestors sometimes did things tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, leaving incidental traces that we sometimes are lucky enough to notice. Whatever they were doing, it was almost certainly not their intention to be noticed by us.

A #FossilFriday that’s #LiveFromTheField! I’m doing fieldwork in the Cenozoic deposits of Kyrgyzstan currently, we started out with a really cool Eocene site called Toru Aygyr. My best find was this little tooth!

I'm absolutely cackling that they developed a tool for analyzing ONE MILLION GENOMES and they named it DR EVIL Well played www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

This work from late last year showing footprints probably belonging to two different species of human relatives on the same shoreline within hours of each other is still some of the most exciting work on hominin interactions I've seen in a very long time. www.johnhawks.net/p/when-homin...

In my latest, I look at one of the main components of immune system variation, the HLA system, and what today’s people have inherited from the archaic peoples of East and island Southeast Asia that we know as today as Denisovans. www.johnhawks.net/p/denisovan-...

Interesting article by @hlee.bsky.social looking at the complexities of dating zircons, tough little crystals that can survive being partially melted in lava, making their internal histories complex. arstechnica.com/science/2025...

This new work establishing lithium deficiency as a possible risk for cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease is groundbreaking. Eric Topol gives a very good summary of the new results and their broader context in prior work. erictopol.substack.com/p/lithium-an...

This is what I think too. What is recognized today as “human cognition” is an amalgam of components from past and current cultures, environments, and developmental processes. Technology has expanded it and continues to do so. Every culture across the world that is forgotten shrinks it.

I summarized some of my thinking about innovation and exploitation of new environments in a post from a few years ago. On this week’s news of million-year-old habitation of Sulawesi, I’m revisiting those thoughts. www.johnhawks.net/p/how-capabl...

Sulawesi, Luzon, and Flores each had a fascinating history of archaeological investigation of Pleistocene sites, with significant discoveries of artifacts. That history sometimes gets swept under the rug in stories about new findings. To many it was no surprise that habitation was ancient.

A juvenile hip bone of 300,000 year old human cousin Homo naledi. Bony struts on the inside (right panel) are arranged to help withstand forces experienced during life, providing clues about how Homo naledi moved their bodies through their world #FossilFriday

Sulawesi is bigger than Flores and Luzon, has a more diverse Pleistocene large mammal fauna, and has a much richer archaeological record than most people know. Now it's clear that the island was home to ancient human relatives for more than a million years. www.johnhawks.net/p/hominins-v...

There was nowhere in the multiverse where menswear guy was not eventually going to get to Neanderthals, but I like to think there are other Earths where it’s not some clown theory he hears first.

Wow, I was reading a new article in an Elsevier journal and the copyright notice has been updated to this: “© 2025 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.”

Joan Strassmann asks, “What should a full professor do?” and the advice she provides may be valuable to many. sociobiology.wordpress.com/2025/08/03/w...

Super fascinating explanation of a new paper in Science Advances suggesting that Neanderthals’ original paleo diet included big ol’ piles of ~maggots~

Homo juluensis in the news today with a story from Discover magazine, with perspectives from Christopher Bae and Chris Stringer. I wrote about this group last year for anyone that wants the inside story. www.johnhawks.net/p/julurens-a...

I think retracting the paper now (or even when I was Editor-in-Chief) would have served no role other than to confuse the meaning of a retraction and likely to lead to calls for retraction of other papers because some people think they are wrong (or, worse, inconvenient for other reasons). /fin

People eat food in many ways that may offend the palates of those who didn't grow up with their customs. Eating fermented or putrifying meat is common among traditional hunting societies but overlooked by many who study past hunters like Neanderthals. www.johnhawks.net/p/bizarre-fo...

One of the earliest artistic reconstructions of a Neanderthal was a portrait of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints individual created by the artist Amédée Forestier published in The Illustrated London News in 1911. Humanlike in pose, it is starkly different from the more famous reconstruction by Kupka.

“Yet with Neanderthals, I find that almost every win is secretly a loss. That turned out to be the case with hypercarnivory. One thing everyone seemed to agree on: Neanderthals were weird.” johnhawks.substack.com/p/bizarre-fo...

It sort of conveys what I wrote to the author but I don't think strongly enough. So here is what I wrote to the author which she summarized in the section quoted above

A long-form piece in @science.org covers recent research at Kromdraai, Drimolen, and Swartkrans, South Africa—all adding to the record of Early Pleistocene hominins. The article's lede, “Did they meet” is a bit of a distraction: They certainly met somewhere! www.science.org/content/arti...

Many followers of NCSE have a similar story, so perhaps some of you can relate to Ella Al-Shamahi, a former devout Muslim who is now a paleoanthropologist. In this article, she reflects on coming to terms with her understanding of evolution, and the struggle of leaving her religious community.

I think it's so great how every year during the summer campaigns at Atapuerca there are new press events for things they are finding and working on, long before they come out in academic journals. This is a way to let people into the process of science! comunicacio.iphes.cat/eng/news/new...

Really sad to hear this news but I understand the urgency for Wenner-Gren to support field researchers. Proud to have written a piece for Sapiens. I will be continuing my mission to connect people with my areas of anthropology and will do what I can to broaden these connections.

“Some 1,489 respondents had generated null results and agreed that they are important to share but had not yet done so. Most of that group expressed concerns about publishing them.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Trees, the longest-lived and largest organisms on the planet, have the ability to rebuild their entire crown after damage. Trees maintain enormous populations of stem cells just below the bark, which quickly produce new branches to create a new crown. We describe the process in this old bur oak.