Con Moong Cave, Vietnam, has evidence of ash, burials, and shell middens from the terminal Pleistocene. Even earlier—by 42,000 years ago—people used the cave, alternating with periods when bats were present and humans absent, evidenced by sediment geochemistry. Photo: Thanh Hoa Newspaper

One hundred and one years ago today, a young Australian anatomist worked with knitting needles to chip the hard rock from the face of a 3-million-year-old child. Together they placed human ancestry in Africa, as Charles Darwin had predicted fifty years before. www.johnhawks.net/p/the-circum...

The solstice has always mattered, more to our ancient ancestors than to most of us today. I always wonder when I am under dark skies what wisdom they had that we may have forgotten. www.johnhawks.net/p/when-did-o...

The Yarımburgaz cave complex is around 22 km west of Istanbul, in the Thracian part of Turkey. An upper cave is the location of a Byzantine church, while a lower chamber has much older Middle Pleistocene record of choppers, modified flake tools, and remains of cave bears. Photo: CeeGee (Wikipedia)

This is a good time to talk about the TRUE genetics revolution brought in by sequencing the human genome: The genetic underpinning of traits is not simple, will never be simple. Complex gene-gene interactions are the rule, not the exception 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

“GenAI for Africa, a funding call from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme…Out of 215 submissions, only two projects are expected to be funded, giving a success rate of under 1%” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Good coverage in the @economist.com about the investigation of Denisovan ancestry and possible connections to the Yunxian Homo erectus group. (paywall) www.economist.com/science-and-...

#FossilFriday Stack of opalised vertebrae from an Early Cretaceous ichthyosaur. Another remarkable fossil on display in the South Australia Museum, Adelaide.

It has been a remarkable year of discoveries. From ancient Pompeii, to the medieval Avars, to the American Southwest. Plus some advances in 3D organization of ancient genomes and an ancient disease with unexpected roots. And lots about Denisovans! www.johnhawks.net/p/top-10-dis...

Will an anthropologist be able to identify your sex and gender from your bones 100 years from now? I sure hope so! Read my essay on the limited and limiting methods we currently have for sex estimation to learn where the science has room to improve. www.prosocial.world/posts/an-ant...

Review of the use of bone technology which used to be taken as a diagnostic of modern behaviour: 'In this contribution, we present a global review of the diverse range of roles that bone tools played during the period from the Middle Pleistocene to the Early to Mid Holocene (c. 8,000 years ago) […]

Ghar-e Boof, Iran, has Upper Paleolithic stone and faunal assemblages from 42,000–35,000 years ago. The people who used the cave over time shifted their hunting toward more difficult-to-hunt small animals, using tools made with bladelets. Photo: Nicholas Conard

“What archaeology asks of everyone is an openness to alternate worlds. An understanding that your society, with its ways of working, worshipping, learning, loving—even knowing a dog—is just one permutation of endless human and beyond human possibilities.” www.sapiens.org/archaeology/...

Oued Bousmane, Algeria, is a striking rockshelter on Djebel Dyr. The Late Pleistocene sediments in the site contain stone assemblages of the kind categorized as Aterian across North Africa, although with few of the tanged points that are the type indicator of that industry. Photo: Nadia Bahra

One of the most iconic early discoveries of human origins is the skull from Kabwe, now thought to be around 300,000 years old. The human story behind the site, with its legacy of industrial lead contamination, is not often told with the paleoanthropological one. www.johnhawks.net/p/kabwe-famo...

Cueva de Nerja, Spain, has many paintings from Magdalenian (around 15,000 years ago) and earlier periods. These include depictions of fish, rare in the cave art of other sites. Remains of fish are also well represented in the bone assemblage from the cave. Photo: Diputación de Málaga

Amud Cave, Israel. Years ago I hiked to the site, named for the striking natural pillar of rock, just north of the Sea of Galilee. Here, archaeologists unearthed the remains of several Neandertals, who lived between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.

The pyrite from the chunks hasn't survived, there's no evidence either sparked this particular fire, and there's no flint with sparking traces. The evidence of firestarting is only indirect. And that's no surprise: Evidence for sparking fires is hard to find! www.johnhawks.net/p/sparking-a...

Maybe we got up to some nonsense at the end of semester gathering

Such an amazing visit this morning to our teaching lab at @uwmadison.bsky.social by students from Clark Street Community School. Always great to share the fossil record with students, and these were so well prepared with great questions!

This is a fascinating piece looking at how a century of clever people found ways to reduce disease without modern epidemiological ideas. healthchecksonhistory.substack.com/p/italy-buil...

We are discovering new species at the fastest rate ever. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Sometimes I’m in caves for nonprofessional reasons. Beautiful a capella holiday concert last night.

Big implications of a small hip fossil lawnchairanthropology.com/2025/11/30/h...

I’m writing up this year’s top discoveries from ancient DNA and it reminded me to circulate a link to last year’s top 10 list. Some amazing stuff there and remarkable how fast this field moves! www.johnhawks.net/p/top-10-dis...

I'm really pleased that my first coauthored article of 2026 is out. With some amazing folks @marckissel.bsky.social @anthrofuentes.bsky.social we think through a synthesis of behavioral ecology, emotional cognition, and archaeology. www.johnhawks.net/p/bringing-e...

Just out "Social and emotional cognition in Pleistocene hominin evolution: The role of biocultural processes" with @johnhawks.net @marckissel.bsky.social Penny Spikins, Jennifer French and me. Open access in Journal of Archaeological Science... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I taught (and co-taught) a course on human population genetics from 2000-2024. Having retired, I'm now making all the course materials public: github.com/alanrogers/p... #popgen #evbio

Nature Publishing Group. Hmmm... Also, how are that person's legs going straight through the bench?

Ancestors around the table can try anyone's patience

Fascinating summary of research on the movement of giant stone moai on Rapa Nui. Hundreds of people moved them. Did they rock them side-to-side, walking them forward? Or did they slide on sledges and rollers? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/s...

Apparently, Paleolithic garden burgers (patties of legume and grains) may have been a thing! And they flavored food with mustard, and used medicinal plants like yarrow and chamomile!

Coming together to eat the food we share has been part of humanity from the very beginning. I wrote this post after a Thanksgiving week lecture on evidence for Neanderthals and other ancient people making prepared mixtures of grains, lentils, and other foods. www.johnhawks.net/p/a-neandert...

This is a remarkable open access resource for genomic work on living great apes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Compared with stone toolmaking itself, the traces of butchery of animal carcasses are rare across the early archaeological record. But even so, cutmarks and other butchery evidence are one of the highest signals, surprisingly constant from the earliest sites. www.johnhawks.net/p/olduvai-ef...

I cannot imagine being buried less than 3 feet from any anthropological colleague. Sorry folks, eternity's too long

The entire concept of such a book is fatally flawed from the start. And though I don't think this point comes up in the podcast, I think there is a major selection-bias problem here too: the only ppl willing to write a book like this are the ones must vulnerable to bad-outcome overconfidence.

The earliest stone toolmakers seem to have innovated so slowly. What is going on with that? open.substack.com/pub/johnhawk...

Writing more about Homo erectus this week, podcast interview set up for Monday, giving a conference presentation on the topic Thursday. The topic is really heating up—prompted by the reconsideration of many of the early fossils from mainland Asia. www.johnhawks.net/p/the-proble...

✅ RNA? ✅ Ancient RNA? ✅ Ancient RNA from woolly mammoth! #FossilFriday 🦣 🧪 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Towards coexistence: human-animal co-construction of behaviour in shared spaces! New article from excellent ongoing project with @mfhansen.bsky.social aias.au.dk/events/show/...

Some fascinating new research is showing how fast ancestral humans evolved their skulls, outpacing all other lineages of apes. These methods intersect with work that my students and I are doing, fun to explain how they work and what the results may mean. www.johnhawks.net/p/human-skul...

From Caveman to Martian? Caves have long been used as shelters by humans & our ancestors. It is possible that humans who travel to Mars would use caves as well, since they provide natural protection from the radiation, cold, and dust storms on the surface. phys.org/news/2025-11...

We saw these from home last night but it turns out my office had an even better view. Wonderful aurora photo by Xiaomeng Shen in front of the Carillon tower and Social Sciences Building at @uwmadison.bsky.social

Human origins research has unfortunately become an area where researchers bring out Tolkien-esque analogies, trading on the idea that races or species of hominins once coexisted. The existence of past diversity is real, but the analogies with hobbits and other fictional beings promote misconceptions

Oops…“Principal components (PC) axes identified by a PCA are not necessarily the most informative biologically. Nevertheless, paleoanthropologists frequently interpret proximity in PC space as indicative of morphological and thus evolutionary affinity or relatedness” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is a really informative story from the University of São Paulo about archaeological work seeking traces of Neanderthal-modern human interactions: “Brazilian scientists travel 40,000 years back to study Neanderthals in Romania” jornal.usp.br/uspnews/braz...

James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97 www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/s...

A nice story in @science.org this week about the collaboration between archaeologists and Kuikuro people in Brazil, which has been central to uncovering evidence of social complexity in the Amazon region more than 600 years ago. www.science.org/content/arti...