john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

Losers of the day

Thu, 2009-10-01 18:30 -- John Hawks

Now that Ardipithecus has descended from heaven to join us mortals, who is grumbling the worst?

  • Nature. After a long run of Middle Awash articles through the 1990's and 2000's, what did they do to lose this one?
  • Toumaï. If Ardi had a primitive apelike postcranium, how bipedal could this 7-million-year-old fossil have been?
  • Morphometricians. Lovejoy accuses them of ignoring both "careful comparative anatomy" and evo-devo. That's bound to leave a mark.
  • Chimpanzees. OK, the chimps don't care -- but they're looking more and more irrelevant to interpreting early hominins.
  • Anybody else working on early hominin locomotion. Back to the drawing board.

Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.