john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

A hobbit Internationale

Sun, 2007-08-05 14:14 -- John Hawks

There was an international meeting in Indonesia about the Flores hominids last week, including scientific presentations and a visit to the cave. I have a regular correspondent who very kindly gave me a short report on some of the proceedings, which included CT scans of the mastoid process (See here for why that may be relevant).

Reporter Elizabeth Culotta was at the meeting, so there will likely be an article about it in Science somewhere in the next few issues.

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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.