John Hawks

John Hawks

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More hominins raised from beneath the waves
Fossils from the Madura Strait of Indonesia remind us of the expansive sunken landscapes of our ancestors.
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John Hawks
Ghost populations in human origins
Genetic models are finding more and more unknown lineages. How real are they?
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John Hawks
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The problem when all the fossils are male
Protein data shows that most known Denisovan teeth come from male individuals, hamstringing attempts to understand the variation of this group.
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John Hawks
What I told my students about the threats to evolutionary science
I was floored by the question, but it matters. With U.S. funding crashing, what will happen to the future of the field?
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John Hawks

April 2025

Consilience, convergence, and consensus
A new editorial in Science questions the common understanding of “scientific consensus”, and I reflect on what makes science reliable.
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John Hawks
How do hominin fossils get their numbers?
Numbers for fossils, like AL 288-1, are nowhere near as iconic as names like “Lucy”, but have an important place in the study of paleoanthropology.
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John Hawks
How Homo naledi got into the Dinaledi Chamber
New research from Dirk van Rooyen gives the most detailed look ever at the entry path into the deepest parts of the Rising Star cave system.
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John Hawks
Tinshemet Cave and modern-Neandertal cultural interactions
New work at a site of similar age to Skhūl and Qafzeh suggests cultural sharing among groups of different biological ancestry.
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John Hawks

March 2025

Research highlight: Burials by Homo naledi
After two years of intense reviews and revision, the work on burial evidence from this ancient hominin finds acceptance.
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John Hawks
Lactase and the Neandertals
New research shows that a common gene variant that may explain some lactase persistence in East Asia is introgressed from Neandertals.
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John Hawks
A look at the Sima del Elefante face
When the global timeline passed one million years ago, more than half the span of hominin presence in Eurasia had already passed by.
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John Hawks
Plant-eating and meat-eating in Australopithecus
A new approach to sampling nitrogen-15 in tooth enamel opens a window into the diets of early hominins.
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John Hawks
© 2025 John Hawks
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