John Hawks

John Hawks

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A look at the Neanderthal deep cave structures from Bruniquel
Ten years after describing the site, new work details ancient access to the cave.
 • John Hawks
A shorter, sharper Out-of-Africa story is emerging
A new study of genomic ancestry in Papua New Guinea supports a short timeline for the dispersal of modern people
 • John Hawks
Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2025
In a year full of Denisovan discoveries, I look at some of the top highlights of research.
 • John Hawks
Tracing the wave of Neanderthal-modern interactions
A rapid expansion of modern people ran into Neanderthals and mixed with them nearly to the ends of their range.
 • John Hawks
How archaeologists are missing Pleistocene cultures
I propose a “Culture First” way of looking at ancient remains, instead of the “Culture Last” assumption so pervasive in the field.
 • John Hawks
The gene from Denisovan to Neanderthal to modern mucus
A “genetic sandwich” reveals how a block of DNA entered several populations successively and was affected by natural selection.
 • John Hawks
Matrilineal networks may be the key to understanding Neanderthal mixture
A new study focusing on the X chromosome finds repeated maternal dispersal bias in Neanderthal and modern evolution.
 • John Hawks
How human evolution has been speeding up
Providing some of the missing background for new research on natural selection from ancient DNA
 • John Hawks
The problem skulls from Yunxian
The relationships of fossils from deep time in China may help reveal ancestral connections for the Denisovans
 • John Hawks
Did Levallois tools make Neanderthals human?
Evaluating a recent hypothesis from the geneticist David Reich, focusing on range expansion from Africa.
 • John Hawks
When did human chromosome 2 fuse?
More and more, it looks like this event happened shortly before a million years ago, in the common ancestors of Neandertal, Denisovan, and African…
 • John Hawks
A deep record of unknown hominins from Sulawesi
A cave known as Leang Bulu Bettue provides a record from the Middle Pleistocene across the arrival of modern people.
 • John Hawks
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