John Hawks

John Hawks

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Africa

The contribution of segmental duplications to human diversity
New studies based on long-read sequencing open a new way of looking at variation of these structural variants.
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John Hawks
Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2023
This year's highlights include ways of finding ancient relatives, how some phenotypes evolved in ancient people, and trace evidence from artifacts.
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John Hawks
Tracing the signature of African-to-Neandertal gene flow
A new study of African genetic variation yields a more accurate picture of the genetic exchanges between ancient Africans and Neandertals 250,000 years…
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John Hawks
Ghostbusters of human origins
Humans tend to mix and interact with each other. Geneticists are once again starting to take that seriously, changing their view of our origins.
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John Hawks
Kabwe: A famous fossil unearthed amid the human costs of mining
Mining led to the skull's discovery, destroyed its context, and left a century-long legacy of lead poisoning.
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John Hawks
Neandertals got 6% of their genomes from Africa
An analysis by Melissa Hubisz and coworkers finds that mtDNA is not all that Neandertals received from our African ancestors
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John Hawks
How much Neandertal DNA do today's African peoples have?
New research shows that today's populations in Africa have around one third the Neandertal ancestry as people in Eurasia.
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John Hawks
The transition to Middle Stone Age from Acheulean did not make humans more deadly
Reading a meta-analysis of faunal data by Geoff Smith and coworkers that concludes that all Middle Pleistocene African peoples hunted the same prey…
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John Hawks
Three big insights into our African origins
Recently, I delivered a lecture to the American Society for Human Genetics, focusing on the African record of human origins.
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John Hawks
Growing genetic data suggest a two-phase model for prehistoric population expansions in Africa
I describe results from two papers of African genetic variation, which show that the population growth from agriculture followed an earlier demographic…
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John Hawks
Modern human origins was more interesting than a single point of dispersal
A study of SNP variation across Africa enables us to look at a structured ancestral population long before 100,000 years ago.
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John Hawks
Gertrude Caton Thompson within the history of archaeology in Africa
As I read through the 20th-century archaeologist's memoirs, I find the flavor of the field in the 1920s and 1930s.
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John Hawks
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