John Hawks

John Hawks

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modern human origins

A hard ceiling on modern human dispersal
Neandertal DNA in some of the oldest modern human genomes establishes a short timeline of 50,000 years for the out-of-Africa founder event.
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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
Explaining the X chromosome hole in Neandertal ancestry
Natural selection reduced the variation on human X chromosomes in populations with the most Neandertal and Denisovan mixture. It may have been meiotic…
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John Hawks
The Nesher Ramla site: a third way between Neandertals and modern humans?
Fragments representing people who lived just before Skhūl and Qafzeh seem outside the expectations for these “early modern humans” or for Neandertals.
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John Hawks
Fossil profile: Skhūl 1 and the mixing of populations
A child's skull from Mount Carmel gives an occasion to look at the history of ideas about population mixture.
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John Hawks
Zlatý kůň and the Neandertal heritage of first Europeans
A skull from Czechia represents an individual from one of the earliest European modern human populations to encounter Neandertals.
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John Hawks
Fossil profile: BOU-VP-16/1 and mortuary practice
A fossil from Bouri, Ethiopia, represents an individual whose skull was processed after his death.
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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
There are no “anatomically modern” elephants. Why do we treat humans differently?
A quote from Phillip Tobias illustrates the strange way that we talk about human variation compared to other species.
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John Hawks
How old is the "early Homo sapiens" skull from Florisbad?
Introducing a new preprint in which I examine critically the evidence for a skull thought to be contemporary with Homo naledi.
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John Hawks
How much do Y chromosome haplogroups shape our views of modern human origins?
The divergent A00 haplogroup roots the modern human Y chromosome tree deeper in time.
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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
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