Hi, I'm John Hawks.
I'm a paleoanthropologist, exploring the ancient world of humans and fossil human relatives.
I write about the science of human origins, and how our ancient past can help make sense of today's world.
You can follow my writing here, or subscribe to have articles sent when they are published. Keep checking in for more changes.
What color were Neandertals?
Even with whole genomes, scientists can't say very precisely what pattern of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation was in ancient populations like the Neandertals.
The top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2022
Research on ancient genomes has moved way beyond population mixture into broader questions about how ancient people lived and interacted with their environments.
A transition to a new platform for my words and video
The look and feel of the site is changing, with a new emphasis on subscriptions and connections.
Interaction and mixture: big picture and small
From the level of function of a single gene up to the movements of entire populations, our evolution was built from mixture.
Guide to Australopithecus species
These ancient human relatives include the first species with evidence of upright walking and running like humans. They represent more than a third of our evolutionary history.
The real story of myosin, jaw muscles, and ancient brains
The provocative idea that our genus arose with a deactivated muscle gene turned out to be wrong.
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 ancestral humans.
Climate models, Neandertals, and Denisovans
A new paper on biogeography of Neandertals and Denisovans raises ideas about the interactions of these groups.
Tracing the genetic histories of ghost apes
The footprints of extinct lineages are the closest we have to a fossil record of the African apes.
Research highlight: Growth and development in human origins
A report from a Wenner-Gren-supported workshop innovating ways forward for understanding hominin ontogenies
Ancient apocalypses are so disappointing
The archaeological and paleoclimate records usually lack the resolution to see how meteorites or volcanoes mattered to our ancestors.
Debates about Neandertal cave art miss the point of their visual culture
Humans today live in visually rich environments, and it's increasingly clear that Neandertals shaped their visual environments also.
Research highlight: Homo naledi teeth
In a massive new paper, a team led by Lucas Delezene provides descriptions of the dental evidence from the Dinaledi Chamber.
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.
Did two pulses of evolution supercharge human cognition?
An intriguing new study tries to tabulate the ages of genetic variants associated with human phenotypes, but its claims about recent brain evolution may not pan out.
Lecture: Finding ancient minds in the human evolutionary tree
Insights into the behavioral capabilities of ancient human relatives are beginning to show that some of the abilities we consider human go surprisingly deep in our ancestry.
New evidence is revealing the ages of death, birth, and menarche in Neandertals
Analysis of dental cementum is yielding new insights into the ages when ancient people faced significant physiological stresses.
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 drive.
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