John Hawks

John Hawks

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history of paleoanthropology

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
Gathering the Ancestors
The largest exhibition of hominin fossils in history brought together science, the public, and geopolitics at the height of the Cold War.
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John Hawks
The circumstances of the Taung discovery
The textbook story of the fossil leaves out a wider context in which scientists interpreted the first evidence of Australopithecus.
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John Hawks
A look at the Maba hominin skull
Found in 1958, the skull is one of a handful of fossil hominins from southern China that may be connected with the Denisovans.
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John Hawks
A look at the fossil skull from Steinheim
The skull provides some of the best evidence for the ancestral population of Neandertals, and had a tumultuous history in the decades after its…
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John Hawks
A sad end for the Journal of Human Evolution
A joint statement announces the resignation of the entire editorial board, while disclosing for the first time the use of AI in article production.
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John Hawks
Did scientists miss a fake Neandertal for 25 years?
An investigation claims dozens of cases of misdated bones in Rheinland-Pfalz, including the purported Ochtendung Neandertal.
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John Hawks
“Lucy”, superstar of evolution, at fifty
Today's science has broadened enormously since the 1970s but the iconic fossil still has an important place in understanding our ancient past.
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John Hawks
What do we know about the ancestry of Homo erectus?
A creation interest group takes a quote from me, and I look back at a classic paper.
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John Hawks
A remembrance of Frans de Waal
Among many highlights of this primatologist's work, he maintained that humans are not unique or separated from other primates.
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John Hawks
Secrets within the teeth of the first Homo fossils
New studies of the enamel-dentin junction show that early members of our genus may have been less distinctive than we think
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John Hawks
Lecture: Opening new frontiers in human origins
At a memorial for Richard Leakey, I shared some ideas about where technology and new discoveries will take paleoanthropology over the next decade.
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John Hawks
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