John Hawks

John Hawks

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introgression

Lactase and the Neandertals
New research shows that a common gene variant that may explain some lactase persistence in East Asia is introgressed from Neandertals.
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John Hawks
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
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
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.
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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…
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John Hawks
Climate models, Neandertals, and Denisovans
A new paper on biogeography of Neandertals and Denisovans raises ideas about the interactions of these groups.
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John Hawks
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.
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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
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…
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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
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
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