Middle Stone Age
Four amazing Stone Age sites with wooden artifacts
From Africa, Asia, and Europe, these sites give us a rare window into the ways that organic technology shaped ancestral lives.
![Four views of a double-pointed throwing stick in center, with detail of sharpened points at top left and bottom right.](/content/images/size/w1460/2024/04/milks-double-pointed-stick-schoningen-plos-2023.jpg)
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 animals.
Lecture: How Homo naledi matters to our origins
A lecture in 2020 covering some of the latest research and new questions arising from the Rising Star cave system.
![John Hawks at a podium that is labeled with the CARTA logo](/content/images/size/w1460/2022/11/john-hawks-speaking-at-carta-2020.jpg)
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.
![Three skulls in oblique view](/content/images/size/w1460/2022/01/neo-florisbad-jebel-irhoud-1-oblique-compared-1.jpg)
Evidence of cooking rhizomes from an early Middle Stone Age context in Border Cave, South Africa
Border Cave has exceptional preservation of plant remains, giving a window into the diets of hominins.
![View from inside a cave looking at railing and sandbags](/content/images/size/w1460/2022/01/border-cave-wikipedia.jpg)
The “amazing” Boskops
A book tries to revive the myth of a large-brained ancient race in southern Africa. It was wrong in 1958 and remains wrong today.
![Photo of Boskop skull fragments next to a line drawing of the reconstructed skull](/content/images/size/w1460/2023/04/boskop-broom-1918-composite-1.jpg)