Vanguard Cave, Gibraltar, is known today for Neanderthal behavioral evidence, including a remarkable controlled hearth for production of pitch from gum rockrose. In 2021, the team discovered a chamber sealed for more than 40,000 years, results to come! johnhawks.net/p/a-visit-to-v…

From 50-year behavioral archives at Gombe to multi-site studies across Africa, primatologists are uncovering how maternal attachment, social risk, and cognitive awareness shape responses to loss in wild populations. johnhawks.net/p/grieving-for…

Always happy to add new Denisovans. This is quite a record now from ancient proteins, five sites that span a geographic area encompassing all of China. These people had remarkable stories we are starting to understand how to tell. johnhawks.net/p/new-denisova…

Dunbar’s number is one of those concepts that is just further entrenched by every demonstration that it’s not true. The final boss of 1990s pop science myths.

Paleoanthropology needs to abandon the notion of a geographical "origin" - a very simplistic monolineage concept invalidated by overwhelming fossil and molecular evidence of a complex reticulate network for the entire recognized Homo existence period. Even at (much) deeper time depths, and given a biased and fragmented fossil record, disputed lithic evidence plus historical biases, the presumption of a single "origin" biogeography is also problematic in light of hominid and hominin hybridization - often the result of contact between previously separated biogeographies. This was clearly a multi-regional evolutionary process dominated by punctuated phases of gene flow between highly mobile, adaptive and intelligent species, and probably reaching back into the Miocene as Eurasian hominine-like fossil discoveries would suggest.

“In broad strokes, it appears that the modern human population evolved from a merger of two ancient groups around 300,000 years ago, roughly 80% from one, and 20% from the other.” Who were these stem populations? Here is some informed speculation. johnhawks.net/p/modern-human…

Meet the most glamourous Neanderthal knife ever. See the shiny spot, left by the knapper exactly in the middle? Tell me, they were not aestetically sensitive. #RajCave what a cave

I know people think the Monty Hall problem is a game show trick or a silly math puzzle, but the fact that most people get the logic wrong can have real world consequences. I'll walk you through an example I teach in my undergraduate Human Genetics class.

Two new Denisovan fossils have emerged from the seafloor of the Penghu Strait, near Taiwan. I look at what these tell us about the survival of Denisovans into the time frame of the “classic” Neanderthals. johnhawks.net/p/legs-of-the-…

“An average effect size of 285 grams per copy means that around 200,000 metric tons of human muscle can be attributed to this Neanderthal inheritance. That’s two aircraft carriers worth of mass.” johnhawks.net/p/how-neandert…

The story of “The petite bodies of the robust australopithecines” is changing in light of the last 15 years of evidence, and footprints are leading the way. johnhawks.net/p/the-big-feet…

Interesting twist in a new paper: Introgression deserts aren't actually deserted. “Our findings suggest that ghost ancestry is often present in previously defined archaic deserts, providing additional context to putative Homo sapiens–specific selection.” science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

The 2026 Buck Moon as it appeared over Southern Arizona last night. Think clouds acted as a prism, splitting the broadband light from the moon into a stunning array of colors. This is an HDR composite captured from two photos, one exposed for the moon, one exposed for the halo.

Long before Florence Nightingale or modern data science, women were likely the first to track cycles, patterns, and records. Alexey Pomigalov digs into that lineage in Nightingale, connecting Stone Age bones to the software cracking cave art today! buff.ly/aRALcHX

I’m fascinated today reading a recent article about insect-eating and ancient dental calculus. In brief, Neanderthals have as much insect DNA in their dental calculus as western chimpanzees, while ancient European modern people have a lot less. johnhawks.net/p/traces-of-in…

It is a prediction of the antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis of aging and a good reason why understanding evolution matters

The first molecular evidence of Homo naledi from at least 20 individuals shows that none are male. I've taken a deep dive into how the paleoproteomics works, what it says about naledi relationships, and why this result is less surprising than it sounds. johnhawks.net/p/the-first-mo…

It's a tough question: How many groups of Denisovans were there, and which were ancestors of living people? Recent studies had me thinking we might be approaching an answer, but after looking at the details I'm not so sure. johnhawks.net/p/how-many-den…

It is a very challenging position that @NeilShubin walks into as leader of @theNASciences with partisan division over many areas of scientific work. Illuminating interview with @carlzimmer as he takes office. nytimes.com/2026/06/12/scien…

That was demoralizing for reviewers - and bleak for the science landscape. An enormous amount of time and effort is devoted to unproductive grant-writing. (11/10)