John Hawks

1 week ago | johnhawks.net | John Hawks

Compared to most kinds of mammals, fossils of our own family are pretty numerous. A century and a half of discovery has given us thousands of pieces of ancient humans, ancestors, and relatives. Even so, most of those fossils come from a few times and places, and a few branches of our family tree. Amid this crowded cabinet, a few ancient species can claim only a pittance of fragments. These cases can be the most misleading. This Substack is reader-supported.

1 week ago | johnhawks.net | John Hawks

As my classes were ending this week, I gave students a chance to ask questions that might invite more speculative answers. The very first question struck a chord: "How threatened do you feel the current political climate is regarding human evolution, medical genetics, and your own research?”Wow. That was a stunner. My student wasn’t the first to ask. Many people have been asking me: How is the current political situation affecting my work, my research, my students? I answered honestly.

2 weeks ago | johnhawks.net | John Hawks

In an editorial in this week's Science, the journal's editor Holden Thorp develops an argument that the notion of “scientific consensus” has confused public discussion of science. In Thorp's view, the public misunderstands “consensus” as something like the result of an opinion poll. He cites the communication researcher Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who observes that arguments invoking “consensus” are easy for opponents to discredit merely by finding some scientists who disagree.

1 month ago | johnhawks.net | John Hawks

One of the most enduring questions about the discoveries of Homo naledi fossils in the Rising Star cave system: How did these ancient hominins find their way into the remote Dinaledi Subsystem of the cave? This area today is 30 meters below the surface and more than 100 meters from the closest surface entrance, via a series of vertical descents, tight turns, and squeezes of less than 30 cm. The most extreme part of this route is the final descent.

1 month ago | johnhawks.net | John Hawks

Last month, Yossi Zaidner and coworkers released a fascinating analysis of the cultural materials from Tinshemet Cave, Israel. This was the first major release of information from the new excavations that began at the site in 2017. Tinshemet is today a small cave, located in the Nahal Beit Arif around 5 km east of Ben Gurion Airport. The cave was surveyed in the 1940s by the archaeologist Moshe Stekelis, who identified Middle Paleolithic artifacts there.