John Hawks

2 weeks ago | johnhawks.net | John Hawks

Many ancient landscapes are drowned today beneath the sea. For most of the last million years a large volume of Earth’s water was locked up in great ice sheets across North America, Asia, and Europe. As a result, the seas ranged as low as 120 meters or more below their present level. Ancient humans and other animals ranged across the exposed areas of the continental shelf. These are the areas that once connected islands to continents, that flanked the ancient mouths of rivers and ancient shorelines.

3 weeks ago | johnhawks.net | John Hawks

Every person’s genome has a few stretches of DNA that stand out as different from most of humanity. Some are traces of ghost populations: ancient groups that became extinct, but not before contributing some of their own genes to other populations that survived. Geneticists have identified some of these ghosts. Everyone shares some of these quirky sequences with Neanderthals or Denisovans, long-lost groups that persist today only within living people’s genomes. But other groups remain a mystery.

1 month 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 month 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.

1 month 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.