Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution | PNAS Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we found that selection h...

Was argued that this would be the case by @johnhawks.net and others 20 years ago.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Thanks for the shout out!

Two images. On left, a stone flake with an encrusted reddish-brown area on the right side of the surface we see. On right, a close-up image of some of the encrustation.

In 2015, the late Paola Villa and collaborators described a stone flake from Sibudu Cave, 49,000 years old, encrusted with an ancient paint made from powdered red ochre and milk from an antelope. They speculated the milk came from a kill of a lactating female.

Image: Villa and coauthors

Thanks for reading!

U.S. federal support for human origins research may be over The field is generating more new discoveries than ever, but significant setbacks for students and many researchers.

The National Science Foundation has proposed eliminating the directorate that includes most of the federal funding for fieldwork and research in human origins. It's a sudden acceleration of a decades-long trend. I comment on what this means.

www.johnhawks.net/p/us-federal...

Could Antoni Leeuwenhoek have discovered Mendel’s laws if he had run a little experiment with rabbits? Fascinating historical detail here.

matthewcobb2.substack.com/p/two-misint...

Anthropology Watch - American Anthropological Association Anthropology Watch Program Tracker displaying closures and changes to anthropology programs at universities.

New Anthropology Watch page from @americananthro.bsky.social is tracking program closures and suspensions of admissions at universities and colleges. Currently listing six graduate programs with admissions pauses, six impending program closures.

americananthro.org/anthropology...

Ancient handaxes made from geodes New work describes exceptional artifacts from the Sakhnin valley of Israel.

I took some time to wonder at the beautiful newly-described handaxes and other artifacts from near Sakhnin, Israel, where Acheulean artisans used geodes and fossil-bearing nodules for knapping.

www.johnhawks.net/p/ancient-ha...

There's a book for this! Probably we're adaptable in a reasonable time, with trade-offs.

mitpress.mit.edu/978026205151...

Flexed burials on the right: A sign of Neanderthal-modern exchange? New work at a site of similar age to Skhūl and Qafzeh suggests cultural sharing among groups of different biological ancestry.

Burial of the dead is one of the few ways that people’s skeletons can tell us directly about their cultures. When very different kinds of people share similar burial practices, it raises the possibility of cultural exchanges between them.

www.johnhawks.net/p/tinshemet-...

Left side view of a fossil lower jaw, the bone a mottled black and brown color, teeth off-white, against a black background with millimeter scale bar at the bottom. The top right corner bears the crest of the University of the Witwatersrand where the fossil is housed.

Since this #FossilFriday is 3/27, check out StW 327: a hardy left lower jaw of a juvenile Australopithecus africanus from Sterkfontein, South Africa. Might display tooth eruption like humans and Homo naledi (doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...)

Image: human-fossil-record.org/index.php?/c...

Looking into a Neanderthal gallery at La Roche-Cotard An enigmatic “mask” comes from outside a cave filled with Neanderthal markings.

La Roche-Cotard is a remarkable cave site used by Neanderthals before 51,000 years ago and then closed. Inside are enigmatic parallel lines, geometric patterns, and ochre dots. Outside, a strange stone resembling a human face was unearthed.

www.johnhawks.net/p/looking-in...

Clovis-first is March of Progress applied to the Americas. No failures, everything steady exponential growth. Life didn’t happen that way. But the Clovis phenomenon was important and real. No contradiction there.

Did Levallois tools make Neanderthals human? Evaluating a recent hypothesis from the geneticist David Reich, focusing on range expansion from Africa.

“Ancient peoples who could trade genes could surely also trade ideas. Understanding such multiregional connections has long been important to my own work: Episodes of gene flow, idea exchanges, and coevolution of genes and cultural adaptations.”

www.johnhawks.net/p/did-levall...

Did Levallois tools make Neanderthals human? Evaluating a recent hypothesis from the geneticist David Reich, focusing on range expansion from Africa.

A new preprint from the geneticist David Reich focuses on the interactions of Neanderthal and African ancestral humans 250,000 years ago. Many parts I wholly agree with, but the key idea about Levallois technology is out of step with today's data.

www.johnhawks.net/p/did-levall...

A not so bold proposal for the future of scientific publishing Around 15 years ago I wrote a blog post about how we could open up more of the scientific process. The particular emphasis that I had in min...

"Preprint servers are a time machine, they move everyone forward 12 months and speed up the exchange of ideas"
ht @pedrobeltrao.bsky.social www.evocellnet.com/2021/06/a-no...

My university does not subscribe to Nature Ecology and Evolution, and I typically do not read or write about articles in the journal, even when written by good colleagues. I know people may be chasing that one for the name and prestige, but sorry, I'm priced out.

I'm an optimist when it comes to what we can discover about the inner lives of these hominins. It's impossible for me to look at those tiny spots of fire and not see some kind of care was taken in their placement. These places held a kind of power, at least in the imagination.

A minor update but it does add more context to the discovery and helps confirm the main observations. Also the linked paper has some additional photos of various regions in the cave system.

Interestingly, when you write the same number several times in an essay, readers tend to complain about the repetition!

A look at the Neanderthal deep cave structures from Bruniquel Ten years after describing the site, new work details ancient access to the cave.

Early Neanderthals walked into this cave, went three football fields into the earth, created 15-foot-wide bubbles of rock, lit and tended small fires upon them. Then they left.

This unique find has implications for how we underestimate many past peoples.

www.johnhawks.net/p/a-look-at-...

Boomerang made from mammoth tusk with 5 cm scale

A boomerang made from mammoth ivory, from Obłazowa Cave, Poland. Dating to around 40,000 years ago, the object was shaped and well-used, with signs of polish in the areas where a right-handed person would have handled and thrown it.

Photo: Sahra Talamo and coworkers (2025, scale=5cm)

Saw another article today headlined, "The Real Paleo Diet". Is there any more hackneyed concept at this point? Do people still click on this?

I love reading John's substack, but this one has me particularly chuffed since he is highlighting the part of this new paper that got me most excited (and was ignored in a lot of the coverage). He gives a great summary of identifying matrilineal kin networks/ -based migration in the human genome.

Matrilineal networks may be the key to understanding Neanderthal mixture A new study focusing on the X chromosome finds repeated maternal dispersal bias in Neanderthal and modern evolution.

I'm pretty excited about a new study of the African influence on Neanderthal X chromosomes. It's because a pattern of dispersal of early modern people based on matrilineal kin networks makes a lot of sense.

www.johnhawks.net/p/matrilinea...

Busts of ancient species of human relatives on top of a cabinet

Busts of the ancestors watching over my work this week. They seem confident it will all work out.

How Sahelanthropus tchadensis moved Not quite like a hominin, but with extended hip posture similar to Ardipithecus ramidus

The question of “is it a hominin” is much less relevant than it was 20 years ago.

“But in the period between 8 million and 5 million years ago, the genetic evidence suggests the ancestral populations were mixing with each other, occasionally exchanging DNA.”

www.johnhawks.net/p/how-sahela...

Fossil skull of Australopithecus sediba

Great day today working in the lab with this guy and many other classic fossils. As always, remarkable what they have to teach us.

(MH1, holotype of Australopithecus sediba)

Best to both of you!

How Sahelanthropus tchadensis moved Not quite like a hominin, but with extended hip posture similar to Ardipithecus ramidus

I’ve been trying to understand this fossil for more than twenty years. The femur and ulna are the first real clues about its locomotion, but specialists who have studied the bones all disagree about what they say. I took a deep dive to understand the big picture.

www.johnhawks.net/p/how-sahela...