Boomerang made from mammoth tusk with 5 cm scale
A boomerang made from mammoth ivory, from ObΕazowa 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.
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.
The question of βis it a homininβ is much less relevant than it was 20 years ago.
βBut 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.β
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!
Iβve 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...
Really happy to see this collaborative work led by my student Ayken Askapuli published now in @pnas.org Ancient DNA from a Golden Horde tomb!
My latest for @arstechnica.com explores what it means that we have 1.77 million year-old Homo erectus fossils in central China, and whether Homo erectus was really the first hominin to migrate that far. π§ͺ
Kudu
Not a bad morning working on site today. Always grateful for this beautiful place.
Really outstanding paper!
Thereβs more variety among the Paisley material including cattail, bulrushes and tule
βThe assemblage is dominated by 14 three-strand braided cordage pieces, 13 of which are made from sagebrush bark. Examples made on fibers other than sagebrush include one made from dogbane (Apocynum sp.; CMC21-47) and another made from either bitterbrush or juniper bark.β doi.org/10.1126/scia...
I agree it's interesting. Twisted fibers go way back, even to Neanderthal times, as do perforated bars for twisting. My thought is that the fibers here may be tough to use that way
I think many are braided from strands of twisted ply, compound method. Braiding may be a bit easier to incorporate shorter fibers into longer strands.
Anthropology the Gathering #3: From Blade Runner to Luis Arraez Edition (plus Star Wars and power, democracy, anthro community, coastal anthropology, and the value of drawing cell phones): anthropologia.org/2026/02/15/a... #anthrosky #anthropology #roundup
I love it when new archaeological research is coupled with beautiful photographs of the artifacts. Exciting work on the exceptional Younger Dryas-age organic technologies of some of North Americaβs first peoples.
www.johnhawks.net/p/complex-fi...
Yes the "cognitive niche", "generalist specialist niche" and other "niche" concepts that fall outside the Eltonian niche concept certainly are more aligned with the "niche construction" perspective and are fairly often misconstrued as stories of preadaptation.
Not defending the EES, I just want to observe that this same line of critique applies to many explanations in mainstream human evolution research. For instance, the "generalist-specialist" idea is a kind of meta-adaptation hypothesis.
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
βPaisley Caves and Monte Verde contained perishable items that predate the Younger Dryas.β
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
And earthworms
Statue of Darwin at Natural History Museum, London. Text reads "The most humble organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our feet; and no one with an unbiased mind can study any living creature, however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvellous structure and properties."
Darwin's writing has spoken to me over the years in many ways. One rabbit hole took me deep into the writing of the historian Alfred Crosby, who found Darwinβs keen observations about the effects of plagues on the demographic destiny of peoples.
www.johnhawks.net/p/investigat...
New excavations at the Grotta Guattari, just south of Rome, have yielded beautiful new Neanderthal fossils. They may add a lot to our knowledge of how Neanderthals maintained their populations as they fled the advance of the ice sheets.
www.johnhawks.net/p/a-neandert...
There's quite a lot of research on this question and while it is hard to pin down, the evidence points to polygenic adaptation occurring across much of the last two million years, including some deep changes and at least one change in modern human genomes but not known Neanderthal genomes.
Really wonderful story about Lazarus Kgasi, a leader in South African paleontology at the Ditsong Museum of Natural History.
www.npr.org/2026/02/04/g...
The history of evolutionary ideas about chins took me to Darwin, Pliny the Elder, Stephen Jay Gould, and Theodore Roosevelt. It's an irresistable subject that has befuddled scientists all this time.
www.johnhawks.net/p/what-the-h...
Three snowflakes
Pretty sure itβs a βno shadowβ kind of day
