John Hawks Anthropology Weblog

An interesting story:
One of the graves contained a woman with three children, at least two of whom were not hers. The researchers suggest the woman might be their aunt or a stepmother. Another gra...

Scott Simpson and colleagues describe their find of a 1.5-million-year old, relatively complete pelvis of early Homo from Gona Ethiopia. The paper is in Science this week.
[UPDATE (2008-11-15): I'...

There has been much wringing of hands about the definition of the term "gene." The worries aren't new, but they have become a topic this week because of a NY Times article by Carl Zimmer.
It seems ...

Oxford scholars Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis have a short essay about the anatomical drawing of Christopher Wren in Nature this week.
Wren's perspectograph was probably used to trace the topography...

I'm sitting down in front of the TV to live-blog the Nova episode on the Flores fossils, "Alien from Earth." It has the typical Nova high production values. We'll see what they show:
7:02: Opening ...

The NY Times covers the 20th anniversary of Mystery Science Theater 3000:
“MST3K” may have been the first television show in which the commentary was more important than what was being commented o...

In the random corners of Google, I was led to a short 2004 letter in American Anthropologist by Daniel Wildcat, Irena Sumi and Vine Deloria, Jr. I found this paragraph thought-provoking:
No doubt o...

The web site for the Hobbit episode of Nova has opened. It let's you e-mail questions for Mike Morwood, features some graphics with endocast scans and some video from the program.
The site also in...

Julien Riel-Salvatore on peer review:
Publishing paleoanthropologically-themed research can sometimes feel like you're entering the Thunderdome, a lesson I learned first-hand in my very first peer-...

Elizabeth Pennisi writes this week a news focus in Science about the genome region labeled 17q21.31. I'm probably one of the few people who would recognize that address right away: A recently selec...