The funniest thing to me is that nobody knows when hominins lost the baculum, and I've spent a lot of time carefully examining odd bone fragments thinking that I had a better chance of finding one from Rising Star than anyone's ever had anywhere else.

This is really the frontier of anthropology and genetics in my opinion. Culture is to humans as water is to fish; essential, in contact with our every surface, so that it becomes unnoticed until it suddenly changes. www.johnhawks.net/p/how-human-...

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

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)

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

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)

Not a bad morning working on site today. Always grateful for this beautiful place.

Pretty sure it’s a “no shadow” kind of day

Here at home we're at -18° with a windchill of -32° this morning (temps in F, that's -28° and -36°C). Exceptionally, @uwmadison.bsky.social has cancelled classes, and I expect the wind off Mendota is a lot colder. Stay warm out there, everyone in the upper Midwest! Photo: @uwmadison.bsky.social

Misliya Cave, Israel, is in the limestone massif known as Mount Carmel, looking west onto the Mediterranean. Breccia deposits from the mostly-deroofed cave include a human maxilla and early Middle Paleolithic artifacts from 177,000–195,000 years ago. Photo: John Hawks

Dungo IV is an archaeological site on the Atlantic coast of Angola. It is one of a few coastal Earlier Stone Age sites in southern Africa with clear evidence of geological age, dating to around 600,000 years ago. Tools here were made from quartz beach cobbles. Image: Isis Mesfin et al. (2023)

Ushbulak, Kazakhstan, is a stratified open-air site with archaeological finds dating to between 42,000 and 36,000 years ago. Blades and blade cores from the site resemble similar-age initial Upper Paleolithic sites in the Altai and Mongolia. Photo: Mikhail Shunkov and coworkers

This is a neat new study using LIDAR to document pre-colonization raised agricultural beds along the Menominee River that separates Wisconsin from Michigan, north of Green Bay. “massive field systems like these were much more common than previously recognized” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In writing about the new discovery of a tooth of an archaic human from Gua Danang, Sarawak, I reviewed what is known about the “Deep Skull” from nearby Gua Niah: one of the earliest-known modern people in island Southeast Asia, adapted to island rainforest life. www.johnhawks.net/p/a-possible...

Con Moong Cave, Vietnam, has evidence of ash, burials, and shell middens from the terminal Pleistocene. Even earlier—by 42,000 years ago—people used the cave, alternating with periods when bats were present and humans absent, evidenced by sediment geochemistry. Photo: Thanh Hoa Newspaper

The Yarımburgaz cave complex is around 22 km west of Istanbul, in the Thracian part of Turkey. An upper cave is the location of a Byzantine church, while a lower chamber has much older Middle Pleistocene record of choppers, modified flake tools, and remains of cave bears. Photo: CeeGee (Wikipedia)

Ghar-e Boof, Iran, has Upper Paleolithic stone and faunal assemblages from 42,000–35,000 years ago. The people who used the cave over time shifted their hunting toward more difficult-to-hunt small animals, using tools made with bladelets. Photo: Nicholas Conard

Oued Bousmane, Algeria, is a striking rockshelter on Djebel Dyr. The Late Pleistocene sediments in the site contain stone assemblages of the kind categorized as Aterian across North Africa, although with few of the tanged points that are the type indicator of that industry. Photo: Nadia Bahra

Cueva de Nerja, Spain, has many paintings from Magdalenian (around 15,000 years ago) and earlier periods. These include depictions of fish, rare in the cave art of other sites. Remains of fish are also well represented in the bone assemblage from the cave. Photo: Diputación de Málaga

Amud Cave, Israel. Years ago I hiked to the site, named for the striking natural pillar of rock, just north of the Sea of Galilee. Here, archaeologists unearthed the remains of several Neandertals, who lived between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.

Maybe we got up to some nonsense at the end of semester gathering

Sometimes I’m in caves for nonprofessional reasons. Beautiful a capella holiday concert last night.

Ancestors around the table can try anyone's patience

We saw these from home last night but it turns out my office had an even better view. Wonderful aurora photo by Xiaomeng Shen in front of the Carillon tower and Social Sciences Building at @uwmadison.bsky.social

Great day yesterday sharing fossil hominins with more than a hundred sixth-graders here in Madison. I was able to tell them that—even though many are extinct today—our fossil relatives had families, they came from many parts of the world, and they came in all colors that today's people do. #inktober

The D3444 calvaria was uncovered at Dmanisi, Georgia, in 2002. The individual represented by this cranium lived sometime around 1.77 million years ago, and most scientists attribute the fossil to Homo erectus. The individual had lost nearly all teeth at the time of death. #inktober

The skull from near Herto, Ethiopia, BOU-VP-16/1 represents a person who lived sometime between 162,000 and 147,000 years ago. The skull bears two cutmarks on the right parietal and temporal, suggesting that other individuals may have conducted mortuary practices upon his death. #inktober

The rockshelter at La Ferrassie in the Dordogne of southern France contained the remains of several Neanderthals. The most complete of the skeletons was La Ferrassie 1, who lived an estimated 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. His body like the others was buried, likely by members of his group. #inktober

KNM-WT 17000 is one of the most iconic skulls in the hominin fossil record due to its natural manganese staining, rendering it as the Black Skull. At around 2.5 million years old it is one of the first with pronounced large jaw musculature that would characterize big-molared Paranthropus. #inktober