John Hawks · blog johnhawks.net (founded 2004, long known as John Hawks weblog) · American paleoanthropologist, professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a core member of the team studying Homo naledi from South Africa's Rising Star cave · Still active: latest post 27 September 2026 · Corpus: by his own 2022 count the archive held more than 4,700 posts, about 2.5 million words; across two platform moves since then he culled it by hand, and 280 posts are public today (October 2004 to September 2026; two are paid members' briefings, the rest free) · Two turning points: in 2022 he moved from a self-hosted site to Ghost and switched to long posts every two weeks plus email; in 2025 he moved again, to Substack · How posts were chosen: he has no "best of" page, so this page parsed all 280 posts and counted internal links (the most cross-referenced across years is the 2023 Ghostbusters of human origins, cited as late as 2026), then weighed Substack comments and likes (the 2026 "80-20 mixture" post leads the site with 26 comments and 233 likes) · This page draws on 20 posts read in full, from April 2005 to August 2026: four from the earliest fifth of the blog's span (October 2004 to February 2009), and posts from both sides of each platform move
In the autumn of 2008, the British geneticist Steve Jones announced once again, in a public lecture, that human evolution had more or less stopped. Young people hardly die anymore, fewer children are born to older fathers, and the world's populations are melting into one. As far back as 1995 he had told the New York Times that natural selection "has to some extent been repealed." He had been saying it for more than a decade, and the press loved it every time.
An American paleoanthropologist answered on his blog. The title: "Human evolution stopping? Wrong, wrong, wrong."
His name is John Hawks, and he had a number: a hundred. A year earlier he and four collaborators had published a paper in PNAS that scanned the human genome for variants recently pushed up by natural selection. Their conclusion was the opposite of Jones's: over the last few tens of thousands of years, human adaptive evolution had not slowed down. It had sped up, by about a hundredfold.
Where does the hundred come from? The core argument fits on a napkin. At the recent rate they measured, roughly half a new selected variant appears every year. If that rate had always held, then in the six million years since humans and chimpanzees parted (twelve million years of lineage, counting both sides) we should see about six million adaptive substitutions between the two species. But all the amino acid differences between humans and chimps add up to about 40,000, and perhaps a third of those were selected. The books don't balance. The only explanation left is that the fast rate is new.
Our evolution has recently accelerated by around 100-fold. And that's exactly what we would expect from the enormous growth of our population.Our new paper on why human evolution accelerated, 2007-12-12
Why should population size speed up evolution? Because useful mutations are vanishingly rare, and every new person is born carrying new ones. In 2026 he put it more memorably: "One hundred times more people is like buying a hundred times more lottery tickets." Farming, cities and livestock brought new diseases and new foods, which gave selection a direction; a booming population supplied more raw mutations. Multiply the two and you get acceleration.
The idea began with a polite wall. As a graduate student he burst into the office of the archaeologist Henry Wright: "Agriculture should have sped up human evolution!" Wright took a beat. "Well, yes. That makes sense. But how can you show it?" Hawks spent a decade answering, then waited nearly twenty years more. In 2026, David Reich's group used more than 15,000 ancient genomes to find over 400 signals of positive selection in western Eurasia over the past 10,000 years, and they too read the pattern as acceleration.
But "more people" is only half of this mind. The other half is "people connected to people." Hawks's master's adviser was Milford Wolpoff, standard-bearer of the multiregional model, who argued for a lifetime that gene flow among ancient human populations never stopped. Hawks carried that instinct until ancient DNA testified for it: in 2010 the Neandertal genome showed that most living people carry a little Neandertal DNA. So human history, he says, is not a tree ("A tree will never admit to exchanging sap between its branches") but a braided stream, with channels that split, rejoin and split again. In his words: "It's mixing all the way back."
By 2026 the stream had a sharper outline. Several teams, using different methods, independently found roughly the same answer: all living humans descend from a merger of two ancient populations about 300,000 years ago, about 80 percent from one and 20 percent from the other, and those two had separated around 1.5 million years ago. In 2017 Hawks had noticed a puzzling "wave" in genomic data. It now looks like the shadow of that merger.
Put the two halves together and you have the root question he has returned to for twenty years: human evolution is a history of how many people there were and how they were connected. More people, faster evolution. Tighter connections, and the family tree stops looking like a tree. He applies the same principle to science itself: open the fossil data, open the review process, write for everyone. Knowledge, in his view, also grows faster with more people taking part and more ties between them.
He may be wrong in places. He is a coauthor of the claim that Homo naledi buried its dead, a conclusion his colleagues still dispute, and he admits that his taste for mixture is a philosophical leaning. But he lays every step of his reasoning out in public, where anyone can take it apart line by line.
In 2001 John Hawks was a postdoc working on human genomics. The science writer Steve Olson came to interview him and got excited about some recent applied math: everyone alive today must share a common ancestor who lived within the last 5,000 years.
Everyone? Hawks asked. Even the descendants of people who reached the Americas more than 12,000 years ago?
Everyone, Olson said. From Aboriginal Australia to Tierra del Fuego. It was a simple consequence of math.
The logic goes like this. Going back, your ancestral "slots" double each generation: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents. Twenty generations back there are a million slots; forty back, a trillion, far more than the people alive then. The slots have to land on the same people, so lines of descent must cross over and over. In 1999 the statistician Joseph Chang proved that in a randomly mating population of N people, the most recent common ancestor of everyone lived about log₂N generations ago. For a million people, about 20 generations. When Olson, Chang and Douglas Rohde later added sparse migration between continents to the model, the answer became 3,000 to 4,000 years: 70 to 100 generations.
Hawks at the time was running gene-genealogy simulations all day, and he kept a different ledger in his head. You carry two copies of each gene, so tracing back you always have exactly two genetic ancestors for it, however big the family tree. Which gives this universal ancestor a strange property:
As special as this person is within our genealogy, it is very likely that most living people have inherited no DNA from this person at all.Humankind's last common ancestor lived a surprisingly short time ago, 2022-07-10
He wrote the story down twenty-one years later, and along the way delivered a line that stops you short:
All of us are distant cousins, and so were all of our parents. Each of us is inbred, it's just that most of us don't know who those shared relatives were.Same post
This one oddity holds the two things Hawks cares about most: how many people there are, and how they are connected. Make the numbers large and the connections dense, and human history starts to defy intuition. For twenty years of blogging he has mostly been doing the arithmetic on those two quantities.
As an undergraduate at Kansas State he majored in French, English and anthropology. The way he writes on the blog, taking a new scientific paper apart passage by passage to draw out its larger meaning, he learned as an English major; the method is called explication de texte. He did his graduate work at the University of Michigan, a master's under Milford Wolpoff and a dissertation titled The Evolution of Human Population Size. Today he is a professor of anthropology at UW–Madison. In 2013 he joined the expedition led by Lee Berger that pulled more than 1,200 hominin specimens out of the Rising Star cave; two years later they were named Homo naledi.
The blog started in 2004 on a second-hand Pentium server in his lab, running an open source Perl script. In the early years the site ran on art more than photographs, and "a surprising number of readers once were convinced that I must look like a red-headed caveman." When he changed platforms in 2022 he took stock: more than 4,700 posts, around 2.5 million words, and
80% of posts in my archive were read by fewer than 20 people last year, and half were read by fewer than 5 people.A transition to a new platform for my words and video, 2022-08-28
He called the archive "a lot like an attic full of old junk" and started checking it post by post, updating some and labeling others as historic documents. The 280 posts you can read on his site today are the ones he picked. He is still writing; in September 2026 he was describing a Neandertal stone tool workshop.
His dissertation title already shows his hand: the evolution of human population size. The root question he has not let go of in twenty years is this: how did the number of people, and the ways they were connected, shape human evolution?
He told the story of running into it in 2026. Trained to look at skeletons, he could see that the bones of early farmers had changed much faster than those of Pleistocene people. One day in graduate school he hurried into the office of the archaeologist Henry Wright:
“Agriculture should have sped up human evolution!” … “Well, yes. That makes sense. But how can you show it?”How human evolution has been speeding up, 2026-04-20
He has spent twenty years answering "how can you show it?"
What is striking is that in a long 2005 essay he turned the same lens of numbers and connections on his own field. The National Science Foundation had just begun requiring a data access plan with every physical anthropology grant. Fossils dug up decades earlier and formally published long ago, he wrote, still had no casts for sale and no public data:
I do not think it would be overstating the problem to suggest that perhaps half the people teaching human evolution in four-year universities have never touched a cast of a Hadar fossil.Data access to fossil hominins, reflecting on the NSF policy, 2005-04-16
Hadar is where "Lucy" was found. He quoted the leading fieldworker Tim White, who described paleoanthropology as an inverted pyramid: armchair commentators everywhere, producers of actual fossil data increasingly rare. Hawks rejected the image. The value of a fossil, he argued, comes from comparing it with other specimens and other species, and the fewer people who can make those comparisons, the more fragile the science. It had been reported that only one person had seen all the evidence for Miocene hominins; if the handful of experts review one another's papers, why should anyone else trust them? Newton spoke of standing on the shoulders of giants, Hawks wrote, but in this field "sometimes it seems more like Spinal Tap dwarves trodding on a tiny Stonehenge."
So the root question has two layers. One concerns ancient people: how population size and the links between groups set the pace and the shape of evolution. The other concerns us: how many people can see the evidence, and how tightly they are connected, sets how fast the science can grow. The three ideas below all grow out of this.
The mainstream intuition runs like this: once humans had culture, clothing, fire and medicine insulated them from nature, and natural selection left the stage. Alfred Russel Wallace thought so in 1864. Steve Jones was still saying it in 2008.
Hawks starts from an old remark of Darwin's. Studying animal breeding, Darwin noticed that useful variations appear only occasionally, so the bigger the herd, the better your odds: "number is of the highest importance for success." In 1930 R. A. Fisher made it quantitative: when useful mutations are extremely rare, large populations evolve faster than small ones. Hawks's example is flies. Expose a small laboratory population to low doses of pesticide and they cobble together an imperfect resistance out of many small changes. Spray a whole landscape, and flies with a single mutation conferring complete resistance often appear quickly. That mutation might occur in one fly in a billion; a small lab population would never see it.
Humans are exactly this case. Over the last 40,000 years our numbers grew in the Upper Paleolithic, exploded in the Neolithic and multiplied again with industrialization. At the same time farming, settled life, cities and livestock brought new foods, new pathogens and new ways of living. A changed environment gave selection a direction; more people gave it more raw material. Multiply the two and the prediction is acceleration.
How to show it? In 2007, with Gregory Cochran, Eric Wang, Henry Harpending and Robert Moyzis, he scanned more than three million sites in the International HapMap for the signature of a new variant rising so fast that the DNA around it had not yet been broken up by recombination. They found more than 3,000 in the Yoruba sample, more than 2,800 in Europeans and more than 2,300 in East Asians. And this, he stressed, was only the tip of the iceberg: a selected variant spends very little time inside the detectable window of 22 to 78 percent frequency, and anything rarer or nearly fixed is invisible.
Then came the lever. They set up a null hypothesis: what if selection had always been this fast, with no acceleration at all? First, an enormous number of variants should already have swept to fixation, and so many sweeps would have wiped out the surrounding variation, leaving average human genetic diversity at less than a tenth of what we actually see. Second, humans and chimpanzees should differ at about six million adaptive sites, when their total amino acid differences number around 40,000. Both predictions fail, so the null hypothesis falls. Recent adaptive evolution, they concluded, was about a hundred times faster than could have been true for most of human history.
He also cleared up a puzzle along the way. A study had just sampled Neolithic skeletons from Europe and found not a single carrier of the lactase persistence allele, which today exceeds 90 percent in Scandinavia. That, Hawks pointed out, is exactly what acceleration looks like: a new favorable variant lingers at very low frequency for a long time before it shoots upward. On his reckoning, its sprint through the intermediate frequencies came as late as Roman times.
When Jones declared evolution over a year later, Hawks took him apart point by point. Fewer older fathers? The rate at which new mutations enter a population is 2Nu, where u is the rate per person and N the number of people, and world population has grown tenfold since 1700, which swamps any change in paternal age. Young people no longer die? Selection works through differences in fertility, not just death. Populations mixing? That is evolution:
If Europe becomes “brown” in 500 years, that’s a whole lot faster than the 20,000 years it took Europe to become “non-brown.”Human evolution stopping? Wrong, wrong, wrong., 2008-10-10
In 2026 the acceleration thesis faced a second test, this time with ancient DNA. Ali Akbari and colleagues used more than 15,000 ancient genomes to find over 400 signals of positive selection in western Eurasia during the past 10,000 years, and projected that the true number is at least 3,800, roughly one-sixth of protein-coding genes. In 2007 Hawks had estimated about one gene in seven. He says he "never wavered," but admits he could never be sure his old estimate was within an order of magnitude.
This time he went a step further and pointed to something often missed: in a growing population, selection is not zero-sum. A variant becomes more common because its carriers leave more descendants, so selection is one of the causes of population history, not noise to be subtracted from it. And since people built the farming world themselves, they could choose to stay in it or walk away:
But the factors that mattered most were people choosing to strive within the societies that were growing, instead of walking away, and people allowing others to join their societies instead of excluding them. Whatever genotypes might have been slightly correlated with those choices over the centuries went along for the ride.How human evolution has been speeding up, 2026-04-20
Notice where that lands: what mattered most was, again, more people and people connected to people.
In the textbook, human evolution is a tree: it branches and branches, and the branches go their separate ways. Wolpoff spent his career opposing that picture, arguing for continuing gene flow among ancient populations. In 2006, Hawks recalls, he wrote that genetic studies of domesticated plants and animals were turning up mixture between divergent populations everywhere, and that ancient humans, spread over huge ranges and more closely related than the subspecies of many primates, should be no exception. "But the evidence was not yet there."
It arrived in 2010. Most living people turned out to carry a little Neandertal DNA, and the Denisovan genome soon showed that some populations carry ancestry from several archaic groups never found as fossils. By 2015 he argued it was time for a new metaphor:
A tree will never admit to exchanging sap between its branches, and there are no little xylem hyphae between branches to carry sap anyway.What is the ‘braided stream’ analogy for human evolution?, 2015-11-16
In a braided stream, channels split and rejoin around sandbars and islets. He immediately found fault with his own image: real channels nearly always rejoin, but some ancient populations really did go extinct without flowing back into the main stream. "Maybe an evolutionary swamp would be a better analogy, full of algae-covered bayous." Then the line that sums it up: "It’s mixing all the way back."
Over the next decade, geneticists kept seeing ghosts in African genomes: to explain present-day variation, models needed populations with no fossils and no ancient DNA. In 2023 Hawks wrote Ghostbusters of human origins, the post he has cited most often since, and it took the mystery out of those ghosts:
A ghost population is one solution to a mathematical equation that relates genetic drift and gene flow when populations are strongly isolated and gene flow occurs in short bursts.Ghostbusters of human origins, 2023-05-21
Change the assumption and the ghost may dissolve. A new model by Aaron Ragsdale and colleagues assumed that ancient African groups kept intermarrying, as small-scale societies do today. It needed no ghosts and fit better. Hawks named the overlooked premise: many genetic models assume early humans lived in small groups sealed off from one another for tens of thousands of generations, when real small-scale societies intermarry across cultural and linguistic lines at high rates. "But cultural persistence is not demographic isolation."
He had left a marker on this road himself. In 2016 the Simons Genome Diversity Project published whole genomes from many underrepresented African groups, and the curves of effective population size showed him something odd. Every living population, inside Africa and out, shared a "wave" of larger population size more than 100,000 years ago, which Neandertal and Denisovan genomes did not share. Were there simply more people then? He built a simple model and found another explanation that drew the same wave: Middle Pleistocene Africa held several long-separated groups that later merged.
By 2025 and 2026, several teams using quite different methods had drawn nearly the same picture:
The model of Trevor Cousins, Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin, the model from Alan Rogers's group, and a model from Simon Myers's group built on two types of PRDM9, the gene that decides where chromosomes recombine, differ in detail but point the same way: all living humans come from an ancient merger of roughly 80 to 20, in nearly the same proportions everywhere on Earth. Hawks opens the topic like this:
It looked like everyone living today might have come from a population of hybrids.Modern humans evolved from an 80-20 mixture of two deep streams, 2026-08-25
Who were the two populations? He lays out three guesses, and hints that the most provocative of them is Homo naledi. Then he reminds us that the Middle Pleistocene fossil record of Africa is thin and biased, with West Africa and the Sahel and the Angola–Zambia–DRC highlands almost blank. "There is, in other words, much we cannot see."
The universal ancestor from the opening is the genealogical version of the same idea: the connections among people are far denser than intuition says, so truly isolated populations hardly exist. Hawks does not look away from what some of those connections cost. His example is Tasmania, perhaps the longest-isolated people in human history, cut off when rising seas flooded the land bridge some 12,000 years ago. British colonists arrived in 1803, and disease, killing and forced removal to camps followed; within a century, all remaining descendants of Aboriginal Tasmanians also descended from British or other settlers. The intertwining of genealogies, he writes, "is a witness to legacies that were partially lost." And he adds a warning: "This is a lot to carry for a concept that rests on math and not hard data."
The third idea follows from the first two. If human history is a web, then treating any ability as the patent of our genus, the threshold we stepped over on the way from ape to human, usually fails.
His 2023 post All the hominins made tools opens with a disagreement between Darwin and Wallace. Wallace held that tools had freed the human body from natural selection; Darwin kept insisting that humans and other primates differ in mind by degree, not kind. Hawks sums it up:
Where others imagined a gulf, Darwin invariably saw stepping stones.All the hominins made tools, 2023-12-03
Then he went back through the 1950s record. In 1959 Mary Leakey dug a beautifully preserved skull out of a tool-rich layer at Olduvai Gorge. Louis Leakey named it Zinjanthropus (today Paranthropus boisei) and declared it the toolmaker. The next year the same gorge produced a jaw and skull pieces with a somewhat bigger brain, named Homo habilis in 1964, and Leakey promptly recast Zinjanthropus as probably "an intruder (or a victim)" on a habilis living site. Hawks's verdict:
Homo habilis was the favored hominin. Zinjanthropus, once vaunted as the toolmaker, was now roadkill.Same post
In South Africa, John Robinson made an even stranger argument: because Australopithecus fossils were common at Sterkfontein, Australopithecus was probably not the toolmaker, since "in all other very early Stone Age sites remains of the tool manufacturer are extremely rare." Absence of evidence had been drafted as evidence.
Hawks's lever was a chart. He took Sandrine Prat's compilation of twenty-nine places where stone artifacts and hominin fossils occur together, added a few more sites, and plotted them through time. After about 2.8 million years ago nearly every fossil species turns up with artifacts; Paranthropus and Homo appear at archaeological sites in equal measure, and only Paranthropus is present at the two earliest Oldowan localities. Both had hands capable of the precision grips that toolmaking needs. His conclusion:
It was the uses of the tools that differentiated the hominins, not the capacity to use tools.Same post
He then pushed it back toward his main theme. Species sharing a landscape picked up one another's flakes: "When one was rapping cobble on core, others heard them hundreds of meters away. They learned from each other." Technology flowed between populations too.
The Homo naledi work is the boldest and most disputed application of this idea. H. naledi had a brain about a third the size of ours, yet the team argues that it carried its dead deep into the cave and buried them. Reviewers of the 2023 manuscript asked the authors to start from a "natural process" hypothesis and reject it first, implying that a cultural explanation was extraordinary and could only be accepted last. Looking back in 2025, Hawks described a blind spot that surprised him. The bones had been locally disturbed after they were deposited, and for years the team had hunted for "natural" explanations:
Before starting on this new paper, we never considered even for a moment the simple idea that what we were seeing could be easily explained if Homo naledi had dug into the sediments. In retrospect it was striking that we missed this.Research highlight: Burials by Homo naledi, 2025-03-30
To him, "nature by default, culture must prove itself" is one more unfounded step. Whether he is right is the subject of the section on where he might be wrong.
Lay out the other person's argument and count the hidden assumptions. This is the English major's close reading at work. Reading Ashley Montagu's annotations to the 1951 UNESCO Statement on Race, which argued that "the genes that render cultural achievement possible are fundamentally similar in all the populations of humanity," he listed four buried assumptions, such as that "generalized ability" is a single trait and that natural selection needs "millions of years," and concluded that Montagu's argument "is not a fact, but a hypothesis about the form of past selection." Rebutting Steve Jones, he noticed that Jones's definition of evolution left out gene flow, which is how population mixing got mistaken for evolution stopping. His summary fits the whole field:
As always, claims about the rate of evolution in the future depend only slightly on empirical observations, and mainly on assumptions.Human evolution stopping? Wrong, wrong, wrong., 2008-10-10
Check whether two confidence intervals barely touch. In 2018 he called the popular story that the Toba supereruption nearly wiped out humanity a myth. The original "coincidence," he wrote, "was only a small overlap between enormous confidence limits," while contrary signals were waved away: the ice cores showed no climate shock, and Neandertals showed no sign of population loss. He added: "I’m surprised there hasn’t been a Toba feature movie."
Push an idea to its extreme and see if it falls. He was never a fan of Stephen Jay Gould, whom he found "consistently wrong about human evolution," but he defended provocateurs with one sentence:
When we cannot reject the extreme version of an idea, that should tell us something important about the (poor) quality of the evidence.Stephen Jay Gould and the role of provocation in science, 2015-03-30
Ask first who is in the sample. In 2025 protein evidence placed the Penghu 1 jaw, dredged from the Taiwan Strait, among the Denisovans and identified it as male. Hawks noticed something else: every Denisovan tooth sexed by protein so far is male. "Three big-toothed hominins, all male." Compare those teeth with other fossils, and what looks like a species difference might be a sex difference. His closing line: "I can’t wait to find out how wrong we’ve been."
Read the old literature. On tools he goes back to Robinson in 1957; on ghost populations, to the 1993 "Weak Garden of Eden" model of his postdoctoral adviser Harpending. He has complained that "today's researchers sometimes neglect earlier authors who wrote about the same problems." Yet when the 2026 Reich-group paper was criticized for not citing earlier work, his own included, he wrote: "I tend not to whine about that kind of thing."
Consilience, not consensus. In 2025 the editor of Science proposed dropping "scientific consensus" in favor of "convergence of evidence." Hawks was unconvinced: people in one field are trained by the same advisers, funded by the same agencies and reviewed by the same reviewers, so their evidence may converge simply because they all think alike. He wants consilience in the sense of Whewell and Darwin, where genetics, fossils, archaeology and geology each point to the same answer on their own. "In my own work I often question ideas that seem to be consensus."
Put the process in public. In 2005 he said the NSF data policy "needs teeth": the agency should publish how many grants it turned down for poor data access plans. Twenty years later he chose open review for the naledi burial paper, arguing that the real problem with traditional review is not toughness but secrecy: "one or two tough reviews could keep your work from being read by anyone for years."
First, the naledi burial claim. It is the boldest and most disputed conclusion under his name, and he is one of 37 authors. According to press reports, when the first version went through eLife's public review in 2023, the reviewers almost unanimously found the evidence insufficient for the conclusions. In 2024 María Martinón-Torres, Diego Garate, Andy Herries and Michael Petraglia published a note in volume 195 of the Journal of Human Evolution titled "No scientific evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead and produced rock art." (This page has verified only the bibliographic details; it has not read the full text and does not summarize its arguments.) eLife's 2025 assessment of the revised paper rates its significance as "landmark" and its strength of evidence as both "convincing" and "incomplete": one reviewer found burial convincingly demonstrated, while another considered the evidence for such an unambiguous conclusion incomplete, given the lack of definitive knowledge about how the hominins got into the chamber. According to Live Science, that second reviewer also suggested that independent teams carry out a full analysis, "since science is about replication." On his blog Hawks summarized the outcome as "All of them accept that burial of remains by Homo naledi is a strong explanation for what we have found," leaving out the "incomplete." About two weeks later he published a long post on how naledi got into the chamber, which takes up exactly the question behind that reservation. Of colleagues who wrote "reviews" of the work in other journals, he said they "thought they would bulk up their citation counts." On this topic he is both a party to the dispute and its main public explainer, and his naledi posts should be read with that in mind. His challenge to "natural process as the null hypothesis" can also be read both ways: a real insight, or a lowering of a bar that ought to stay high.
Second, the acceleration numbers. The 2007 "hundredfold" rested on the population history models of the day. In 2026 Hawks himself admitted that back then "we could say very little about how population history had mattered to linkage, which might have inflated our estimate," while their blindness to selection on standing variation may have deflated it. Mistaking linkage disequilibrium produced by population growth or structure for a selection signal is a known hazard of such scans. The Akbari study gives him strong support, but as he notes, its model assumes a constant selection coefficient, so cases where selection changed direction would be missed.
Third, the political pull of acceleration. Two of his 2007 coauthors, Cochran and Harpending, turned this line of research into a 2009 book, The 10,000 Year Explosion. Hawks himself says the question journalists asked him most after the paper was whether rapid recent change would "give aid and comfort to racism." His direct answer is the 2009 post on Montagu: he has identical twins and two other kids, and "How should I treat them?" Genetic sameness or difference does not decide moral equality: "Our brains are all flawed in gloriously variable ways." But in 2026, when Akbari and colleagues found that variants associated today with years of schooling have risen in frequency over 10,000 years, he wrote only that he would take up the polygenic results in a separate post. As of the date this page was checked, that post is not in the archive.
Fourth, his preference for mixture is a prior. He trained under the standard-bearer of multiregional evolution and writes: "Readers know that I've long been philosophically aligned with this way of looking at ancient human groups." The braided stream, the weakly structured stem, the 80-20 merger: each new piece of evidence has moved his way, yet he concedes that at such time depths the models almost certainly "lack the power to get into the details." The more the evidence goes your way, the more it deserves a second look.
Finally, a note on the archive: those 280 posts were chosen by him out of 4,700, and some carry notes added later. It is a scholar's curated self-portrait.