Even though Charles Darwin came up with the majority of the evolutionary theory over nearly 100 years ago, there are still modern breakthroughs in his area of study. John Hawks,  professor of anthropology at UW-Madison, gave a presentation on these breakthroughs in Valhalla Auditorium Thurs., Feb. 19.
“We’ve been trying to get him here at UW-L for years now,” UW-L professor Connie Arzigian stated.
Hawks has been all over the world in his studies, from Africa to Europe, and Asia, comparing modern human DNA to that which has been salvaged from ancient fossils. At the moment, he is working on a project at the Rising Star site in South Africa, where they have uncovered nearly 1,700 human fossils and counting. To say the least, Hawks is very busy, and very successful in his work.
The presentation Hawks gave featured a very specific part of his work that had to do with Neanderthals. Most everyone assumes this hominid species to be the grunting, dimwitted being that looks somewhat like a human, similar to those seen in movies like “Night at the Museum.”
However, Hawks contended that image. From evidence found through research and his many archaeological digs, he said that Neanderthals were doing very close to the same things anatomically that modern humans were doing so long ago.
“The reason why we didn’t know it was because people weren’t looking close enough at the stuff we’d already collected.” Hawks said of Neanderthals and how the image from “Night at the Museum” seemed to be widely accepted, even in the science world, for many years.
It was thought that humans today had no direct relations with Neanderthals, but Hawks claimed that we do.
“There was a lot of mixing going on,” he joked, though he spoke seriously.
Neanderthals were mixing with Homo erectus, leading to what humans are in the present day. In fact, a new species of hominid has been discovered to have lived around the same time as Neanderthals, nearly 200,000 years ago, that mixed their genes into the equation, as well. These new fossils, consisting of only two teeth and a small pinky finger bone of a teenage girl, imply that there might have been a human species living in Denisova, in Asia.
“We have this whole other genome that has been sequenced. We know a lot about her,except what she looked like.” Hawks stated.
The fossils that have been found give a lot of information to anthropologists but do not help compare the features of this new species, the Denisovans, to Neanderthals.
“We’re not at the end of this story,” Dr. Hawks said, closing his presentation. “We’re at the beginning, in a sense. Or in the middle chapter where everything’s changed.”
New evidence is found everyday about the ancestors of humans. And as Hawks reiterated many times through his speech, humans today really aren’t that different from each other, as we all seem to have very common ancestors.