John Hawks is one of the nation's leading palaeoanthropologists, and has lately been working with ancient DNA, recent and earlier Human Evolution, and an interesting project that is a sort of casting call for extinct humans and their relatives.
Most of you know John from his famous Internet site called "John Hawks Weblog: Paleoanthropology, Genetics and Evolution." John is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which is one of the better known and respected for this sort of research.
Unless you've been living in a cave, you know that there are many interesting and exciting things going on in human origins research these days, and on Sunday Morning, on Atheist Talk Radio, John and I will cover as many of them as we can. Were the Clovis people Solutreans? How many hominids were there in recent prehistory? And, what do both ancient and modern DNA studies tell us about the Neanderthal side of the human family?
Listen to AM 950 KTNF on Sunday at 9 a.m. Central to hear Atheists Talk, produced by Minnesota Atheists. Stream live online. Call in to the studio: 952-946-6205, or send an e-mail to radio@mnatheists.org during the live show.
Please feel free to indicate specific questions or topics you might have for John in the comments!
It is my impression that modern humans can throw hard and accurately much better than any of the other living great apes. I think some of our ancestors were relatively small and weak, and had unimpressive teeth. Does anyone have a comment on how well they could throw? Given that big bucks are spent on humans who can throw hard and accurately, I imagine the morphology and physiology related to hard accurate throwing is well known. If so, then it should be fairly easy, when the right material is available, to say whether a human ancestor could throw hard and accurately.
I think some of our ancestors were relatively small and weak, and had unimpressive teeth.
Which ones? Are you talking about the 1962 Mets?
So my question is: To what extent do you think that the dominance of patriarchy has influenced our tendency to only look at about 5% of "human" history and to what extent can paleoanthropology help shed light on the conventions of human family, groups, clans, tribes, etc that by my study seem to have been much less hierarchical and much more cooperative.