Anthropology Prof. John Hawks and UW-Madison students dig up crucial remnants of early hominids

Despite being from Kansas, Dr. John Hawks had never seen storms like he experienced in South Africa.

"They had lightning like I've never seen it," says the University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropology professor. "One day, the science tent nearly blew over in the storm. We were holding the tent, five of us inside. I had the middle pole and was pushing against it as hard as I can because the wind is pushing it the other way. I remember thinking, 'Lightning is going to strike this thing.'"

The science tent was a base of operations set up by a team of researchers outside the Rising Star Cave, a site about 40 miles outside of Johannesburg. In November 2013, Hawks and a team of scientists from around the world arrived there to investigate the discovery of a chamber filled with human bones.

"We really expected when we started that we were there for one skeleton, and that was going to be super important," says Hawks, one of the excavation's lead researchers.

Hawks is one of the world's foremost scholars in human evolution, gaining popularity for the work he's done in relating human genetics to Neanderthals. He is an alumnus of Kansas State University and the University of Michigan, where he earned his Ph.D. in anthropology.

"He is very generous with his knowledge, but also expects his students to be self-motivated, and to learn independently, which is excellent training for an academic career," says Alia Gurtov, a doctoral student of Hawks, and a researcher on the Rising Star team.

Hawks has also taught a free massive open online course (or MOOC) called "Human Evolution: Past and Future" through the popular open access website Coursera. In it, students follow Hawks around the world as he films excavation sites and interviews fellow scientists.

Hawks is now posting some of those interviews on his personal blog at johnhawks.net, which he updates regularly and uses to do science outreach. "It has a lot of professionals who are readers, and people use it in their classes a lot," he says. "Through that, I've really become attentive to people who are doing a lot of outreach work."

In fact, Hawks became connected to Rising Star's lead researcher Lee Berger through his blog. Berger, discoverer of the early human ancestor Australopithecus sediba, is a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.

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Anthropology Prof. John Hawks and UW-Madison students dig up crucial remnants of early hominids