Journal of Human Evolution

• 1. Introduction

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  The Journal of Human Evolution has spent more than five decades as the place where scientists go to announce what they found in the dirt. Founded in 1972 by Academic Press in the United Kingdom, it was built around a single animating question: what does it mean to be human, and how did we get here? The journal, known in the field by its initials JHE, covers paleoanthropology, primate fossils, and the molecular evidence that ties living species to deep ancestors. But in late 2024, something rare happened. The editorial board resigned. Nearly all of them, at once, citing what they described as actions fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal. How does a scientific institution that has published for more than fifty years find itself at that kind of breaking point? The answer involves copy editors, artificial intelligence, and a publisher whose decisions the editors said they could no longer defend.

• 2. What the Journal Publishes

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  JHE is a monthly peer-reviewed journal, meaning every paper it prints has been vetted by experts before a word reaches readers. Its scope is deliberately broad. On one side sit the paleontologists who study ancient bones: human and primate fossils, new discoveries, and reanalyses of material that had been sitting in museum drawers for decades. On the other side sit biologists comparing living species through morphology and molecular evidence. JHE holds both approaches under one roof, on the premise that understanding human evolution requires all of them at once. Beyond original research, the journal also makes room for short communications, which allow rapid publication of exciting new fossils before a full paper is ready. Lead book reviews, obituaries, and review papers of exceptionally high quality round out each issue. That emphasis on quality, stated plainly and repeatedly in how the journal describes itself, is what made the 2024 resignation statement so pointed.

• 3. The Resignation

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  In December 2024, the editors-in-chief of JHE were Andrea B. Taylor of Touro University California and Mark W. Grabowski of Liverpool John Moores University in England. That month, the editorial board, including emeritus editors and all but one associate editor, resigned together. Their statement said that Elsevier's actions were "fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE's success." Three specific grievances drove the decision. First, Elsevier had eliminated a dedicated copy editor position, removing a professional whose job was to catch errors before publication. Second, the company had forced a restructuring of the editorial board. Third, and most striking, Elsevier had introduced generative AI into the production process without informing either the editors or the authors whose work was being processed. That last point did not stay abstract. The AI introduced formatting errors, including errors that the editors had already caught and corrected. The same mistakes came back. The resigning editors also flagged that JHE charges significantly more to publish than most other journals, including other journals published by Elsevier itself.

• 4. Elsevier's Reply

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  Joe d'Angelo, the publishing director of Elsevier, signed the publisher's response to the mass resignation. The note acknowledged the disagreements. It did not concede the substance. D'Angelo wrote that the decisions in question "have not determined the journal's topic coverage nor the selection of Associate Editors," framing the dispute as procedural rather than scientific. That framing left the core accusation, the undisclosed AI use and the return of already-corrected errors, without a direct answer in the public record.

• 5. A New Editorial Team

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  JHE did not fold after the resignations. Elsevier appointed a new editorial team to carry the journal forward. Radu Iovita of New York University leads the group alongside Nohemi Sala of the National Centre for Research on Human Evolution, known as CENIEH, in Burgos, Spain, and Song Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China. The new editors announced changes to peer-review and editorial policy. The most concrete was a move to a two-review system. They also committed to preserving the journal's general profile and editorial outlook, a pledge that implicitly acknowledged how much the old board's departure had put both in question.