His research includes work in lithic technology, archaeology of Indigenous Australia, global dispersion of modern humans and the study of the hominin species Homo neanderthalensis.
His work with Val Attenbrow and Gail Robertson re-evaluated the timing, spread and function of backed artefacts within ancestral Indigenous Australian societies, arguing that the proliferation of backed artefacts along the east coast of Australia was a technological response to increasingly variable climatic conditions brought about by the onset of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation during the mid-Holocene.
[12] Hiscock was funded with Dr. Alex Mackay for an Australian Research Council post-doctoral fellowship project titled "Technology and behavioural evolution in late Pleistocene Africa, Europe and Australia" (DP1092445) worth more than A$400,000 in 2010.
This view was founded on a strong critique of the value of ethnography in the construction of narratives about the deep past, arguing that ethnographic analogy had often imposed images of the lifestyle of recent Indigenous Australians on the different lives of their distant ancestors.
Interpreting the available archaeological and genetic evidence from these view points, Hiscock presented a novel narrative of Australian prehistory, in which population sizes fluctuated through time in response to environmental productivity, the physical characteristics of people varied as climate and gene flow altered, and the economic, social, and ideological systems adjusted to accommodate and incorporate the circumstances of each time period.