Hublin lived in Algeria until his family fled the country in the last year of the independence war in 1961. He spent his teenage years living in the subsidized housing of the northern Parisian suburbs. He later trained as a geologist and paleontologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University of Paris, where he received his doctorate in 1978 under the supervision of Prof. B. Vandermeersch. He received his state doctorate ("habilitation") in anthropology in 1991 at the University of Bordeaux. Hublin currently lives in Leipzig, Germany with his wife Svetlana.