Updates 2022

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Renn and others from the Anthropocene Working Group discuss the search for the beginning of the Anthropocene with the Süddeutsche Zeitung more

A new study published in PLoS ONE is the first to use stable isotope analysis to study the diets of the inhabitants of modern Belarus during the turbulent socio-political transitions of the 11^th to 18^th centuries CE more

A new editorial in the open access journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology explores the ongoing relevance of isotope analyses for exploring human-environment interactions in the past and the novel perspectives these can provide for the present. more

A new study shows that dogs who spend time in Madagascar’s grasslands typically consume forest-derived foods, including endemic species such as the tenrec. more

A new multidisciplinary study published in PLOS ONE, led by a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Scientia Consultoria Científica, and Universidade Federal do Pará in Brazil highlights the importance of the use of diverse wild plants and animals, indigenous domesticates, and river resources in different parts of the Amazon Basin. more

A new article in Nature’s Scientific Data presents the CIMA database (Compendium Isotoporum Medii Aevi). CIMA compiles more than 50,000 multi-isotope measurements together with supplemental historical information covering the entirety of the European Middle Ages. more

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History doctoral researcher Barbara Huber is one of seven members of the Association for Environmental Archaeology to win a 2022 AEA Small Research Grant. The grant will help to fund her project titled “Reconstructing olfactory landscapes of ancient Arabia using biomolecular approaches.” more

A recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE provides technological data for a newly described Ostrich Eggshell assemblage dating to roughly 15,000 years ago, comparing this with other contemporaneous assemblages to shed light on social networks in southern Africa. more

A publication in the journal Bioscience provides a guide on how to best use stable isotope ratios of single amino acids to determine past hominin dietary behaviors. more

New research reveals how the black rat colonised Europe in the Roman and Medieval periods more

A new multidisciplinary study reveals the impact and consequences of the ‘8.2 ka event’, the largest abrupt climate change of the Holocene, for prehistoric foragers and marine ecology in Atlantic Europe more

A new multidisciplinary paper led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History combines historical, archaeological, and palaeoecological data into land use models to study the impact of rice agriculture on land-use and demography in the famous Ifugao region of Philippines. more

A publication in the Journal of Maps synthesizes all well-contextualized Stone Age sites in Sub-Saharan West Africa more

A recent study published in the journal Nature Plants examines charcoal and pit fragments to reveal that people were already using olives as food and fuel 100,000 years ago more

New study identifies regions best suited to persistent human occupation through the last glacial cycle more

Our series of learn-and-debate webinars is intended to facilitate the development of public policy that can help us cope with the natural crises of our times. We will provide the environmental history community with the basic understanding of the ways by which science and policy interact, in particular in the European context, helping individuals and groups to engage in the policy making process. more

Release in collaboration with Flinders University more

A team of international researchers, including scholars at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, outline growing evidence of anthropogenic landscapes in the semi-deciduous tropical forest biomes of northwest Argentina. The paper, published in World Archaeology, shows that human societies inhabiting this region during the first millennium AD (about. 1,500-1,000 years ago) established a strategy of ‘overlapping patchworks’ of food production that were able to contend with considerable seasonal variability more