A group of scientists has traced the domestication of cats by analyzing the DNA of ancient felines, discovering two major waves of domestication that left their mark in our modern housecat.

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Petraglia’s work on the project will focus on fluctuating wet and arid phases in Arabia over the past 125,000 years, and how humans adapted to these changes. [more]

Department of Archaeology Workshop
Date: Jun 29 to Jun 30
Organizer: Monica Tromp [more]

Douka and her team have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to search for human fossils, particularly Denisovans. [more]

Talk by Thomas Higham
May 17, 2017, 3:00 P.M., V14 [more]

Florian Ott, Researcher at the Department of Archaeology, has been awarded the Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). [more]

The Oxford Companion to Cheese, with a contribution by Jessica Hendy, is a recipient of the 2017 James Beard Foundation Book Award for best Reference and Scholarship Book. The Oxford Companion to Cheese is a reference with over 850 entries on all aspects of cheese - historical and cultural, scientific, and technical - with contributors ranging from cheesemakers and cheese retailers to dairy scientists, microbiologists, historians, and anthropologists. Hendy’s entry is on “Archaeological Detection" and outlines how archaeologists and scientists identify dairying practices in the past.

2017 James Beard Foundation Award Winners

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A new paper published in the American Journal of Primatology provides a comprehensive plant reference dataset for a forest habitat of three primate species in Sri Lanka.

A new paper published in the Journal of Human Evolution demonstrates human reliance on tropical rainforest resources in the Late Pleistocene, 36,000 years ago.

The European Research Council is celebrating its 10^th anniversary. With there project proposals Sealinks and Palaeodeserts Nicole Boivin und Michael Petraglia were among the first winners of ERC grants.

Featured by Science and the MPG: Career success stories of the European Research Council, At 10, Europe`s 'excellence' fund ponders changes, Top funding for top researchers

How have humans colonised the entire planet and reshaped its ecosystems in the process? This unique and groundbreaking collection of essays explores human movement through time, the impacts of these movements on landscapes and other species, and the ways in which species have co-evolved and transformed each other as a result. [more]

Workshop Feb. 20. - Feb. 21. at MPI for the Science of Human History [more]

Foraging lifestyles persisted in New Guinean tropical forest environments even after the advent of farming 8,000 years ago [more]

Distinguished Lecturer Seminar Series
Jan 25, 2017
Host: Department of Archaeology

Dr. Patrick Roberts of the Department of Archaeology, has been involved for the second time to an UNESCO meeting centred on tropical forest conservation. [more]

In a new paper in Evolutionary Anthropology, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History review the evidence for the time-depth and nature of Homo’s relationship with tropical forest environments.

The earth sciences have defined a new human age - now social scientists are calling for broader and more interdisciplinary discussion.
Erle Ellis, Mark Maslin, Nicole Boivin, and Andrew Bauer:Involve social scientists in defining the Anthropocene. Nature, Vol. 540, 8. December 2016

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One of our research themes is exploring the ways in which biological and cultural processes interact over long-term historic and prehistoric timescales. In a piece published Dec 7 in The Guardian, incoming postdoctoral fellow William Taylor highlights recent archaeological research on climate and ancient nomadic life in Mongolia, discussing implications for the future in the context of anthropogenic climate change. [more]

With their research project “Heirloom Microbes: The History and Legacy of Ancient Dairying Bacteria”, Dr. Jessica Hendy and Dr. Christina Warinner have won the Max Planck Society’s Annual Donation Award 2017. [more]

Conference at MPI for for the Science of Human History, November 8-10, 2016 Organised by Prof. Michael Petraglia [more]

Nicole Boivin on TV. Aired on Oct 25, 2016, 3sat [In German] [more]

Pantropica: an investigation of geographical and temporal diversity in human ‘rainforest prehistories’, Jena October 3-6, 2016.

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A multidisciplinary team of scientists recently excavated one of Zanzibar’s most important caves, revealing a complex human occupation history over the last 18,000 years.  Initial occupations by Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers ranged between ~18,000 - 13,000 years ago.  Later peoples inhabited the cave in the late first to early second millennia AD. The new research contrasts with previous excavations and interpretations, painting a radically different picture of human habitation in the Zanzibar Archipelago of Tanzania. [more]

Press release to: Boivin, N. L.; Melinda Zederc, M.; Fullerd, D.; Crowthere, A.; Larsonf, G.; Erlandsong, J.; Denhamh, T.; Petraglia, M. D.: Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113 (23) , S. 6388-6396 (2016)
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Press release to: Alison Crowther, Leilani Lucas, Richard Helm, Mark Horton, Ceri Shipton, Henry T. Wright, Sarah Walshaw, Matthew Pawlowicz, Chantal Radimilahy, Katerina Douka, Llorenç Picornell-Gelaber, Dorian Q Fuller, and Nicole Boivin (2016) Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113 (24), 6635-6640 (2016)

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