Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Genomes of seven early Europeans show they belonged to a small, isolated group that had recently mixed with Neandertals but left no present-day descendants

Scientists unravel timing and impact of Neandertal gene flow into early modern humans

Study refutes previous assumptions and reveals the cosmopolitan origin of the inhabitants of Pompeii

With twelve Synergy Grants, the Max Planck Society claims top spot in the ERC ranking

Genetic study of the wider Caucasus region shows how movement of people and innovation transfer enabled pastoralists to exploit the steppe zones of Eurasia

The last Ice Age has shaped human life in Europe for thousands of years. Driven from Central Europe by low temperatures during glacial periods, Homo sapiens repeatedly reconquered previously uninhabitable regions during interglacial periods. Johannes Krause and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig are studying these migrations.

Elspeth Ready from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig regularly travels to the Canadian Arctic for research. She tells of magnificent expanses, special culinary delights, and an icy dog sled ride.

In many ways, our thoughts and actions are influenced by our social background, which is why people’s behavior varies so widely between different countries throughout the world. The psychologist Daniel Haun, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, has made cultural diversity a focal topic of his research. His theory is that we cannot ultimately determine what it is that makes us human until we are aware of what we have in common and what our differences are.

Roman Wittig, who heads up the Taï Chimpanzee Project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, knows what happens when a virus changes its host, and has experienced it several times in the Taï National Park in the République de Côte d’Ivoire, the last time having been four years ago, when a coronavirus that is harmless to humans jumped from humans to chimpanzees. In collaboration with Fabian Leendertz of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, he is looking into pathogens that cause disease in chimpanzees and which of them could also pose a threat to humans.

To a very large degree, academic freedom as we know it today is based on the way it was conceived in Germany during the 19th century. At that time, it was not only professors who were in a position to make independent decisions about their research topics; students, too, enjoyed freedoms that seem incredible from today’s perspective. Lorraine Daston from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin has studied the development of academic freedom and its limitations.

An international team of linguists and geneticists, led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, has achieved a significant breakthrough in understanding the origin of the Indo-European language family. Dated language family trees and ancient DNA evidence combine to suggest that the answer to the 200-year-old enigma of Indo-European origins lies in a hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses.

Humans and other species are constantly shedding DNA into their environments. Researchers at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig developed new methods to extract this human DNA directly from archaeological sediments. We used these methods to fill in the gaps of human history, and discover unknown Neandertal populations.

An international team led by researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reconstructed the oral microbiomes of Neanderthals, primates, and humans – including the oldest oral microbiome ever sequenced from a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal – and discovered unexpected clues about human evolution, health, and diet.

In 2020, a new virus appeared and changed almost everything in our lives. One of the uplifting experiences of the pandemic has been to see how many scientists have risen to the occasion and applied whatever competences they have to understand and mitigate the situation – as we did at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

So far Denisovans were only known from a small collection of fossil fragments from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Together with researchers from China Jean-Jacques Hublin from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology describes a 160,000-year-old hominin mandible from Xiahe in China. Using ancient protein analysis the researchers found that the mandible’s owner belonged to a population that occupied the Tibetan Plateau in the Middle Pleistocene and that was closely related to the Denisovans from Siberia.