Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

On December 17, 2024, the Max Planck Society welcomed approximately 400 guests from politics, business, and society to its, Prelude 2025, held at the Festsaal Kreuzberg in Berlin. Max Planck Society President, Patrick Cramer, opened the event with a call for justice. In his speech, he advocated for the establishment of an independent Chief Scientific Advisor to the Federal Government, similar to roles held by Chief Scientific Advisors in countries such as Canada and the UK. 

Research reveals possible remains of discoverer of St James’ Tomb

Even the earliest human interactions with tropical forests had irreversible consequences that will continue to impact the environment well beyond the 21st century.

Jürgen Renn, Director at the Institute of Geoanthropology, discusses the Institute’s concept, the phenomenon of the "Great Acceleration," and the Jena location

Humans started breeding chickens later than previously assumed

When people find their final resting place in a mass grave, their life stories are often buried along with their mortal remains. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena have succeeded in reconstructing part of the story of three African men who lived in Mexico City in the 16th century: theirs is a story of forced migration and slavery, but also of dangerous pathogens that traveled around the world undetected.

Neanderthals and modern humans must have coexisted in Europe for several thousand years. What happened when they encountered each other and how they influenced one another are riveting questions. Jean-Jacques Hublin and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig are searching for the answers. In the process, they have found clues as to what the Neanderthals learned from Homo sapiens – and what they didn’t.

The transition to agriculture changed human society more drastically than almost any other innovation. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena are investigating this revolution from very different perspectives.

Human beings are currently changing the Earth on an unprecedented scale. But when did the transformation of our planet begin – and with it the human age, the Anthropocene? For archaeologists, the answer is clear: humans have been shaping the world’s ecosystems for tens of thousands of years. Nicole Boivin and her team at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena are using new methods to search for the earliest traces of human activity – and getting involved in current debates surrounding the Anthropocene.

Migration isn’t a new phenomenon, but new insights suggest that modern-day Europeans actually have at least three ancestral populations. This finding was published by Johannes Krause and his colleagues in September and was prominently featured on the cover of Nature. As it happens, the paleogeneticist himself is currently thinking about migrating, and will henceforth travel through time as a Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. For him, looking back millennia into the past seems to be no problem.

Understanding how tropical land use and deforestation affects the dynamics of the global Earth system and identifying potential tipping points are key to the future of our species on this planet. By exploring the long history of human societies in tropical forests and bringing together natural and social systems in interdisciplinary models, we can evaluate the repercussions of early human interaction with tropical environments. This historical interaction has left  irreversible imprints on the Earth, with consequences that will reverberate far beyond the 21st century.

Klimadaten aus Sedimentkernen, die 130.000 Jahre zurückdatieren, zeigen, dass die Erwärmung im Indischen Ozean während der letzten Warmzeit die Regenfälle über dem Indischen Ozean verstärkte, die Niederschläge des Indischen Sommermonsuns an Land jedoch abschwächte. Ein nachlassender Monsun in Südasien wird unter dem derzeitigen, globalen Erwärmungsszenario zunehmend wahrscheinlicher und hätte weitreichende Folgen für die Ernährungssicherheit sowie das Wohlergehen von rund 40 Prozent der Weltbevölkerung. 

With an international research consortium, we have succeeded in obtaining high-resolution information from fossilized human and animal footprints that are about 120,000 years old about the environmental conditions of that time in the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. The finds are the oldest securely dated record of humans, presumably Homo sapiens, in this part of the world. They show that human and animal migrations and landscape use were closely linked and strongly underline the importance of Arabia for the study of human prehistory.

In the laboratories of the Department of Archaeogenetics, we have examined for the first time the genetic material of people who lived about 3,600–2,800 years ago (during the Bronze to Iron Age transition) in Ashkelon, one of the most important cities of the Philistines. Analysis showed that a European gene component arrived in Ashkelon in the early Iron Age. This suggests that the Philistines' ancestors migrated from southern Europe across the Mediterranean and that the marked cultural change in Ashkelon and other cities in the region at this time was linked to the migration of people.

The well-documented Christianization of Austronesian societies served scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human History as a “natural experiment” to test how various factors influenced the spread of the new faith. This research provides new insights into historical processes and can help to better understand how, for example, demographic, cultural or environmental factors influence the spread and adoption of new institutions, ideologies and technologies today, and how they might spread in the future.