Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Scientists are rebuilding microbial natural products up to 100,000 years old using dental calculus of humans and Neanderthals

Scientists recover an ancient woman’s DNA from a 20,000-year-old pendant

Geochemical analyses of stone artefacts reveal long-distance voyaging among Pacific Islands during the last millennium

An international team has created a new database that documents patterns of grammatical variation in over 2400 of the world’s languages

The Xiongnu dominated the Eurasian steppes two millennia ago and foreshadowed the rise of the Mongol Empire

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.

What makes humans human? How and when did we become what we are today? How did our ancestors live? These questions are of great interest to a lot of people. The scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology use different methods to investigate them systematically. One of these methods involves extracting DNA from human fossils. Using a new procedure, Svante Pääbo and his team can isolate and sequence ancient genetic material from just a few grams of bone powder, allowing them to compare the genomes of different prehistoric humans with one another and with people living today.

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.

In prehistoric times, two distinct groups of hominins inhabited Eurasia: Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. We sequenced the genome of an approximately 90,000-year-old female individual from Russia and discovered that she had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. This shows that individuals from these two groups occasionally mixed. Together with previous evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans mixed with early modern humans, this shows that throughout history, humans from different groups have always mixed.

New finds of fossils and stone tools from Jebel Irhoud (Morocco) document the origin of our species by about 300,000 years ago in Africa. These fossils are more than 100,000 years older than the previous oldest finds and document important biological and behavioural changes in an early evolutionary phase of Homo sapiens.