Max Planck Institutes and Experts

A variety of recent studies suggest that apes know what other individuals do and do not see. The results of may be explained by postulating some behavioral rule that individuals have learned that does not involve an understanding of seeing. The patchiness of coverage gives this kind of explanation an ad hoc feeling, especially since there is rarely any concrete evidence that animals actually have had the requisite experiences to learn the behavioral rule – there is just a theoretical possibility. Thus, it is more plausible to hypothesize that apes really do know what others do and do not see.

In social anthropology cultural heritage is mainly seen as cultural production, which connects present interests with the past. This article analyses constructions of cultural heritage against the background of changing nation-state affiliations in the case of the UNESCO World Heritage Site „Curonian Spit“. The social practice of the actors involved is characterised by normative imaginaries that have their origins in different time-related and spatially defined systems of law, which continue to have effects and are even newly mobilised in present times.

Early modern agents, key figures in the mediation of cultural and scientific concepts, have come into the focus of research. On the basis of the correspondence of the Roman agent Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein (1719-1793), which for the first time has been reconstructed from German, Italian and foremost Russian archives, an attempt is made to analyse the communicative patterns of the transfer of aesthetic, artistic and scientific concepts from late enlightened Rome to the Northern and Eastern European periphery.

Caravaggio’s cult status is largely based on clichés surrounding the painter’s notoriety as a criminal bohemian. The Bibliotheca Hertziana has embarked on a long-term research project, the first phase of which seeks to re-examine the artist’s life in the light of contemporary sources and the interdisciplinary context of recent historical research. What emerges from this investigation is the picture of an (almost) normal life amidst an ambitious and enterprising middle class.

Among the most fascinating motor abilities of humans and animals is the capacity to use tools in order to achieve desired effects in the environment. A study of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences shows that humans have an abstract internal model of the tool-specific mapping between external effect and associated bodily movement which is accessed in the process of action planning.