Research Report

2023:
New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
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.

2022:
Human history from cave sediments
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.

2021:
The surprising evolutionary history of our oral bacteria
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.

2020:
Viral Times
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.

2019:
First hominins on the Tibetan Plateau were Denisovans
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.