News 2022

A new study shows that dogs who spend time in Madagascar’s grasslands typically consume forest-derived foods, including endemic species such as the tenrec. more

A new article in Nature’s Scientific Data presents the CIMA database (Compendium Isotoporum Medii Aevi). CIMA compiles more than 50,000 multi-isotope measurements together with supplemental historical information covering the entirety of the European Middle Ages. more

A publication in the journal Bioscience provides a guide on how to best use stable isotope ratios of single amino acids to determine past hominin dietary behaviors. more

New research reveals how the black rat colonised Europe in the Roman and Medieval periods more

A new multidisciplinary study reveals the impact and consequences of the ‘8.2 ka event’, the largest abrupt climate change of the Holocene, for prehistoric foragers and marine ecology in Atlantic Europe more

In a new call for action paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, discuss the importance of scent in human history and address how and why experts might investigate smells from the past. more

A well-preserved Palaeolithic site in northern China reveals a new and previously unidentified set of cultural innovations more

Release in collaboration with Flinders University more

A new study indicates that severe monsoon failure in the Indian subcontinent is more likely under the current global warming scenario more

A team of international researchers, including scholars at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, outline growing evidence of anthropogenic landscapes in the semi-deciduous tropical forest biomes of northwest Argentina. The paper, published in World Archaeology, shows that human societies inhabiting this region during the first millennium AD (about. 1,500-1,000 years ago) established a strategy of ‘overlapping patchworks’ of food production that were able to contend with considerable seasonal variability more