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By Pere Gelabert   On the 14th of September, Michelle Hämmerle successfully defended her PhD thesis titled “Ancient Pathogens in Context - Paleogenomic Insights into Human Ancestry, Disease Burden, and Living Conditions in Past Populations.” Michelle has worked intensively over the last three years in multiple genomics projects that developed cutting-edge approaches to understand past human living conditions. Her thesis comprises one published paper and two others currently under revision. The thesis focuses on recovering and analysing human genomic data and human pathogenic strains from past individuals to understand the relationship between biology, social status, cultural practices and the lifestyle of past individuals. She has put an incredible amount of work into her research while also helping her colleagues in many other projects.   We congratulate you, Michelle, and wish you the best in the future!

by Martin Kuhlwilm A new ancient DNA study from a Saka-era burial site in Kyrgyzstan led by HEAS researchers offers a rare glimpse into the family structures of Iron Age nomads. Researchers analyzed genetic material from 12 people buried at Boz-Barmak, dating to the 4th–2nd centuries BCE. The individuals fit within the genetic range of ancient and modern groups from Central Eurasia and Siberia. While the team found no immediate family pairs (such as parent-child or siblings), they detected several second- and third-degree connections, suggesting a broader web of kin across the community. Strikingly, all the men shared the same Y chromosome lineage, which is also common in present-day Kyrgyz populations, while mitochondrial DNA, inherited from mothers, was notably diverse. This pattern supports a patrilocal social system, where men remained in their home group and women moved in from elsewhere, boosting genetic diversity. Despite the modest amount of recoverable DNA, the findings add to our understanding of how kinship, mobility, and social organization shaped the population history of Central Eurasia’s nomadic societies. Funding: Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) grant 10.47379/VRG20001 (Martin Kuhlwilm); European Research Council (ERC) SHADOWS project (101163057) and Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 10.55776/P36433 (Pere Gelabert); Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 10.55776/ESP546 (Sojung Han).   https://www.heas.at/research/publications/genomic-insights-into-the-iron-age-saka-of-boz-barmak-kyrgyzstan/

Pere Gelabert Our Neanderthal heritage Did you know that there were once several Neanderthal groups, but only some of them encountered modern humans and had offspring? This means some people today still carry a fraction of the original Neanderthal genome. The Neanderthals were the first truly pan-European human population. Traces of them span more than 250,000 years and can be found across Europe. However, until recently, our understanding of them was fragmented: different countries had their own datasets, and scientists specialising in archaeology, anthropology, genetics and geology often worked in isolation. To unite this knowledge, the COST Action ‘Integrating Neanderthal Legacy: From Past to Present’ (iNEAL) brought together experts from across the continent. They shared data, aligned their research methods, and created a more complete picture of who the Neanderthals were and how they lived. Connecting minds and reconstructing the past “The Action developed a shared database and research guidelines, helping researchers across Europe work with the same standards”, explained Professor Ivor Janković, Chair of the Action from the Institute for Anthropological Research in Croatia. A major result was the Catalogue of Neandertal Sites, listing 127 archaeological sites across the continent. “This publication is already being used by scholars”, said Ivor Janković. “And we’re committed to continuing data collection for a future update that will serve as a starting point…

By Gerhard Weber   The fossils found from Ethiopia are in Vienna for the first time for examination at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna.   An interdisciplinary and international research team led by the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna was on the road in the Somali region in eastern Ethiopia in the years 2000-2009 to search for the ancestors of mankind. For the first time in the history of Austria, it has been possible to make some finds of australopithecines and even earlier hominins. These date back to a time of over 5 million to 3 million years ago. Now an export permit has finally been obtained in order to be able to examine the finds in Vienna using state-of-the-art methods.   It is particularly interesting that the fossils all come from a locally narrowly defined area of less than 100 km2, but cover exactly the period in which our first truly identifiable precursors, the australopithecines, developed. Such sites from the early Pliocene are very rare and it is hoped that the detailed examination of the finds will provide further information about the beginnings of the incarnation. The project was initiated in 2000 by the anthropologist Univ. Prof. Horst Seidler and continued for ten years.   In the desert-like sediments around…

The project LEGION – machine LEarninG-enabled Identification of archaeological Objects in the middle daNube river basin, led by HEAS member Dominik Hagmann as a researcher at the OeAI/OeAW in collaboration with colleagues from the TU Wien Computer Vision Lab, has been recently approved within the Heritage Science Austria 2.0 programme. The project integrates machine learning and archaeological expertise to establish a unified, AI-supported typochronology for Roman common ware from the ancient metropolis of Carnuntum (Austria). Based on a corpus of c. 70,000 digitized profile drawings, LEGION develops a scalable and reproducible framework for the classification, dating, and interpretation of archaeological mass finds, combining eXplainable AI (XAI) and human-in-the-loop (HITL) approaches. By linking morphological and contextual data, the project generates new insights into production, distribution, and settlement dynamics along the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Danube Limes,” while providing an open, FAIR- and CARE-compliant digital research infrastructure for future applications in Heritage Science.   Funding   ÖAW – Heritage Science Austria 2.0 (Heritage_2024-12_LEGION): https://www.oeaw.ac.at/foerderungen/foerderprogramme/heritage-science-austria   Project webpage: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/oeai/research/historical-archaeology/archaeology-of-the-roman-provinces-in-the-latin-west/legion

HEAS Network Associate José-Miguel Tejero is the Principal Investigator of the Spanish Consolidator Research Grant PHUMA (First Human Population of the Peruvian Andean Plateau), developed under the scientific co-direction of Leslye Valenzuela (French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS, and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, PUCP). The project brings together several HEAS members, including Pere Gelabert, Olivia Cheronet, Tom Higham, Katerina Douka, and Mareike C. Stahlschmidt, alongside researchers from partner institutions: Xavier Mangado, Julien Le Guirriec, and Santiago Riera (University of Barcelona), Dagmara Socha (University of Warsaw), Ximena Suárez (University of São Paulo), Alessandra Caballero and Gerardo Vega Toscano (PUCP, Peru), Nick Taylor (Stony Brook University), and Lola Larssonneur (Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University).   PHUMA is a pioneering project combining archaeological and biomolecular approaches, including ancient DNA (aDNA), sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA), and paleoproteomics, to investigate the cultural and biological adaptations of the first human populations to settle permanently on the Peruvian Andean Plateau at altitudes exceeding 3,500 metres above sea level. The project addresses the formidable environmental pressures these populations faced, including hypoxia, extreme cold, intense solar radiation, and scarce food resources, during the transition between the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene. PHUMA will generate extensive genomic and archaeological datasets from some of the oldest known Pleistocene sites in the region, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding…

Congratulations to PhD Emily Pigott, who defended her doctoral thesis on Monday 30th March. Emily published two papers during her PhD research and has two more in review/submission. Her main paper was in PNAS and was about a small Neanderthal bone that she found using ZooMS from a site in the Crimea called Starosele. Her other paper was in the Journal of Palaeolithic Archaeology. She worked incredibly hard to finish in just under 3 years. An hour after the defence she found that she had been successful in her application for a 2 year post doc position working in Tubingen, Germany on Palaeolithic sites in Armenia. Congrats Dr Emily Pigott from everyone in HEAS!