keynote

Pervasive findings of partial selective sweeps realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation.     David Reich is a Professor of Genetics and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Physics from Harvard University in 1996, his doctorate in Statistical Genetics from the University of Oxford in 1999, and did post-doctoral work with Eric Lander at the Whitehead Institute / MIT Center for Genome Research. He has shared multiple awards with Svante Pääbo including the 2017 Dan David Prize in Archaeology & Natural Sciences, the 2019 Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, the 2020 Darwin-Wallace Award from the Linnaean Society of London, and the 2022 Massry Prize (the latter also joint with Liran Carmel). He was highlighted by Nature as one of “Ten Who Made A Difference” in 2015, was awarded the 2019 National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, and was the recipient of the Hermann J. Muller Award for contributions to our understanding of genes and society. His laboratory has produced approximately half the genome-wide ancient human DNA data published to date, he is the author of more than 200 scientific papers, and he and wrote the 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New…

    New strategies and coping practices of early farmers taking the Danubian route (6000-5350 cal BC)   At the advent of the Neolithic in Europe, one major route of the spread of farming in Europe led across the central Balkan Peninsula, over the Carpathian basin and further along the Danube valley to Western Central Europe. Following river valley routes towards the north, some regions seem to have been intensely occupied, while others may have been barely populated. Rapid advances and halts alternated until the descendants of the first Balkan farmers reached the southern Carpathian basin, which is the focus of my talk.   Farmers reached the marginal zones of the alluvial riverine Danube landscape to the cool and wet, wooded hills of the western Carpathian basin at the advent of the 6th millennium cal BC, where they stopped for different reasons.  This area proves to be key to understand the encounters with locals and re-structuring, resulting major bottlenecks of Neolithic lifeways from the Balkans to Central Europe. I shall focus on elements like networks, settlement patterns, architecture, animal husbandry, ritual customs and new bioarchaeological results, to highlight the nature of the changes, which are is inextricably bound up with the formation of the first farmers’ communities of Central Europe, the Linearbandkeramik (LBK).   To register click here Eszter Bánffy_Poster…