FINDER is a 5-year research project (2017-2022) funded by the European Research Council. It aims at recovering, analysing and characterising new human remains, whether Denisovans, Neanderthals, modern humans, or others, from Pleistocene Eurasia over the past 200,000 years. It uses a novel combination of state-of-the art scientific methods in peptide mass fingerprinting, ancient DNA, chronometric dating and stable isotope analyses.
Our team
FINDER is a collaborative interdisciplinary effort; the core team are based at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Jena, Germany. We work with several international teams and collaborators, across different countries from the UK to Siberia and southeast Asia.
Projects
FINDER has initiated several collaborations across Eurasia with local archaeologists and museum curators. In the following pages we outline some of them:
NEWS
FINDER Project goes Bayeux
In January 2018, it was announced that the Bayeux Tapestry, an incredibly-detailed 70m long cloth depicting the Norman conquest of England and dating to the 11th cent AD, would be loaned to the British Museum in 2022. This will be the first time that the Tapestry leaves France in 950 years! To mark the announcement and …
New PhD student
The first PhD student for FINDER, Samantha Brown, arrived in Europe from her native Australia to undertake a 3-year research degree with FINDER. After obtaining her BA in Archaeology in Australia, Samantha (Sam) moved in 2016 to the University of Oxford where she received a MSc degree. For her Masters dissertation she worked on the …
FINDER Projects begins
FINDER project was launched on the 1st of June 2017. It is based at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Jena, Germany. FINDER is a 5-year (2017-2022), ERC-funded adventure that will take us to several locations across Eurasia, in the hope that we discover new human fossils in the “faunal” assemblages …