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
Meeting “Denny” (again)
These have been exciting couple of months. In early September we’ve reported in Nature, in a article led by our colleagues at the Genetics Department in the MPI-EVA (V. Slon, S. Pääbo etc) that Denisova 11 (“Denny”), the tiny little bone we had found during a pilot study and reported as Neanderthal in 2016 in Scientific Reports here, …
IN-ZooMS workshop in Copenhagen
On Sunday 19th August 2018, FINDER project, along with colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, Prof. Matthew Collins and Dr Frido Welker, organised a round table workshop on the current status, challenges and future prospects of peptide mass fingerprinting of archaeological collagen, the method also know as ZooArchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS). The development and …
FINDER volunteers
FINDER has recently hosted 3 fanstatic volunteers who helped us sample and prepare bone fragments for ZooMS analysis. We were delighted to host for 2 weeks, in May, Saltanat Amirova, a student from the Institute of Archaeology of UCL who worked on material from Denisova Cave (Siberian Altai, Russia). Saltanat is from Kazakhstan so her knowledge …