About FINDER

FINDER is a 5-year research project (2017-2024) 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 (also known as ZooMS), ancient DNA, chronometric dating and stable isotope analyses.

Projects

FINDER has initiated several collaborations across Eurasia with local archaeologists and museum curators. In the following pages we outline some of them:

North Asia   |   Rest of Asia

NEWS

Early Denisovans

Denisovans are elusive in many ways. When did they first appear and where, how spread where they geographically and how the different Denisovan populations interacted with each other and with other archaic and modern human populations. A small step towards understanding the early Denisovans, their toolkit and subsistence strategies was the discovery of Denisovan remains …

Democratisation of ZooMS: Jena lab protocols published

One of the biggest challenges we faced at the onset of the project in 2016-17 was the lack of transparency in terms of the nitty gritty of ZooMS, the actual analytical protocols, from the wet chemistry laboratory procedures, to equipment settings, data analyses and full data deposition (both reference data as well as analysed unknown …