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 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 …
2000 samples!
To celebrate our first 2000 analysed bones (we aim for 40,000 by the end of the project!) and the fact that we have a beautiful FINDER project logo created by a very talented graphic designer (email me for details), we have printed and are showcasing our new project T-shirts!
FINDER goes to Siberia
In the past couple of weeks, Sam Brown has travelled to Siberia to collect new samples for the project and also to attend and present preliminary results of her PhD project at the international archaeological conference held this week at Denisova Cave. Below giving a talk to the audience at the campsite, and also with …