An interdisciplinary team effort by AIAS Fellow Iza Romanowska and researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Bergen have identified climate-driven changes to food availability as a factor behind dramatic historical events that led the oasis city of Palmyra in Syria to its ultimate demise. The new study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The University’s Archaeogenetics Research Group has played a key role in a genetic and archaeological study, the largest to date of Early Medieval Europe, which has revealed there was indeed large-scale Continental migration into eastern England during the Early Middle Age.

In the largest early-medieval population study to date, an interdisciplinary team consisting of geneticists and archaeologists – led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Central Lancashire – analysed over 400 individuals from ancient Britain, Ireland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. The results show in detail one of the largest population transformations in the post-Roman world.

Research, led by archaeologists and primatologists from the Technological Primates Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has shown that stone tool using chimpanzees in West Africa have distinct and recognizable material cultures.

A new study has revealed the earliest known evidence of the use of the hallucinogenic drug opium, and psychoactive drugs in general, in the world.