Former Fellows and Members

Fellowship Period: October 2015—December 2019

Dr Yonatan Sahle is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at UCT. He received a PhD from UCT in 2013, and was a postdoctoral fellow at The University of California, Berkeley. Dr Sahle worked as a Junior Research Group Leader at the University of Tübingen (Germany) before taking up his UCT position in 2020.

Dr Sahle is a broadly trained archaeologist with research interests spanning technological change, prehistoric weaponry, hominin carnivory, and lithic ethnoarchaeology. He has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, and Greece. Dr Sahle’s current research is primarily focused on understanding behavioral, paleobiological, and environmental contexts across the evolution of Homo sapiens. To comprehensively understand these aspects, Dr Sahle leads collaborative field research projects in a) the Lower Awash basin (Afar Rift, Ethiopia), investigating late Middle Pleistocene contexts, and b) rockshelters outside the Rift Valley, studying Late Pleistocene human adaption. These recently launched projects have already yielded remarkable hominid, faunal, and archaeological (including lithics, worked ochre, and rock art) remains that promise insights into our species’ evolutionary past.  

Email: yonatan.sahle@uct.ac.za
Personal Website: http://www.archaeology.uct.ac.za/yonatan-sahle
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yonatan_Sahle

Fellowship Period: August 2018—April 2019
Dr. Hila Ashkenazy is an archaeologist with specialization in lithic analysis. Her research interests include the later prehistory of the Levant and northeastern Africa. Dr. Ashkenazy examines cultural change using the chaîne opératoire approach, in addition to basic techno-typological attribute analyses. She is interested in understanding how technological and other adaptive patterns coevolve with changing environmental and demographic patterns. During her stay at the Center, Dr. Ashkenazy examined lithic assemblages from recently excavated cave sites in southeastern Ethiopia.

Email: hila_ash@yahoo.com

Fellowship Period: April 2017 – January 2018

Fellowship Period: May 2019
Dr. Chiara Barbieri is a geneticist with a background in anthropology. She is a senior postdoc at University of Zurich with a second affiliation at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. She received her PhD from the University of Bologna while working at the Max Planck for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Her studies cover various declinations of human genetics in reconstructing the human past, from anthropological fieldwork to laboratory analysis and computational data processing, with a strong multidisciplinary vocation. Working at the intersection of genetics and linguistics, she spent most of her research time on sub-Saharan African populations and pre-colonial South America. During her staying at the Center, she worked with Dr. Matthias Urban on genetic and linguistic correspondences in the prehistory of Peru.

email: barbieri.chiara@gmail.com
Personal Website: http://www.chiarabarbieri.com/
Institutional Website: https://www.ieu.uzh.ch/en/research/evolbiol/humangen_langdiv.html

Christian Bentz studied Germanistics, Economics, and Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and has a Master in English and Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. He wrote his PhD thesis on Computation, Cognition, and Language at the University of Cambridge. He currently has positions with the Center for Advanced Studies and the Department of General Linguistics as member of the EVOLAEMP project. His research interests include language evolution,language change, complex systems, and information theory.

Email: christian.bentz@uni-tuebingen.de
Personal Website: http://www.christianbentz.de/
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christian_Bentz

Fellowship Period: January—March 2017

Laura Buck is currently a Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology at Liverpool John Moores University (UK).  At the broadest level, she is interested in what determines variation in skeletal shape.  In her research she has focused on skeletal plasticity, the adaptive and neutral influences on hominin crania, and climatic adaptation in human and non-human primates.  Currently, her main research employs a macaque model to investigate the morphological consequences of hybridisation between closely related taxa.  Her results enable inferences about the effects of human interbreeding with extinct lineages (e.g., Neanderthals).  The methods she employs include computed tomography, 3D laser scanning, manipulation of digital data (e.g., segmentation and virtual measurement), geometric morphometric methods and traditional morphometrics.

Email: l.buckspam prevention@ljmu.ac.uk
Twitter: @_LTBuck
Institutional webpage: https://rcbioanth.com/laura-buck-abc/ 
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Laura_Buck2

Fellowship Period: March—December 2019
Johannes Dellert recently completed his dissertation in general linguistics while working as a member of the EVOLAEMP project, after undergraduate studies in computational linguistics and computer science. His postdoctoral research currently focuses on machine-assisted approaches to historical linguistics and typology, and on exploring the possibilities of interpretable machine learning for robust analysis of language varieties in the absence of large datasets for training. During his time at the Center, he was coordinating the continued expansion of the NorthEuraLex database, and is working on a prototype of a new system for machine-assisted etymological theory development, supported by intramural funding as well as a RiSC grant by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the State of Baden-Württemberg.

Email: jdellert@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de
Personal Website: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~jdellert/index.html

Fellowship Period: November—December 2018

Andrej Evteev is a physical anthropologist interested in the study of the interplay of factors shaping the human skull: genetic, climatic, ontogenetic, functional and stochastic. Specifically, during the last several years he has been primarily dealing with ecogeographic variation of the facial skeleton in North Eurasia paying a special attention to employing population genetic data as a “control for phylogeny”. One of the aims of his Tubingen fellowship carried out in 2018 was to put the data collected (morphological and genetic) into a broader context and to analyze it from a more general point of view.
He also studies growth of the human skull using medical CT data with a distant aim of detailing the ontogenetic origin of intergroup morphological differences.
One more problem he is interested in is the role of intragroup cranial variation in producing intergroup variation. It is acknowledged that at least 80% of cranial variation in humans resides at the intragroup level, but in fact we have very few ways of taking it into account in a craniological analysis (see for details https://sites.google.com/site/worldpcaeng/).
In his work, he uses a variety of methods, including GMM and Finite-Element Analysis, and various techniques of working with CT images of both living and skeletal individuals (measuring, segmentation, landmarking). At present, his aim is to explore from different points of view the collection of ancient and modern cranial CT scans from the Research Institute and Museum of Anthropology in Moscow which includes many populations not represented in other CT depositories, as well as in museums outside Russia.
Finally, he has some experience as a field bioarcheologist specialized on the macroscopic descriptive study of human remains.

Dr. Armando Falcucci completed his doctoral training at the University of Tübingen in December 2018. His dissertation focused on the Aurignacian sequence at the Late Pleistocene site of Fumane Cave (Veneto, Italy) and it was funded by a Doctoral Dissertation Grant in the framework of the research project “The Evolution of Cultural Modernity” based in the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and financed by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Art. From April to August 2019, he was a Research Assistant at the ROCEEH project (The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans) at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and based at the University of Tübingen. During this time, he helped in the creation of a comprehensive archaeological database of Paleolithic sites discovered south of the Alpine range and along the Italian Peninsula. Dr. Falcucci has excavated in several cave sites across Europe and the Near East and has an extensive experience in analyzing Early Upper Paleolithic stone tool assemblages. At the DFG center, he will perform three-dimensional (3D) multivariate analyses of Upper Paleolithic stone tool assemblages and will collaborate with Dr. Fotios A. Karakostis (University of Tübingen) to assess whether lithic production and tool morphology are correlated to specific hand muscle attachments patterns on early modern humans.

Fellowship Period: August—December 2017
Full Professor for Archaeology at the Catholic University of Peru, Lima and founder of the Archaeological Program in 1982. Ph.D. from Bonn University, Germany, in 1980. Visiting professor in Germany, USA, Japan, China, France, Spain, Canada and Chile. Ordinary member of the German Archaeological Institute and commission member of the KAAK Commission for the Archaeology of Extra-European Cultures) until 2015. Numerous excavations and surveys in Peru since 1971. Actually, he is co-director of the Junin Archaeological Project (Central Peru) (with Kurt Rademaker). Director of the Boletín de Arqueología PUCP from 1995 to 2015 Organizer of International symposia at the Catholic University and speaker in many international and Peruvian congresses, symposia, roundtables, etc. About 180 publications (books, articles, reviews). His principal interests are funerary rites and contexts in archaeology and anthropology, early art and religion, the Formative and the Archaic periods in the Americas, comparative archaeology and origins of complex societies. He was awarded with the Order of Merit for Distinguished Services by the Peruvian government in 2018.

Fellowship Period: March 2016 – April 2017

Dr. Lumila Menéndez was a long-term fellow at the DFG Center, scheduled to be a part of the research team through October 2017. A bioanthropologist by training, she completed her bachelor and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology and Natural Sciences at the National University of La Plata, Argentina. Her broad interests are in human evolutionary biology, skeletal anatomy and phenotypic plasticity. Her research focuses on the evolutionary processes and ecological factors that shape craniofacial variation among human populations from southern South America across the Holocene time period. She has multi-disciplinary knowledge in topics ranging from biomechanics and bite force to dental health and isotopes. Her work applies geometric morphometric techniques to quantify anatomical variation in two and three dimensions. Likewise, she uses spatial statistics to better understand how bio-cultural variation is structured across geography. At the Center, she studied the role of altitude in shaping craniofacial variation in prehistoric southern South American populations.

Fellowship Period: October – November 2017

Gustavo  G. Politis.Doctor in Archaeology  (Universidad Nacional de La Plata,  Argentina, 1984).  Senior Researcher at  the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and Professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and at the Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Director of the Instituto de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Paleontológicas del Cuaternario Pampeano (INCUAPA).  Main research interest: the peopling of the Americas, ethnoarchaeology of hunter-gatherers, archaeology of  the Pampas region and Northeast of Argentina, theory and history of archaeology.

ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gustavo_Politis

Fellowship Period: August—September 2015
Dr. Kurt Rademaker is an interdisciplinary archaeologist interested in human-environment dynamics, hunter-gatherer settlement of South America, adaptations in extreme environments, and foundations of complex societies. He has carried out archaeological and Quaternary science research in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Basin regions of the U.S., Mexico, Peru, and Scotland. His primary institution is Michigan State University. In Peru his team searches for and investigates hunter-gatherer sites from the Pacific coast to the high-elevation Andes. They are especially interested in learning about early migration routes and evolving social connections across vast, diverse landscapes. Ongoing collaborations with earth science colleagues are producing high-resolution paleoenvironmental records for comparison with cultural sequences. Collaborative research with physical anthropologists and paleogeneticists focuses on population movements and adaptations in high-elevation mountain regions, some of Earth's most challenging environments. More information on his working group is at: www.paleoandes.com 

Visit http://anthropology.msu.edu/author/radem103/ for his latest CV and publications.

Fellowship Period: January—December 2019

Dr. Hannes Rathmann is a bioarchaeologist specialized in human osteology and his research interests center around questions relating to human migrations and demography in the past. Methodologically, he draws on bioinformatic analyses from the fields of population and quantitative genetics. His work promotes interdisciplinary synergy between Anthropology, Paleogenetics and Archaeology.

Email: hannes.rathmann@uni-tuebingen.de
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hannes_Rathmann2

Fellowship Period: September—December 2017

Ivan Roksandic (PhD University of British Columbia) is a broadly trained linguist with a background in archaeology, epigraphy, and history of script. His current research, combining linguistic and archaeological lines of examination, explores the patterns of successive migrations and colonization of Caribbean islands and the linguistic heritage of different pre-Colombian ethnic groups as expressed in the toponymy of this region. He is also interested in morphosyntax of Jê languages, especially Xavante, and the subdivisions of that language family. Ivan is a faculty member at the Department of Anthropology, coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Linguistics Program, and the Director of the Caribbean Research Institute, all at the University of Winnipeg.

Email: i.roksandic@uwinnipeg.ca
Personal Website: https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/anthropology/faculty/ivan-roksandic.html

Fellowship Period: September—December 2017

Mirjana Roksandic is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and coordinator of the interdisciplinary program in Bioanthropology at The University of Winnipeg and graduate faculty at the University of Manitoba. Her main research topics include Pleistocene hominin evolution in Europe and in particular Eastern Mediterranean and mortuary ritual among sedentary and semi-sedentary archaeological hunter-gatherers. She has two active international projects: one in Serbia focusing on hominins excavated in Paleolithic caves, and the other in Cuba and Nicaragua where she is working on questions of mortuary practice and ritual continuity in the Caribbean. She is interested in when, how, and why humans have moved across continents and vast expanses of lands and sea in the context of adaptation to climatic fluctuations and social pressures. Prof. Roksandic is a recipient of NSERC and SSHRC grants, and the recipient of the Nellie McClung Foundation Manitoba Women Trailblazer Award.  

Email: m.roksandic@uwinnipeg.ca
Personal Website: https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/anthropology/faculty/mirjana-roksandic.html

Fellowship Period: May—July 2017

Fellowship Period: March—December 2019
Johannes works on the application of Markov Models to computational historical linguistics. The increasing availability of data facilitated the use of algorithmic methods to answer questions in historical linguistics. Markov Models are of great use in this research area from modelling alignments to the framework of Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the inference of phylogenetic models. Johannes focuses on the automated identification of cognate word pairs and their downstream usage in phylogenetic inference, as well as on the facilitation of different Bayesian machine learning techniques for phylogenetic inference.

Email: johannes.wahle@uni-tuebingen.de
Personal Website: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~jwahle/

Fellowship Period: October—December 2015
Dr. Søren Wichmann was a short-term fellow at the center and is based at the University of Leiden, where he is co-investigator of the project The Linguistic Past of Mesoamerica and the Andes (MESANDLIN(G)K), funded by the European Research Council. Dr. Wichmann was born in 1964 in Copenhagen, studied a B.A. in English at Honor’s College, University of Oregon (1982-83), received an M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen in 1992, and a Ph.D. from the same institution in Native American Languages and Cultures in 1996. Before Tübingen and Leiden, he held appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Copenhagen, the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and the Universidad de Sonora. Wichmann specializes in the writing systems and native languages of Mesoamerica, in particular the languages Tlapanec (Otomanguean), Ch’orti’ (Mayan), Texistepec Popoluca and Mixean (Mixe-Zoquean), and Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan). His research is oriented towards language history and tends to draw in the wider cultural context of the languages studied. Most recently, he has been engaged in cross-disciplinary oriented research on world linguistic prehistory.

Personal Website: http://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/1/soren-wichmann
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Soren_Wichmann

Fellowship Period: October 2015—September 2018
Igor Yanovich was a long-term fellow at the “Words, Bones, Genes and Tools” interdisciplinary research Center in Tübingen, Germany. His research at the Center included testing the robustness of state-of-the-art methods for inference about the past from linguistic data, building an explicit population-genetics-style framework for language change, and exploring sources of linguistic data new for computational historical linguistics. He was particularly interested in comparing linguistic diversity in populations with genetic and anatomical diversity, and inferences drawn from them all. Igor holds a masters degree in linguistics from Moscow State University, and PhD in linguistics from MIT. His previous postdoctoral appointments included work in the ERC-funded EVOLAEMP project, a fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation, and a research fellowship at the Philosophy department of Carnegie Mellon University.

Personal Website: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~yanovich/

Audrey Arner was a visiting student for Summer 2018. She was working on her bachelor degree in biology and biological anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Her scientific interests are in human evolutionary genomics and the interaction between biological and cultural evolution. During her time at the DFG Center, she worked on two projects: the evolutionary genomics of sexual dimorphism in humans and the coevolution of pelvic shape and baby size in humans.

Dr. Irina Morozova is a molecular geneticist whose main research interest is the evolution of host-pathogen interactions. Her research methods include ancient and modern DNA analysis, bioinformatic and phylogenetic analysis of molecular and population data. Irina also worked as a Research Scientist at the University of Zurich where she led projects on genotype-phenotype-environment connections and on whole-genome characterization of Y.pestis in historical samples from Central and Eastern Europe. During her staying at the University of Tübingen, Irina worked with other members of Paleogenetics group on the reconstruction of evolution of Micobacterium leprae. Currently, she is a Project Manager at Kommunarka Clinical Hospital (COVID Center) in Moscow Department of Health.

Being trained both as an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist, my main research interest lies in the study of human evolution from a joint bio-cultural perspective that takes evidence from human artifacts and fossils into consideration. My current research projects focus on aspects of the cultural, behavioral and biological evolution of our genus (Homo) and species (Homo sapiens) in Africa and their dispersal to the rest of the world. My main expertise in Paleolithic archaeology is the analysis of lithic assemblage from Middle Stone Age contexts to study the cultural evolution and behavioral adaptations of early Homo sapiens. The focus of my paleoanthropological work concerns the evolution of body size in the genus Homo. I am also interested in theoretical archaeology and evolutionary biology, including evolutionary archaeology, niche construction and cultural transmission theory.  I have been part of archaeological excavations in Europe, the Near East and Africa, and currently co-direct fieldwork in South Africa and Germany.  

Dr. Mark Grabowski is a biological anthropologist and paleoanthropoloigist whose research focuses on the evolutionary basis of human adaptations, and concentrates on three regions of our anatomy that were focal points of evolutionary change – the pelvis, the brain, and overall body size. His research integrates paleoanthropology and functional anatomy with evolutionary biology – through quantitative genetics, evolutionary modeling, and phylogenetic comparative methods. Overall research interests include human evolution, paleoanthropology, skeletal biology, evolutionary morphology, particularly hominin brain and body evolution and hominin pelvic evolution, quantitative methods, theoretical evolutionary biology, and the origins of Homo.

Dr. Patricia Santos is a postdoc at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (University of Bordeaux). Her main research interests are understanding the relationship between genetics and culture in human populations, applying methods capable of inferring the demographic history of populations using modern and ancient human genomic data. During her time at the center, she applied a novel Approximate Bayesian Computation framework to the analysis of competing models of the Bantu expansion using both linguistic and genomic data.

Tobias Mühlenbruch obtained his PhD in Pre- and Protohistory at Heidelberg University under Professor Joseph Maran, while writing about the settlement of the Lower Citadel of Tiryns in LH III C. Before he became assistant professor at Marburg University, he was a member of the SCIEM 2000-project. Following his habilitation thesis, he was granted a Heisenberg research funding of the DFG ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’. His main research interests cover the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age and the Central European Neolithic period as well as the Central European Bronze Age.

Fellowship Period: July 2016—June 2019

Dr. Abel Bosman trained as an osteoarcheologist at the University of Leiden, Netherlands and is currently a doctoral candidate at the DFG Center. His research interests focus on the application of virtual anthropology in the study of human evolution. As part of this master’s degree, he used geometric morphometrics to analyze differences in mandible form between human populations from Medieval and post-Medieval Netherlands. For his doctoral dissertation, he is reconstructing and analyzing Middle-Late Pleistocene hominin crania. His research interests are in hominin variation, the effect of masticatory stress on the cranium, and the possible influence of language on the anatomical variation of the vocal tract system.

Email: abel.bosman@ifu.uni-tuebingen.de
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Abel_Bosman2

Carolin Röding studied Archeological Science at the University of Tübingen and worked as a student assistant at the DFG Center for Advanced Studies. At the center, she was part of the Cuncaicha project and focused on the origins of Tasmanian Aborigines as part of a broader project which combines genetic, linguistic, and morphological aspects to explore the diversity in the peoples of Oceania and Island Southeast Asia.

While completing her bachelor’s degree in Biology she developed an interest in human evolution with a special emphasis on brain evolution. In her master thesis she used the methodological toolkit of geometric morphometrics to answer questions about the cerebellar evolution in hominids. Further her research interests include hominin variation, the interaction between brain and braincase as well as cranial integration and modularity.

In March 2018 Carolin Röding started as doctoral candidate in the CROSSROADS project at the University of Tübingen. For her doctoral dissertation, she is reconstructing and analyzing Middle-Late Pleistocene hominin crania and teeth from the Mediterranean.

Office: Rümelinstraße 23 room 509, 72070 Tübingen
Email: carolin.roedingspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de
Personal Page:  http://www.crossroads.ifu.uni-tuebingen.de/?staff=carolin-roding
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carolin_Roeding

David Matzig studied Pre- and Protohistory and Art History at the University of Tübingen. Since October 2017 he is pursuing a master’s degree in Pre- and Protohistory at Kiel University. With his background in Prehistory and Art History he compiled a database of engravings and abstract designs on Paleolithic mobile art as a student assistant with the DFG Center of Advanced Studies. His other research interests lie in the archaeological application of remote sensing and geographic information systems.

Gabriele has achieved his bachelor's degree in archaeological sciences at the University "La Sapienza" of Rome with a focus on Prehistory and Archeozoology. He was studying for the Master's in Archaeological Sciences at University of Tübingen with a focus on Archeozoology.

Mei-Shin Wu achieved master's degree in the International Study in Computational Linguistics program (ISCL) at the University of Tübingen and was a student assistant at the DFG Center. Miss Wu previously completed an M.Sc. degree in bioinformatics at the University of Edinburgh and a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics at the National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan. Her previous research experience focused on pharmacogenetics. At the center, she focused on linguistic dilatometry and explores the association between geographic distance and dialect changes.

Office: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Kahlaische Strasse 10, Jena, Germany
Email: wu@shh.mpg.de
Personal Website: https://www.shh.mpg.de/employees/91421/25522
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mei_Shin_Wu

Sophia Haller is currently pursueing a master in paleoanthropology at the Institute for Scientific Archaeology at the University of Tübingen. She worked as a student assistant with the DFG Center of Advanced Studies and with the biogeology group at the University of Tübingen. In the centre she was not only part of the Cuncaicha project and looking at tooth microwear; she was also contributing to a project exploring population interactions in South America through craniomorphometrics. Her research focused on paleo-ecology and human settlement of the Andes and the development of Andean high altitude adaptations. Her ongoing master thesis invesigates the diet of hunter gatherers in the high Andes of Peru through stable isotopes.

Office: Hölderlinstr. 12, Raum S507, 72074 Tübingen
Email: sophiavonhaller@gmail.com
ResearchGate Profile: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sophia_Haller

Alessio Maiello was a B.A. student in the International Studies in Computational Linguistics program at the University of Tübingen. His role in the center focused on web development and administration of the IT resources.

Email: gmaiello@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de
Personal Website: http://www.alessiomaiello.com
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giuseppe_Maiello3

Alina Ladygina studied Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Moscow State University and finished a master’s degree in Computational Linguistics at the University of Tübingen in 2017. She worked as a student assistant with the DFG Center of Advanced Studies. Her research interests focus on corpus and historical linguistics, as well anaphora and coreference resolution in the Russian language.

ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alina_Ladygina

Gabriel Šaffa was a visiting Erasmus trainee for Summer 2016. He completed his bachelor and master degrees in ecology at Prešov University in Slovakia. His scientific interests are in human evolutionary ecology, with an emphasis on the role that the environment plays in shaping dietary adaptations and dietary niche construction. His work was focused on particular aspects of human life history, including the timing of menarche. During his time at the DFG Center, he worked with isotopic data from South American populations across varying ecological settings in order to understand the patterns of weaning in hunter-gatherer and agricultural populations.

Email: gabriel.saffa@azet.sk
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gabriel_Saffa2

Panagiotis Zodos was a visiting Erasmus trainee during Spring 2017. He completed his bachelor degree in biology at University of Crete in Greece. His scientific interests are in zoology, with an emphasis on evolutionary zoology and diversity. He has experience conducting ecological field work, as well as laboratory field work on DNA extraction and PCR. During his time at the DFG Center, he worked with the human remains from Cuncaicha rock shelter in Peru. Firstly, he scanned these materials using both Breuckmann and medical CT scanners and subsequently he analyzed his data in order to make anatomical comparisons between high-altitude living humans and other populations.