Press releases (archive)
Contact: Sandra Jacob (e-mail:info@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de, phone: +49 (0) 341-3550 122)
2014
Education and alternative protein sources may help protect biodiversity in tropical Africa
Information on socio-economic development processes and their impact on the biodiversity in tropical Africa need to be taken into consideration when…
Don't be an outsider!
Very young children imitate their peers to fit in, while great apes tend to stick to their own preferences
Children and chimpanzees often follow the…
The early chimp gets the fig
Wild chimpanzees plan their breakfast time, type and location
How do our close relatives, the chimpanzees, acquire sufficient food when times are lean?…
Earliest modern human sequenced
Researchers discover fragments of Neandertal DNA in the genome of a 45,000 year-old modern human from Siberia
A research team led by Svante Pääbo of…
"Kernel" lexicon of languages remains stable in the long run
Changes in the social environment can nevertheless speed up the development of a language's lexicon
The frequency with which we use different words…
Early modern human settlement in Central Europe
Modern humans may have migrated into Austria around 43,500 years ago during a period with a cold steppe-like climate
A multinational team led by…
Chimpanzee males more likely to kill and be killed
Lethal aggression in wild chimpanzees and bonobos is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts.
An international team of researchers…
Female bonobos start up early
Onset of puberty in female bonobos preceeds that of chimpanzees
Puberty is the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Behavior and appearance…
Sweet memories: What chimpanzees remember from past feeding experiences
Positive emotional experiences may trigger spontaneous prospective memory retrievals in foraging chimpanzees
An international team of researchers from…
Dogs follow human voice direction to find hidden food
Max Planck researchers found that dogs and puppies can locate hidden food by using human voice direction referentially
Dogs and puppies are gifted at…
Albert Maucher Prize 2013
Prize winner Kathryn E. Fitzsimmons leads the working group for Luminescence Dating within the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck…
Family ties in the language jungle
Max Planck researchers reveal relationships between rare languages in the Colombian Amazon
The only linguistic data available for Carabayo, a language…
Life-style determines gut microbes
An international team of researchers has for the first time deciphered the intestinal bacteria of present- day hunter-gatherers
The gut microbiota is…
One of the last strongholds for Western chimpanzees
Liberia is home to the second largest chimpanzee population in West Africa
When Liberia enters the news it is usually in the context of civil war,…
Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Guinea - impact on wildlife?
A team of interdisciplinary scientists arrived in Guinea April 2nd 2014 to investigate a possible epidemic of Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF) amongst…
The Neanderthal in us
Contemporary Europeans have as many as three times more Neanderthal variants in genes involved in lipid catabolism than Asians and Africans
Although…
Mixed genes
An interactive world map of human genetic history reveals likely genetic impacts of historical events
When individuals from different groups…
New large population of chimpanzees discovered
Several thousand chimpanzees inhabit a remote forest area in the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo
With great ape populations in fast decline,…
Friend or foe
Chimpanzees keep track of other group members’ bonding partners and use this knowledge in conflict situations
To know who your opponents’ family and…
The way to a chimpanzee's heart is through its stomach
Chimpanzees who share their food with others have higher levels of the hormone oxytocin in their urine
The ability to form long-term cooperative…