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HEAS Member Peter Steier publishes paper on dating Austria’s Lake Neusiedl

The landscape of present-day Austria was shaped by the ice ages, the last of which ended around 10,000 years ago. Modern scientific methods allow us to gain an insight into these processes long before historical records exist. One controversial question to date has been how long Lake Neusiedl has existed. Because there was no reliable evidence, estimates ranged from thousands to millions of years. In a joint endeavour, scientists from four Austrian universities have now succeeded in narrowing down the age of Lake Neusiedl to around 25,000 years. Stephanie Neuhuber from the Institute of Applied Geology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna, under whose leadership the study was carried out, is surprised by this age, which coincides with the peak of the last ice age, as it was actually particularly dry at that time. The age was determined by radiocarbon dating of carbonate minerals formed in the lake water and deposited in mud on the lake bed. Read more here   Read full paper  

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News Allgemein

HEAS Member Verena Schünemann has a new paper in Nature on Prehistoric human remains from South-America helping to uncover the origins of treponemal diseases.

The oldest known genome of a bacterium from a family that causes diseases such as syphilis has been identified in prehistoric human remains from Brazil, a Nature paper reveals. The finding helps to shed light on the origins of this disease group. Closely related but distinct subspecies of Treponema pallidum bacteria cause different types of treponemal disease, such as venereal syphilis and a non-sexually transmitted disease known as bejel. The origins of these diseases are debated: some argue that the syphilis epidemic in late 15th century Europe arose after Columbus’ expeditions introduced the bacteria from the Americas. Previous theories of the emergence of these diseases have been based on studies of ancient bone pathology but definitive evidence to identify the causative subspecies has eluded researchers. Verena Schuenemann and colleagues extracted DNA from four individuals from a nearly 2,000-year-old Brazilian burial site and were able to reconstruct the genomes of T. pallidum bacteria that had infected them. Their analysis revealed that the pathogen responsible was most closely related to the modern species that causes bejel. The finding adds strength to previous suggestions that civilizations in the Americas experienced treponemal infections in pre-Columbian times, and that treponemal disease was already present in the New World at least 500 years before Columbus set sail. The study does not shed light on the emergence…

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HEAS member Muhammad Bilal Sharif successfully completes PhD. Congratulations Dr. Sharif!

We are pleased to share that a HEAS member, Muhammad Bilal Sharif, has successfully completed his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Elmira Mohandesan and Prof. Katrin Schaefer. He defended his thesis "The Threads of Time in Equine Management: A Genetic Exploration of Iron Age and Roman Equids, and New Zealand's Feral Horses" on January 5th, 2024. Congratulations to Dr. Sharif on this remarkable achievement!

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