Award ceremonies

The Department for Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the Institute of Prehistory, Early History and Medieval Archaeology awarded the ROMINA-Förderpreis for ice age research for the first time. This prize is generally awarded for scientific works in the field of ice age archaeology and quaternary ecology. The company Romina Quellen Mineralbrunnen from Reutlingen donates the prize money of 10 000 DM. With this prize, the Tübingen institue and Romina Quellen Mineralbrunnen want to promote ice age research and innovative ideas and discourse in the field especially amongst young and aspiring scientists. 

The first winner of this award is Dr. Jacobo Weinstock-Arenovitz of the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde in Stuttgart. A jury consisting of five people honored his dissertation "Late Pleistocene Reindeer Populations in Western and Central Europe. An osteometrical study of Rangifer tarandus". The dissertation covers the ecological and economical importance of reindeer in Europe during the time of 130 000 to 10 000 BC. Weinstock-Arenovitz focuses on the herd migrations and the different uses palaeolithic hunters made of the animals. 

The ROMINA-Förderpreis for ice age research is awarded to Dr. Sandrine Costamagno for her dissertation, "Stratégies de chasse et fonctions des sites au Magdalénien dans le sud de la France", concluded in 1999. Her work deals with the hunting strategies and the function of certain sites during the Magdalénien. This time period is considered the peak of ice age hunters. Costamagno shows that there was no preference in hunting certain animals, as opposed to what researchers assumed previously. 

Prof. Natalie Dawn Munro PhD of the University of Connecticut was awarded the fifth Förderpreis for her work on the use of animal resources at the transitional period from the last cold phase to today's warm phase. Her research on late ice age animal remains from Israeli sites provide important information on the Neolithisation, starting in the region of the Fertile Crescent. 

American archaeologist Dr. Britt Marie Starkovich received the 14th annual Förderpreis for Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology. Starkovich from the School of Anthropology of the University of Arizona researched more than 21 000 animal bones from the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic in her dissertation „Trends in Subsistence from the Middle Paleolithic through Mesolithic at Klissoura Cave 1 (Peleponnese, Greece)“, reconstructing dietary habits of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans and how they changed during the transitional period in the Middle Palaeolithic. As a postdoc, Starkovich plans on continuing research on human's adaptations to a changing environment in Greece and other regions of Europe. 

The Förderpreis is being financed by EiszeitQuell. 

The 15th annual Förderpreis for Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology goes to Dr. Katerina Douka of Oxford University. The award is being financed by Romina Mineralbrunnen GmbH. 

Douka has specialised in C14-dating. Her dissertation “Investigating the Chronology of the Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition in Mediterranean Europe by Improved Radiocarbon Dating of Shell Ornaments” relies on the commonly found shell ornaments which are associated with occupation of anatomically modern humans as opposed to Neanderthals.  Douka analysed the shells of 14 keysites in Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France which are important for understanding the migration of modern humans to Europe in the transitional period between the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. Surprisingly, Douka found that the oldest shell ornaments are from France, not the Near East, as could be expected. 

Spanish archaeologist Dr. Antonio Rodríguez -Hidalgo of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) in Tarragona received the 18th annual Förderpreis in Tübingen.

He is a known specialist for zooarchaeology, an archaeological discipline focusing on animal remains. In his dissertation, Rodríguez -Hidalgo reconstructed subsistence strategies of early humans from animal remains, dating up to 400 000 BP. The remains were found at the site Sierra de Atapuerca near Burgos in the north of Spain, one of the largest known ice age sites. Rodríguez -Hidalgo 's research shows that early humans such as the homo antecessor were already hunting animals, using strategies not unlike those of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. 

Dr. Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo is the 2nd consecutive Spanish researcher receiving the award for this work on Sierra de Atapuerca.

Dr. Trine Kellberg Nielsen of the University Aarhus, Denmark, is awarded the Tübinger Förderpreis for her dissertation on „Northern Neanderthals: A systematic assessment of the possibility of a pre-modern human occupation of southern Scandinavia”. She discusses the possibility of Neanderthal occupation of Scandinavia in the warm periods before the last ice age. 

This possibility is often debated in Scandinavia, supporters of the idea relying on private collections. Dr. Trine Kellberg Nielsen organised surveys and examined those private collections to find evidence for Neanderthal occupation of Scandinavia during the Eem warm period. She concluded occupation was sporadic at best, providing concrete scientific evidence for a long debated question. 

The Tübinger Förderpreis for Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology was awarded to Dr. Frido Welker of the University of Kopenhagen. He receives the award for his dissertation “From Bones to Proteomes: Gaining a biological understanding of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition”.

Welker examines the archaeological remains during the transitional period of the Last Neanderthals and the early anatomically modern humans. Welker has developed a new approach to assign a site to one of the hominid species by analysing specific organic molecules contained in the site. With this method, he successfully assigned a Châtelperronien site to Neanderthal use. 

The Tübinger Förderpreis for Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology this year is awarded to Dr. Flavia Venditti of the Sapienza University in Rome for her dissertation  „The recycling phenomenon during the Lower Palaeolithic: the case study of Qesem Cave (Israel)“. Venditti researches the production of small cutting tools from larger, no longer usable tools and their usage around 400,000 years ago.

Venditti was able to show that tools were recycled in Qesem Cave starting 420,000 years ago. The reuse of materials continues up until 200,000 years ago. Tools from "recycled" materials were long regarded as provisionary - Venditti's work shows the importance of these intentionally manufactured smaller tools.

The 23rd Tübingen Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology prize goes to Dr. Anna Florin from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. The Australian archaeologist receives the award for her thesis, “Archaeobotanical investigations into 65,000 years of plant food use at Madjedbebe, Mirarr Country, northern Australia.” In it, Florin examines 65,000-year-old plant macrofossils found at Madjedbebe, tracing changes in the past diet and land use of people using the rock shelter. Her work shows that early humans were skilled gatherers who mastered complex processing techniques for exploiting plant foods.
Anna Florin studied archaeology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, where she also completed her doctorate. She is currently a research fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage at the University of Wollongong.
Florin and her team used high-performance optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy to analyze charred plant remains from ancient hearths at the Madjedbebe site. These were discarded remains of meals cooked and shared in the rockshelter tens of thousands of years ago. The samples were found to contain the remains of fruits, nuts, seeds, palm stem and roots and tubers. “Many of the plant foods we found required a lot of time and good knowledge to prepare,” Florin explains. The findings challenge earlier theories that early modern humans moving into the region put as little effort as possible into meals and did not have a varied diet.
The plant remains found at Madjedbebe indicate that early Aboriginal people were skilled gatherers and used a variety of techniques to subsist on a variety of plant foods, some of which were time-consuming to prepare. “The find is so interesting because there is little evidence worldwide of the use of plants in the diets of early humans,” Florin says. It is the earliest evidence of plant foods consumed by people outside of Africa or the Middle East. “With these results we can trace what the Firs Australians ate, and how they adapted and thrive in this novel environment over the past 65,000 years,” Florin says.
Florin worked closely with the Mirarr Aboriginal people, the Traditional Owners of Madjedbebe, to learn about plant use in the region today. Their expert knowledge of plants and Country allowed for the archaeological remains to be interpreted. Several of the plants required processing to make them edible. This included laboriously extracting pandanus nuts from their shells through pounding, peeling and cooking roots, tubers and palm, and pounding the palm pith to separate the edible starch from the less digestible fibers.
The Madjedbebe fossils provide information about the relationship between humans and plants over a long period of time - through two glacial phases, and the rise of the sea level, to the formation of northern Australia’s famous Kakadu wetlands.

The 24th Tübingen Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology prize goes to Dr. Lucía Cobo-Sánchez of Madrid University. The researcher receives the award for her doctoral thesis Taphonomic and spatial study of the archaeological site DS from Bed I in Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania). In this study, she combined classical animal bone studies with machine learning methods and was thus able to show that humans were capable of planning, cooperation and coordinated action 1.84 million years ago.

Lucía Cobo-Sánchez studied archaeology at the Universities of Madrid and Tübingen, specializing in prehistory and archaeozoology. For her Master's degree at the University of Cambridge, she chose Human Evolutionary Studies. She completed her PhD in prehistory at the University of Madrid in 2020. Since 2021, she has been conducting research at the University of Cologne in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Eleftheria Paliou and Dr. Tilman Lenssen-Erz in the project "Modeling Prehistoric Hunting Behavior" funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research.

In her thesis, Cobo-Sánchez addressed the controversial questions of the extent to which people ate meat almost two million years ago and how they obtained it. As the basis for her work, she used the exceptionally well-preserved David's Site at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, which she helped excavate. Based on the bones of ungulates, traces of their processing by humans and spatial distribution, she investigated the origin of the site, supported by the use of artificial intelligence.

Cobo-Sánchez showed that small to medium-sized prey were brought to the site whole and dissected there with the help of numerous stone tools. There is little evidence that carnivorous animals helped themselves to the carcasses. This, and the high proportion of young adult animals, leads Cobo-Sánchez to conclude that the animals were deliberately hunted by ambush.

In addition, her work provides basic insights into the social behavior of our early ancestors. Repeated returns to the site over a period of one to two years indicate its use as a central place where food was presumably shared. In addition to hunting prey, people also transported large quantities of raw materials there to make stone tools. "Obviously, planning, cooperation and coordinated behavior were features of close human interaction in this early period," says CoboSánchez. However, the large number of bones and implements found in a small area show behavior that is very different from both other primates and modern humans.

The annual Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology Prize is sponsored by the mineral water producer EiszeitQuell and is endowed with 5000 euros prize money. The prize is awarded for the 24th time in 2022.

The Tübingen Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology Prize this year goes to Briana N. Doering, assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, USA. The distinction honors her thesis with the title “Evaluating the Social and Environmental Processes of the Athabascan Migration.” The thesis examines the circumstances surrounding the migration of Dene/Athabascan populations from Alaska and the Yukon as far south as Arizona, some 1500 years ago. The jury praised the study as an example of rigorous hypothesis testing using multiple different analytic methods, guided by an explicit theoretical framework.

Briana Doering received her B.A. in Anthropology from Barnard College of Columbia University, then moved on to the University of Michigan, where she earned her M.A. in Anthropological Archaeology in 2016 and Ph.D. in 2020. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Her main research area is in Alaska, working on topics such as migration, indigenous archaeology, human-animal relationships, spatial organization, resilience and adaptation.

Doering used archaeological, linguistic, genetic and oral history data in her doctoral thesis to develop a new theory regarding the migration of Dene/Athabascan populations. For many decades it was believed that a volcanic eruption drove Dene/Athabascan people away from their homes and into new environments, thousands of kilometers away. Dr. Doering challenges the very premise of the explanation, noting that archaeologists are quick to see environmental factors as catalyzing major change. Dr. Doering hypothesizes that social factors such as group reorganization related to the kinship structure led to population growth and the eventual migration of Dene/Athabascan groups south.

Dr. Doering excavated four archaeological sites with five time components marking before and after the volcanic eruption. At each of the sites she conducted a thorough lithic analysis to see if and how tool production and raw material selection changed. She also analyzed isotopes from lipids from hearths and integrated these data with information from fauna studies to understand the composition of the human diets at that time. She carried out a large metadata analysis from two huge radiocarbon databases (one from the US and one from Canada) to see how landscape use changed relative to the number and size of sites.

Overall, Dr. Doering found that leading up to the Dene/Athabascan migration, many changes had been gradually occurring over hundreds of years. Stone toolkits became more specialized and the populations intensified their use of both upland and lowland resources. Fishing became more important. Dr. Doering also explored the kinship structures of Dene/Athabascan groups, and determined that changes in social organization could explain the population growth.

The annual Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology Prize comes with 5000 euros in prize money and is sponsored by mineral water producer, EiszeitQuell. The prize is now in its 25th year.

The Tübingen Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology Prize this year goes to Dr. Paola Cerrito of Zürich University. She receives the award for her doctoral thesis, "Histological and elemental markers of physiological stressors in hard tissues" in which she investigates how events that influence the metabolism, such as reproduction, menopause and changes in lifestyle, are permanently recorded in the skeleton. This is regarded as the biological archive of a human life. Applied to fossil human remains, new insights can be gained into the life histories of individuals and the development of human traits, such as unusually short inter-birth intervals and an extended post-reproductive lifespan.

Paola Cerrito (born 1990 in Italy) studied Biological Anthropology at the Sapienza University of Rome. She completed a Master's degree in Biological Anthropology at New York University, where she also completed her doctorate in 2022. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Geneva, has worked as a postdoc at ETH Zurich and, since August 2023 has been a postdoc at the University of Zurich. From July 2024, she will be Assistant Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University in Durham (USA).

Cerrito is researching the question of how certain life patterns have developed during the evolution of Homo sapiens: At what age did women become pregnant for the first time in a particular era, at what interval did they bear children, how long did they live after menopause, and what changes occurred in human life histories? The development of such life history variables is traditionally difficult to study: Bones and other mineralized tissues are mainly formed in childhood and adolescence, so that hardly any traces of events in adulthood remain.

Cerrito therefore concentrated on a little-researched dental tissue, the root cementum, which anchors the tooth in the jaw. The special thing about this cementum is that it continues to be deposited - a bit like the rings of a tree - throughout the life of the individual. Using improved histological preparation and imaging techniques, Dr. Cerrito examined samples from people with known life history and medical records. She was able to show that events such as births and menopause can be detected in the cementum and assigned to an age, based on the annual deposits.

Using synchrotron radiation on the ELETTRA SYRMEP beamline, she proved that such "histological markers" can be detected using virtual histology. As the teeth do not have to be destroyed, even rare fossil human remains can be examined in this way. In a pilot study, she applied these methods for the first time to Neanderthal teeth from Krapina (Croatia; approx. 130,000 years old) and teeth of early farmers from what is now Serbia. However, the histological markers are non-specific and it is not possible to distinguish between signs of pregnancy and signs of menopause.

Cerrito therefore also investigated what chemical signature is left on the skeleton by various events in an individual’s life. Her aim is to trace the evolution of the typical human life and to understand the interplay of the developmental impulses involved, such as social and reproductive behavior and the need to make optimum use of available food resources.

The annual Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology Prize has been awarded annually for 26 years. It comes with 5000 euros in prize money, sponsored by Romina Mineralbrunnen GmbH.

Source: https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/news-default/article/what-human-fossils-reveal-about-life-stories/