2024 News from the MPI of Geoanthropology

While debate about the start of the Anthropocene continues, its social, geophysical, and environmental roots undoubtedly lie deep in the past. Now, an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, historians, palaeoecologists, and Earth system scientists highlights the ways in which human activities significantly altered parts of the Earth system prior to the Industrial Age, with ramifications for navigating current and future relationships with the planet. more

A new study examines differences in dogs’ behavior while their owners’ experience various emotional states. Researchers found that dogs behaved differently depending on their owner’s emotion, performing better at a training task with a happy owner. more

Research reveals likely remains of discoverer of St James’ Tomb more

Analysis of lake sediment cores from Nam Co will illuminate paleoenvironmental changes on continental-scale, enabling predictions of future climate changes and its consequences. more

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Petroleum is one of the most prominent driving substances for the modern era, the Anthropocene, and therefore an important subject for Geoanthropology. It connects the deep natural history of the planet with all layers of modern human life and affects all types of politicial, societal, and ecological futures. It is both a global and intensely local commodity that can tell stories of empowerment as well as of destruction. In the forty-four chapters of their Atlas of Petromodernity, Benjamin Steininger and Alexander Klose present insight into sciences, technologies, geographies, politics, cultures, and subjectivities connected by a substance that, in all its complexities, contradictions, and ambivalences still needs more understanding to be left behind. more

The Max Planck Society is funding a new graduate school – the International Max Planck Research School for Modeling the Anthropocene (IMPRS-ModA) – at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology with almost 2.7 million euros for 6 years starting in July 2024. more