Even then it was a coup for the Max Planck Society. In 1997, 25 years ago, the research organization of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich poached a young star of science, the founder of “molecular archaeology” Svante Pääbo, who was already coveted by universities worldwide. The Swede left his Munich biology professorship and went to Leipzig, where he was one of the four directors to help set up the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology – an institute that had never existed in this form before in the world. Geneticists and prehistorians, linguists, ecologists and primatologists should all work under one roof in an interdisciplinary search for the origins of mankind. With the “Wolfgang-Köhler-Center for Primate Research”, operated together with the Zoological Garden Leipzig, the institute even has its own small zoo to analyze the behavior of living great apes.
Today, more than 400 people work at the Max Planck Institute, including 250 scientists. The institution is dedicated to six main research areas; Svante Pääbo derives one for evolutionary genetics. He is the first Nobel Prize winner from the Leipzig Institute. But this has always made a name for itself – and not only because of Pääbo’s work.
Other scientists researched the origins of language – or even of plagues
The primate researcher Christophe Boesch, for example, who headed the department of primatology in Leipzig for 22 years, observed that not only humans but also chimpanzees have regionally different “cultures”. A few years ago, anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin discovered, thanks to fossil finds in Morocco, that Homo sapiens existed 100,000 years earlier than previously thought. The archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause, who is currently working at the institute, researched historical epidemics, whereby he and others succeeded in using medieval DNA samples to prove that the bacterium Yersinia pestis, now known as the causative agent of bubonic plague, was actually responsible for the notorious “Black Death” of the late Middle Ages was. And the behavioral scientist Michael Tomasello, who retired in 2018, formulated an influential theory on the evolution of language, according to which language did not develop from primal screams or other sounds, but from gestures that animals are also capable of in principle. A language in today’s sense arises when gestures are not only used as a request, but also to show something or to draw the attention of one another to something. This shared framework is the basis for a complex language.
For example, scientists at the institute recently published genetic analyzes of the population of the British Isles in the early Middle Ages. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Angles and Saxons crossed the English Channel from the fifth century AD. According to the researchers, 300 years later, three quarters of the population in what is now east and south-east England was made up of immigrants from the European continent.
Other researchers at the institute recently determined that it can be frustrating, not only for human children, when they have a sibling and the parents devote their full attention to it from then on. The new competition is also causing stress in great apes – and this can even be measured biologically. The scientists studied wild bonobo monkeys in the Congolese rainforest. And they found out that when a brother or sister was born, the older offspring released five times the amount of the stress hormone cortisol. And the stress only slowly subsides. Hormone levels remained elevated for seven months.
Martin Stratmann, President of the Max Planck Society, proudly commented on Monday about the Nobel Prize for Svante Pääbo, the former young star. For example, he proved that Neanderthals and other extinct pre-humans made an important contribution to the development of Homo sapiens, he says. “His work has revolutionized our understanding of the evolutionary history of modern humans.”