What happened to the Stone Age farmers of Europe? Tales from ancient DNA
Institutskolloquium
- Datum: 19.06.2026
- Uhrzeit: 10:30 - 12:00
- Vortragender: Prof. Frederik Valeur Seersholm
- Frederik Valeur Seersholm is a researcher specializing in the use of ancient DNA to study disease, kinship and population dynamics in the past. His work focuses on understanding how historical events, such as the spread of diseases like plague, shaped human populations and ecosystems. Frederik completed his PhD from Curtin University in Perth, Australia in 2020, and is currently employed as an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen.
- Ort: IPP
- Raum: Günter-Grieger Lecture Hall (Greifswald) and Zoom
- Gastgeber: Dmitry Moseev
- Kontakt: dmitry.moseev@ipp.mpg.de
In the past decade technological leaps in DNA sequencing technologies have allowed researchers to read the DNA of the past, from a wide array of species ranging from massive mammoths to tiny bacteria. In this lecture, I will give an introctuction to the research field called ‘ancient DNA’ as a whole and dive into two recent studies focusing on the end of the Stone Age in Europe.
It is well established that the Stone Age came to an abrupt end 5,000 years ago when large parts of Northern Europe's population disappeared. It is, however, still debated what caused this population decline. Through genetic analysis bone and tooth samples from hundreds of individuals buried in big stone graves across Northern Europe, I will present new data that brings us one step closer to understanding why these people vanished. Using the latest DNA sequencing techniques, we have demonstrated that a large fraction of analyzed individuals were infected with a previously unknown form of plague at the time of their death. This finding suggests that this disease may have been a major contributing factor to the disappearance of the population 5,000 years ago.