blog

29.10.2025

Unveiling the Past with Machine Learning

How can machine learning be used in archaeology? Dr. Boqiang Huang lists the ways that archaeologists could use machine learning to revolutionize standard archaeological methods.

15.10.2025

How to create migration networks?

How can we actually map out potential patterns of human migration? Max Brockmann discusses how he and Lena Perlberg use methods of probability to estimate how earlier humans may have moved throughout Europe!

01.10.2025

When it gets cold

What happens to humans when the world suddenly turns cold? An international team led by HESCOR members Isabell Schmidt and Andreas Maier investigated how Palaeolithic humans reacted to the cold Younger Dryas climate event about 12,000 years ago in Europe!

17.09.2025

Docker and the HESCOR Database

How might an interdisciplinary database work? HESCOR Project Database Manager, Philipp Schlüter, lays out the technical problems and potential solutions for creating HESCOR's database.

03.09.2025

Why all the way up there?

How do people survive extreme altitudes? Living in high-altitudes is challenging today - but humans in the Ethiopian highlands have done it for tens of thousands of years! Dr. Götz Ossendorf introduces his hypothesis that social connectedness allowed past humans to endure such harsh conditions.

21.08.2025

Learning from and with animals

Humans exist within a commingling network of other living organisms. What have we learned from them and what have they learned from us? Dr. Shumon T. Hussain and Dr. Dominik Ohrem highlight their research to better integrate the ways that humans and animals learn from each other and how that knowledge-sharing impacts the Earth System!

06.08.2025

Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research

Interdisciplinary research demands extra effort, time, and communication—but it’s worth it! Dr. Isabell Schmidt outlines the challenges involved and explains why such collaboration is essential for answering questions about our deep past.

23.07.2025

Modelling Human Migration on Networks Using Partial Differential Equations

How can we actually model human migration? Max Brockmann breaks down how mathematicians can use Partial Differential Equations to model continental-scale human migrations in prehistory!

10.07.2025

How Do Population Size and Connectedness, and Resource Scarcity and Sufficiency, Influence Technological Innovation?

What does innovation have to do with population? And what drives innovation - hardship or abundance? Dr. Tilman Hartley explores some of the theoretical questions about how different aspects of human societies might impact innovation!

18.06.2025

Communicating Interdisciplinary Data

Researchers at universities rarely work with researchers in other departments - why? Dr. Elena Robakiewicz highlights the difficulties of understanding research and data in other fields and what HESCOR is doing to address data communication issues!