blog

30.10.2026

HESCOR Virtual Exhibition Opening

After a year of intensive work on content, structure, and design, HESCOR celebrated the opening of its Virtual Exhibition at the University of Cologne (UoC) on Friday, October 23rd 2026. The event brought together project members, external colleagues, …

14.10.2026

As HESCOR concludes, we present the findings in a Special Issue!

The research team, led by Dr. Andreas Maier and Dr. Nikki Vercauteren, provides an early preview to their contribution to the Journal of Quaternary Science.

30.09.2026

Student Perspectives: Vittorio Iannuzzi

From running KinderUni learning stations to creating an audio-dubbed comic series, Vittorio talks about his three years as a student assistant in science communication at HESCOR and how outreach in a big interdisciplinary project is varied, hands-on, and full of new experiences.

02.09.2026

Student Perspectives: Lana Allan

Lana Allan talks about her work as a student assistant with HESCOR - and agent-based modelling.

02.09.2026

Student Perspective: Lena Perlberg

Lena Perlberg, one of our student assistants, shares her experiences about working with HESCOR,

05.08.2026

Student Perspectives: Helen Hoffmann

What is it like to work for the HESCOR project? Helen explains the various tasks she has worked on and shares some of her favourite moments at HESCOR.

22.07.2026

Humans in the Earth System II: Rethinking Human Agency

How do humans act in the Earth System? Dr. Dominik Ohrem and Dr. Shumon Hussain argue for a multi-dimensional account of "human agency."

08.07.2026

Humans in the Earth System I: Components and Dynamics of the Anthroposphere

To understand the Earth and Human Systems, we break them down into spheres - but the human sphere, or anthroposphere, is always oversimplified. Dr. Dominik Ohrem and Dr. Shumon Hussain describe the critical elements of the anthroposphere to create more accurate Earth System Models!

24.06.2026

Modelling Past Vegetation Dynamics: How Well Do Models Capture a Changing Earth?

How closely can climate models reproduce Earth’s changing vegetation over the past 20,000 years? Dr. Anne Dallmeyer explains how she and her colleagues explore where models succeed—and why they still miss important regional detail.

15.06.2026

Student Perspectives: Anna Köpke

What is it like to write a master’s thesis in the HESCOR project? Anna explains how she is investigating the influence of uncertainties and biases in data on the HEP.

20.05.2026

Student Perspectives: Jakob Heiter

Wie ist es als Student bei HESCOR zu arbeiten? Jakob erzählt von seinem Beitrag in der Weiterentwicklung von Modellen zur Berechnung des Human Existence Potential (HEP)!

06.05.2026

The First Farmers and Their Environment

How did Europe's first farmers 10,000 years ago interact with their environment? Dr. Johanna Hilpert shares how HESCOR workers are studying the Linearbandkeramik culture and their relationship with the environment!

22.04.2026

Humans in Africa’s High Mountains – 15,000 Years Ago

How did past humans utilize some of Africa’s highest landscapes? In his new publication, Dr. Götz Ossendorf explores evidence that reveals how humans 15,000 years ago took advantage of newly ice-free landscapes in Ethiopia.

08.04.2026

Modern Transfer Learning Architectures Improve Archaeological Artifact Classification

Can artificial intelligence transform how we classify artefacts? Discover how Dr. Boqiang Huang is using transfer learning to overcome limited data and subjectivity, unlocking new insights into the past.

25.03.2026

Student Perspectives: Viktoria Fries

Wie ist es, als Studentin bei HESCOR zu arbeiten? Viki erzählt von ihren Erfahrungen zwischen Archäozoologie, Datenbanken und interdisziplinärem Austausch.

11.03.2026

How Did Humans Spread Across Ice Age Europe? The „Our Way Model“ Explains

How might the first anatomically modern humans have migrated across Europe? Dr. Isabell Schmidt explores this question using the “Our Way Model” and results from our recent Nature Communications paper.

28.01.2026

Reconstructing Lakes from Cores

From our everyday experiences, lakes don’t seem to change that much, but over hundreds of years, they can change a lot! Dr. Elena Robakiewicz explains the fundamentals of coring and studying past lakes in a review of her most recent paper on Lake Nakuru in Kenya over the last 35,000 years!

14.01.2026

Modelling Prehistoric Mobility

How can a rock from hundreds of kilometers away be the source material for stone tools? Dr. Johanna Hilpert explains how HESCOR team members are exploring prehistoric “networks” to understand how different groups of humans interacted and exchanged with one another in the distant past.

10.12.2025

How can we facilitate access to paleovegetation reconstructions?

Understanding reconstructions of past vegetation can be difficult…. Dr. Oliver Kern introduces his PALVEG app to make the maps from paleovegetation reconstructions more accessible to researchers across all disciplines!

26.11.2025

Interdisciplinary research is demanding, unsettling, and transformative – otherwise it fails

Achieving true interdisciplinarity is hard! Dr. Shumon T. Hussain makes an argument for accepting the transformative nature of interdisciplinary research - even if that means researchers must revisit their standard methods and assumptions!

12.11.2025

What is a good model?

What's a (good) model? Dr. Annika Vogel highlights the questions that need to be answered and decisions that need to be made to appropriately model interdisciplinary phenomena - there are always tradeoffs!

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!