Nature News reported on the use of bow-and-arrow for hunting based on the research made on small points found in a 54,000-year-old cave site in southern France.

The genetic material of currently living Europeans is partly of Neandertal origin. Were our ancestors successful because they were hybridising and interacting with the local populations they encountered when migrating into new places? Reconstructing our evolutionary trajectory is key for rethinking…

Recent studies of Neandertal body mass and skin surface indicate raised energetic requirements in this lineage compared to anatomically modern humans.

This project focuses on the study of Neanderthal and early modern human behavior, primarily on the basis of stone tools, fauna and spatial patterns

The Modern Devotion: pone of the most influential religious initiatives in the late medieval Low Countries.

In Nature researchers at Leiden University and Utrecht University show how 47 teeth from Southern China indicate that anatomically modern humans where present at least 80,000 years ago in the region. This is 40,000 years earlier than in Europe.

As the flagship journal of the National Academy of Sciences USA, PNAS publishes several special features each year highlighting topics that are expected to engage the interest of the journal’s broad readership. Archaeologist Wil Roebroeks was invited by the Editors of PNAS to contribute a paper on the…

The routine assumption that Upper Palaeolithic early modern humans in Europe were regular fire users who produced fire at will has never been tested against the archaeological record. Utilizing literature, database and microwear analytical approaches, this project seeks to establish the role and forms…

The Human Origins group at Leiden University studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, from the earliest stone tools in East Africa, more than three million years old, to the origin of sedentary societies towards the end of the last ice age.

ASLU 28 Michalis Karambinis (2015)

On the 2nd of April, Eline Lismont successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Eline on this achievement!

The research contained in this dissertation explores the origins of fire making in prehistory, focusing primarily on the fire use practices and fire production capacities of Neandertals.

On March 21 2018, a study was published in Nature, co-authored by Professor M. Soressi from the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University, announcing the sequencing of five new Neandertals, raising the number of high-coverage sequenced Neandertals from two to seven. A tooth lost by a Neandertal woman…

This volume discusses practices of memory in early modern Europe.

Providing a valuable overview of regionalism throughout the entire continent, Regionalism in Modern Europe combines both geographical and thematic approaches to examine the origins and development of regional movements and identities in Europe from 1890 to the present.

With an off-the-charts number of downloads, outstanding media coverage, and more than 300 tweets, a small team behind the Scientific Reports article led by a Leiden PhD Igor Djakovic is living every researcher’s dream.

Neanderthals and modern humans in Belgium, a bone story

An experimental approach to organic palaeolithic technology

The Altai region has yielded a cluster of Middle and Upper Paleolithic stratified sites that have been recently excavated using a multidisciplinary approach.

The genetic material of currently living Europeans is partly of Neandertal origin. Were our ancestors successful because they were hybridising and interacting with the local populations they encountered when migrating into new places? This subject takes centre stage in a beautiful documentary produced…

A fragment of a human skull discovered in sediments extracted from the bottom of the North Sea, 15 km off the coast off the Netherlands, has been identified as belonging to the extinct Neandertal group.

The Leiden Institute of History approaches early modern and modern European history from comparative and transnational perspectives.

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections and interactions between a variety of artistic expressions and society. It focuses not only on objects (artistic, literary, cinematic, and medial), but also on practices (aesthetic, political, and cultural).

New finds demonstrate that Neandertals were the first in Europe to make standardised and specialised bone tools – which are still in use today. These firndings are reported by Leiden reseachers together with an international team of archaeologists in the PNAS journal (Proceedings National Academy of…

Les Cottés is one the rare site in western Europe with occupations in sequence by the very last Neandertals and the first anatomically modern humans.

In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century.

The conquest by Rome brought profound changes to large parts of Europe. Unprecedented infrastructural works were created, towns sprang up, a ribbon of fortresses was laid out along the frontiers.

This dissertation the role of the English dissenting minister Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) as a grammarian is studied.

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume project, authored by an international team of researchers, and offering the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe.

An Introduction and Field Guide, Second and Revised Edition (15 December 2014)

The analysis of protein residues extracted from the storage containers of circa 50,000 year old bone-tools reveals Neandertal strategic selection of bovid ribs to make some of their “lissoirs”.

Middle Paleolithic stone tool technology is one of the major sources of information about Neandertal behavior and adaptations. The Balkan Middle Paleolithic often remains outside of the major debates and interpretations of Neandertal behavior.

Musical instruments are multiple things: they are objects but also means of communication; they are technological and also deeply connected to embodiment through the player; and they leave certain cultural traces (Ricoeur 1975/1984). This research project explores how literary texts from the 19th century…

The Human Origins group at Leiden University studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, from the earliest stone tools in East Africa, more than three million years old, to the origin of sedentary societies towards the end of the last ice age.

Huda Abi-Fares defended her thesis on 10 January 2017.

Built Environment and Domestic Material Culture in the Medieval and Post-Medieval Cyclades, Greece (13th – 20th Centuries AD)

In a new article in the journal Scientific Reports, Leiden archaeologist Wei Chu and colleagues report on recent excavations in Western Romania at the site of Româneşti, one of the most important sites in southeastern Europe associated with the earliest Homo sapiens. The site gives an important glimpse…

The transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic is a major biological and cultural threshold in the construction of our common humanity. Technological and behavioral changes happened simultaneously to a major climatic cooling, forcing human populations to develop new strategies for the exploitation…

When do fire making tools appear in prehistory, and how might the use of these tools manifest in the archaeological record?

Extinct hominin DNA extracted from >40,000 years old sediment

Correctly interpreting the patterns of fire evidence in the archaeological record will illuminate the origin of human fire use.

Two Vidi subsidies for Faculty of Archaeology.

On 30 January 2024 Jurre van der Meer successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Aristocratic dynasties have long been regarded as fundamental to the development of early modern society and government. Yet recent work by political historians has increasingly questioned the dominant role of ruling families in state formation, underlining instead the continued importance and independence…

Drawing on a broad array of sources, this project examines modern retrievals of Bacon’s idols, thereby testing Justus von Liebig’s intriguing observation, back in 1863, that Bacon’s name lived on mainly in mottos or stereotypical phrases. More importantly, it examines the rhetorical purposes served…

In the South African context, certain iconic images have been a dominant source for public understandings of historical events. The emphasis given these images tends to overshadow the historical value of other more personal photographic sources – like studio or amateur photography. This project looks…

Scientists remain puzzled by the sudden extinction of Neanderthals, some 40,000 years ago. New research by scientists from Eindhoven University of Technology, Leiden University and Wageningen University now suggests we might have been too quick in attributing the demise of Neanderthals to invasions…

Modern humans and Neanderthals may have co-existed in France and Northern Spain for up to 2,900 years until the Neanderthals disappeared. This is what archaeologists from Leiden University and Cambridge University write in a new publication in Scientific Reports.

One way for governments to conduct foreign policy and promote national interests is through direct outreach and communication with the population of a foreign country. This is called public diplomacy. Historians such as Helmer Helmers and William T. Rossiter have shown that printed media were already…