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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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

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

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…

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…

La Grande Roche is one of the rare archaeological sites that preserved a long sequence of deposits formed at the time of contact between late Neandertals and early Homo sapiens.

Scientist looked for the genetic footprint of fire use in our genes, but found that our prehistoric cousins - the Neanderthals - and even the great apes seem better at dealing with the toxins in smoke than modern humans.

Collecting as much information as possible about administering a new medicine to people can save a lot of money.

The factors that dynamically sculpt the inter-regional correlation of brain patterns are poorly understood. Here, we test the hypothesis that they are shaped by the catecholaminergic neuromodulators norepinephrine and dopamine.

Researcher: Hieke Huistra MSc. This PhD-project is directed at the historical and educational import of the Leiden University nineteenth-century pathological collections.

The Patriot behind the pot tells the story of pottery, people and politics in the Netherlands during a time of great revolutions -revolutions both in a political and industrial sense.

According to Thomson Reuters’ 2014 Journal Citation Reports® (JCR) and the Washington & Lee University School of Law 2014 Journal Rankings, 22 journals published by the University of Chicago Press rank at the top of their subject categories.

On January 8 and 9, a conference will take place at Leiden University, titled: "The Plurality of Early Modern Media: 21st-Century Perspectives on Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities". This conference marks the 25 years anniversary of the Intersections series (published by Brill) and reflects…

Why did 'character', 'habit', and 'virtue' serve as key terms in late 19th and early 20th-century scholarly correspondences, biographies, and obituaries? Why did scholars around 1900 display so much interest in the working habits and character traits of what they called the 'scholarly self'?

In this dissertation, a comprehensive portrait of the American-born Quaker Lindley Murray (1745–1826) is painted and the influence of Murray’s Quakerism on his language use is investigated by analyzing a corpus of 262 of his unpublished private letters.