Looking into the past
Katerina Harvati links the research worlds of Europe and America.
Where do we come from? Who were our ancestors? Professor Katerina Harvati from Greece is investigating these questions at the most advanced scientific level. She heads up the Paleoanthropology group of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoecology at the University of Tübingen and is one of the most recognized international researchers in her field. When it comes to her own personal background, Harvati does not want to be tied down: “I feel Greek, American and also German,” she says.
Until now she has spent her academic career in the USA and in Germany. In 1998 she graduated from the City University of New York with a Master’s degree in anthropology; three years later she completed her doctorate at the institution with which she still has ties today as an adjunct professor. In 2004, after three years as assistant professor at New York University, she went to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. In 2009 Katerina Harvati moved to Tübingen as a full professor.
The list of her discoveries and awards is long. In November 2011 she was one of the authors who were able to present evidence in the journal Nature for the coexistence of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals over 40,000 years ago in Europe. For this purpose, Harvati had scanned and compared the teeth of both species at her computed tomography lab in Tübingen. Harvati was also a member of the research team that was able to prove the African origin of all modern humans – a breakthrough that was named as one of the outstanding research discoveries of the year by Time magazine. Harvati has also always paid special attention to the settlement of America by prehistoric humans. The fact that her achievements are also recognized outside the scientific world was demonstrated by a special award in 2009: the World Council of Hellenes Abroad named her Woman of the Year.
Harvati appreciates the respective advantages of the research systems in North America and Europe: “In my opinion, America offers junior researchers especially good opportunities. Europe perhaps has a slightly more strongly bureaucratic character, but in Germany especially I can see great flexibility in the research landscape.”
At the end of 2011 Harvati was awarded one of the European Research Council’s sought-after Starting Grants and her project – Paleoanthropology at the Gates of Europe: Human Evolution in the Southern Balkans – will receive ca. 1.3 million euros of funding over five years. “There are still numerous gaps in our knowledge of human evolution in Pleistocene Europe,” she says.
The project is taking Harvati and her multidisciplinary colleagues to the researcher’s Greek home. “There is still a very great deal to be discovered here, also because the relevant research in Greece has often been relatively neglected compared to work on the many sites of classical antiquity,” says Harvati. “I would like my work to contribute to the further development of evolutionary and paleoanthropological research in Greece.”
