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Abstract When people think of their ancestry, they are often just as concerned with the origins of their linguistic and cultural identity as they are with their genetic history. And while modern advances in ancient DNA have dramatically improved our understanding of prehistoric population movements, genes do not themselves carry language. The fields of population…
We’re excited to announce the Human Past Fellows for the academic year 2026-27. We will welcome Jaison Jeevan Sequeira as the Junior Fellow (during the whole academic year 2026-27) and Sohini Ramachandran as Senior Fellow in the spring term. Jaison Jeevan Sequeira, PhD, Mangalore University, India Junior Fellow 2026-27 Deciphering the dual Steppe ancestry and…
The Human Past SCAS Residential Fellowship Programme is an initiative by the Center for the Human Past, administered by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). The fellowships are designed to foster a collaborative environment where early-stage (postdoctoral-level) and established scholars can converge across a wide range of disciplines, such as archaeology, population genetics, and…
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The Higher Seminar in Baltic Languages with Signe Rirdance (SU) and Anthony Jakob (SCAS). The seminar is split into two sessions (with a coffee break in between): 14:00-15:30 – Signe Rirdance (SU): “Deciphering Getzel’s hand in early Latvian: AI and I” 16:00-17:30 – Anthony Jakob (SCAS): “Linguistic ghosts and zombies in modern Standard Lithuanian” Language:…
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ABSTRACT The diversification of the ancient Greek dialects has long posed a major challenge for Greek linguistics. Core questions—how the dialects are related, when they diverged, and how they were distributed in the second millennium BCE—remain the subject of sustained debate, in part because of the limits of traditional methods of historical inference. Over the…
We are pleased to welcome Hugo Reyes Centeno, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky, USA and Anthony Jakob, a historical linguist with a PhD from Leiden University as our new fellows. During the fellowship, Hugo will work on the project Genomic and archaeological approaches toward resolving the Austronesian problem, while Anthony…
The post of Associate Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, has been awarded to our Human Past Fellow, Axel Palmér. Axel’s enthusiasm, curiosity, and quest for learning, combined with his desire to teach, make him the ideal colleague to work with. Congratulations, Axel! More about…
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In the new SCAS podcast episode (episode 65), Axel Palmér, a historical linguist specialising in Indo-European languages, discusses his research on agricultural vocabulary in the Rigveda. Axel examines whether the people who composed the Rigveda were pastoralists or agriculturalists by analysing the text’s descriptions of agriculture and comparing them to those found in other Indo-European…
We’re excited to announce that the Human Past Fellows for academic year 2025-26 have been selected! The fellowship programme is an initiative by the Center for the Human Past, administered by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS). It is designed to foster a collaborative environment where early-stage and established scholars can converge across three…
The Fellowships are a joint initiative of the Center for the Human Past (CHP) and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). Deadline for applications: 2 June 2025. The fellowship aims to attract researchers interested in the human past, combining methods and materials from different disciplines. The primary focus is research on three major migration…