Benjamin VernotI am a population geneticist who specializes in the study of ancient DNA, using this DNA to reconstruct the lives of people in the past. My current focus is on ancient DNA extracted from sediments.
Most ancient DNA is retrieved from bones or teeth – but many sites lack such skeletal elements. Furthermore, bones and teeth are deposited upon death, but an individual sheds DNA throughout their entire life, in principle leaving a trace of their presence where they lived and worked. Recent work (Vernot et al, Science, 2021) has demonstrated that human DNA can be retrieved from ancient sediments – including human nuclear DNA – and that this DNA can even come from single individuals. In addition to human DNA, most sediment samples contain abundant DNA from flora and fauna, providing insight into the environment in which these people lived.
Our projects can be split into three groups: 1) the study of human DNA from archaeological sediments; 2) projects that reconstruct ecosystem changes over time, often as a function of human activity; 3) the development of novel computational methods for analyzing challenging ancient DNA datasets.
Timeline: I studied Computer Science for my Bachelor’s degree, earned my PhD in Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, and went on to a postdoc with Svante Pääbo in at the Max Planck for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. In 2021 I was awarded an independent W2 group at MPI EVA, and in 2025 I joined the University of Vienna as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, while retaining an affiliation at MPI EVA. I lead the Ancient Environmental Genomics group, which is currently located in both Vienna and Leipzig, and am the principal investigator for the ERC Consolidator Grant UNEARTH.