Johannes Krause

Accepting boundaries has never been a trait of modern humans. Starting from Africa, Homo sapiens settled the world, encountered Neanderthals and Denisovans, crossed open seas for the first time to reach Australia, and traveled thousands of kilometers in tiny canoes to reach the most remote islands of the Pacific. Archaeology and archaeogenetics show that migration and intermingling have shaped human history from the very beginning. The lecture spans the spectrum from the first migrations through the spread of early farmers and steppe nomads to the great population movements of modern times. It explores what remains of the borders that surround us today and what possibilities still lie ahead.

Prof. Dr. Johannes Krause is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He contributed to the decoding of the Neanderthal genome and, in 2010, was the first to identify a new human species, the Denisovan. In 2026, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.