Ulli Lust & Johannes Krause
- Telling the Story of Our Origins
- Of Early Traces and New Stories
- Geist Heidelberg, In dialogue
How do early traces become a history of humankind? Comic artist Ulli Lust and archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause bring two extraordinary perspectives into dialogue: feminist visual art meets archaeogenetics. In her non-fiction comic series *Die Frau als Mensch* (*Woman as Human*), Lust challenges common notions of gender roles and community in early societies. Krause’s research on ancient DNA offers new insights into ancestry, kinship, and migration. Together, they explore how the past can be reconstructed from images, artifacts, and genes—and to what extent our present-day perspectives shape the stories we tell about human history.
Prof. Ulli Lust is one of the most prominent voices in the German-language comics scene and teaches at Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts. In 2025, she became the first comics artist to receive the German Nonfiction Prize for *Die Frau als Mensch*.
Prof. Dr. Johannes Krause is an archaeogeneticist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He contributed to the decoding of the Neanderthal genome and has published several bestsellers.
