Rate My Professor Cosimo Posth

Jun. Prof. Dr. Cosimo Posth is Junior Professor of Archaeo- and Palaeogenetics at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment. He leads the Archaeo- and Palaeogenetics group within the Institute for Archaeological Sciences. Posth focuses his research on the genetic reconstruction and dispersal history of archaic and modern humans through the DNA analysis of ancient human remains. His main research interests include ancient DNA, population genetics, human evolution, and archaeological sciences.

After studying Natural and Anthropological Sciences in Florence, Italy, Posth received his doctorate from the University of Tübingen in 2016. In his doctoral thesis, he demonstrated that early modern humans and Neanderthals admixed more than 200,000 years ago and revealed population expansions and contractions of European hunter-gatherers during the last Ice Age. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, where he became leader of the Human Paleogenomics group in 2019. Since April 2020, he has held his current appointment at the University of Tübingen. Posth received the Manfred Fuchs Prize from the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Key publications include the 2016 paper 'Pleistocene Mitochondrial Genomes Suggest a Single Major Dispersal of Non-Africans and a Late Glacial Population Turnover in Europe' and the 2023 paper 'Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European Hunter-Gatherers' in Nature. He maintains an active research program in palaeogenomics and contributes to the field through leadership of his research group and participation in international collaborations.