Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (German: Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie) is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Planck Society network.

The institute comprises five departments (Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Evolutionary Genetics, Human Evolution, Primatology and Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture) and several Junior Scientist Groups, and currently employs about three hundred and thirty people. The former Department of Linguistics, which ran from 1998 to 2015, was closed in May 2015, upon the retirement of its director, Bernard Comrie.

Well-known scientists currently based at the institute include Svante Pääbo (genetics), Michael Tomasello (psychology), Christophe Boesch (primatology), Jean-Jacques Hublin (evolution) and Richard McElreath (evolutionary ecology).

In July 2006, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and 454 Life Sciences announced that they would be sequencing the Neanderthal genome. Results of the study were published in the May 2010 journal Science detailing an initial draft of the Neanderthal genome based on the analysis of four billion base pairs of Neanderthal DNA. It was thought that a comparison of the Neanderthal genome and human genome would expand our understanding of Neanderthals, as well as the evolution of humans and human brains. The study determined that some mixture of genes occurred between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans and presented evidence that elements of their genome remain in that of non-African modern humans.

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