Katerina Harvati


Katerina Harvati is a Greek paleoanthropologist and expert in early human evolution. She specializes in the broad application of 3-D geometric morphometric and virtual anthropology methods to paleoanthropology. Since 2009, she has been full professor and director of Paleoanthropology at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Life

Harvati is a graduate of Columbia University, New York, where she earned a B.A. in Anthropology 1994. Four years later, she received her master’s degree in Anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York. After having been awarded with her Ph.D. at CUNY in 2001 she worked as an assistant professor at New York University. From 2004 to 2009, she was senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In 2005, she became also adjunct associate professor at the City University of New York Graduate School and in 2009 she was appointed full professor at the University of Tübingen and director of Paleoanthropology. In 2010, she was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her contributions to Paleoanthropology. Harvati is married to the Greek biotechnology executive Elias Papatheodorou. They have two children.

Research

Harvati´s research focuses on primate and human evolution as well as on evolutionary theory, with emphasis on the paleobiology of Pleistocene humans and modern human origins. She has conducted fieldwork in different parts of Europe and Africa and contributed largely to the understanding of the relationship of morphological variability to population history and the environment. Harvati has led recent breakthroughs in the understanding of modern human origins and Neanderthal behavior. Her recent work on the fossil human remains from Apidima Cave, Southern Greece, pushed back the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe by more than 150 thousand years, showing an earlier and much more geographically widespread early modern human dispersal than was previously known. This work was listed as one of the most important discoveries of the year by The Guardian, Discover Magazine and LiveScience, as well as one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the decade by Gizmodo. She led research overthrowing long held assumptions about increased levels of violence and traumatic injuries relative to modern humans and demonstrating that Neanderthals regularly performed precise manipulative activities, contrary to previous beliefs. Other contributions include the assessment of the Neanderthal species status, the identification of an early modern human in Southern Africa ; and the demonstration that modern humans evolved much earlier than previously thought, around 300,000 years ago in Morocco. Finally, Harvati's work has spearheaded paleolithic and paleoanthropological research in South-East Europe. She has received two grants of the European Research Council, one ERC Starting Grant in 2011, and one ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016. In addition, she directs a Centre for Advanced Studies on linguistic, cultural and biological trajectories of the human past since 2015.

Awards