Mateja Hajdinjak

Mateja and the baby Ollie sitting on the park bench outside of the ESHE2025 conference venue, at the beautiful Jardin des Plantes in Paris. With the companion pigeon in the background.

Second time attending @eshesociety.bsky.social conference together ❤️💀 last year baby Ollie helped his mama to organise #ESHE2024 in Zageb 🇭🇷, this year celebrating being 5 months old at #ESHE2025 in Paris. 🇨🇵
Could not have made it without the support of @alexhbnr.bsky.social ❤️

Very excited to receive an ERC Starting Grant to study the earliest archaeological and biomolecular evidence of Homo sapiens in NW Europe

Watch this space for new positions in Bristol in 2026! 🎉

#HorizonEurope #ERCStG

Congratulations to Oleg Sobchuk and Arthur Kocher on being awarded @erc.europa.eu Starting Grants!! 🥳 @sobchuk.bsky.social will be exploring the macroevolution of European literature, while Kocher will be studying ancient pathogen dynamics. See: tinyurl.com/mr2m2zms & tinyurl.com/9cwdnc54

Job Alerts!🚨 We are looking to fill three Independent Junior Research Group Leader positions in the 'HUMAN ORIGINS' Cluster of Excellence at the University of Tübingen
Application deadline: Sept. 10, Starting Jan. 1, 2026

1. Genotype-Phenotype interactions:
uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

Seeking a few Postdoctoral Researchers at Mathematical Genomics RIKEN ECL Research Unit (25-695)

Postdoc position in my group in Tokyo!
Please get in touch if you are interested.

And happy to discuss projects - these would range from developing new methods to analysis of new genomes that we are now sequencing in the lab.

Job Ad: www.riken.jp/en/careers/r...
Lab page: speidellab.github.io

Excited to announce our paper on ancient Borrelia genomes is finally out! 🦠💀We document the evolutionary history of louse-borne relapsing fever, published today in @science.org‬ with @lucyvandorp.bsky.social and @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social #aDNA 🏺🧪🧬
Main findings and paper below: 🧵⬇️

Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage - Nature Pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into the Green Sahara, where an isolated, distinct North African ancestry persisted.

I'm beyond excited to share our new paper in Nature! We sequenced the first ancient human autosomal genomes from the Central Sahara, two ~7,000-year-old individuals from Takarkori in Libya, revealing a long-isolated North African lineage: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Here's a short thread: (1/n)

Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage - Nature Pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into the Green Sahara, where an isolated, distinct North African ancestry persisted.

Our study analyzing the DNA of ~7ky-old Pastoralists from the "Green Sahara" is out! Who were these people, and how did herding spread into the region when the present-day desert was dotted with water bodies? 🧬🦴🏜️ (1/7)

#PopGen #GreenSahara #aDNA

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

ESHE 2025 goes to Paris, France! Join us in person for talks and posters from Sept 25–27, with a public keynote on Sept 24. Excursion details are coming soon. More info on the meetings page this March! #ESHE2025

Looking forward to it! :)

Oh no!! Sorry to have missed you there :(

W1 Professorship in Geography of Global Environmental Change (with tenure track to W3)

Are you a postdoc working on global environmental change? Apply for the new #TenureTrack professorship on #Geography of #Global Environmental Change and join us at the Geography Department of Humboldt-University Berlin! @humboldtuni.bsky.social
--> hu.berlin/GeographyGEC

Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago - Nature The identification of tools dated to the time of Homo sapiens associated with microfloral evidence of wet tropical forests indicates that West African forests were occupied by humans much earlier...

In @nature.com we show that humans lived in rainforests ~150,000 years ago – over double the previous oldest estimate. Their presence in West Africa’s rainforests demonstrates the spread of early humans and places ecological diversity at the heart of our species.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Postdoctoral position in population genomics of the palaeolithic - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics - BiRC - Bioinformatics Research Center, Aarhus University

Two weeks left to apply (Jan 15) for postdoc (2.5 years) in population genetics of the Paleolithic in my group in Aarhus, Denmark. It is an interdisciplinary project with Felix Riede @felixthehauskat.bsky.social, and a new postdoc in his group covering archaeology. Apply using tinyurl.com/4jt4dru4

At Stockholm University, we are now starting a 2-year Master’s programme in Evolutionary Genomics!

Topics include population genetics, phylogenetics, molecular & genome evolution, DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, and palaeogenetics.

Please spread the word!

www.su.se/english/sear...

Apply for this funded PhD with me, Selina Brace and Silvia Bello at UCL & the Natural History Museum:

Human or Animal? Biomolecular Analysis of Upper Palaeolithic Bone Artefacts to Explore Raw Material Selection.
#ZooMs #ancientDNA #stableisotopes

www.trees-dla.ac.uk/projects/hum...

Very excited to see our study published today, joint effort with @benmpeter.bsky.social group, co-led by @leonardoiasi.bsky.social & Manjusha Chintalapati. Excitedly, @arevsumer.bsky.social et al. in Nature today show similar timeline of N gene flow. Details👇

@lauritsskov.bsky.social is by far one of the nicest and smartest people that I know, so this is really a great opportunity to have an awesome supervisor! ;) apply apply! 👇

Enthralled to see our work published in Science. This wouldn’t have been possible without the wonderful contributions of the team comprising @moorjanipriya.bsky.social @leonardoiasi.bsky.social @benmpeter.bsky.social @lauritsskov.bsky.social @matejahajdi.bsky.social and Alba!

And a great 🧵 breaking-down the paper with @leonardoiasi.bsky.social, @mchintalapati.bsky.social , @lauritsskov.bsky.social , Alba Bossoms Mesa, @benmpeter.bsky.social and @moorjanipriya.bsky.social 👇

So incredibly proud of and happy for @arevsumer.bsky.social , @leonardoiasi.bsky.social and @mchintalapati.bsky.social, and their two papers that just came out yesterday! 💀❤️🧬
And so incredibly grateful to be able to work with such an amazing group of people. :)
A great 🧵 by @arevsumer.bsky.social👇

PhD fellowship in Sediment DNA at the Department of Forensic Medicine

Wonderful to see so many new people here! :-)

Interested in sedaDNA, aDNA, or forensic genetics?
Join me in Copenhagen!
I'm hiring a PhD and a Postdoc to start in 2025. Application deadline 28 November
employment.ku.dk/phd/?show=16...
employment.ku.dk/all-vacancie...

Assistant Professor in Biodiversity (up to three positions) at the Department for Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences, the Department of Environmental Science, the Department of Geological Sciences, the Department of Physical Geography or the Department of

Three (!) Tenure-Track Positions in Biodiversity Research at Stockholm University and SciLifeLab!

Each position comes with a great start-up package to finance research costs and hiring of PhD students and postdocs.

su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Buried under 8 meters of rock and debris in a German cave, researchers found proof Homo sapiens arrived in northern Europe thousands of years earlier than previously thought—and overlapped with our Neanderthal cousins for millennia. www.science.org/content/arti...

Natural products from reconstructed bacterial genomes of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic Ancient metagenomes allow for resurrection of Pleistocene bacterial metabolites.

We are currently continuing our efforts on obtaining natural products from reconstructed microbial genomes after having published its feasibility earlier this year. Please get in touch if you are interested in Master theses or PhD positions. www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Award Ceremony: Early Career Scientist Award Award Ceremony: Early Career Scientist Award

What a nice occasion for my augural post here: I have been recently selected as one of the recipients of the Microverse Early Career Scientist Award: www.microverse-cluster.de/en/news/earl... This nicely honours our work done at the groups of @christinawarinner.bsky.social and Pierre Stallforth!

Registration now open for the annual Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics meeting, to be held in Vienna April 10-12th 2024. Deadline for a talk or poster: February 15, 2024. See: events.vbc.ac.at/gmi_events/p...

We found that the previously found infant human teeth belonged to a girl that lived >30,000 years ago and could be associated to a collection of 112 herbivore tooth pendantes.

Chronological and genetic analysis of an Upper Palaeolithic female infant burial from Borsuka Cave, ... Six infant human teeth and 112 animal tooth pendants from Borsuka Cave were identified as the oldest burial in Poland. However, uncertainties around t…

Happy to share our publication where we used <67mg of tooth dentine for both aDNA and C14 analysis!
t.co/1S73KFacwO

This was a challenging project, but a wonderful collaboration with @helenfewlass.bsky.social , Jarosław Wilczyński,
@matejahajdi.bsky.social , Jean-Jacques Hublin, Edouard Bard, Thibaut Tuna and Yoann Fagault