# Christina (Tina) Warinner Landon T. Clay Professor of Scientific Archaeology Sally Starling Seaver Associate Professor at the Radcliffe Institute Archaeology Program Director ![Photo of Christina Warner](/sites/g/files/omnuum6776/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/anthropology/files/warinner_minerals.png?itok=fk3qEgCD) location\_on Peabody Museum 570, 11 Divinity Ave. Cambridge, MA 02138 smartphone [617-495-1279](tel:617-495-1279) email laptop\_windows [Teaching, Research, Publications](http://www.christinawarinner.com) **Christina (Tina) Warinner** is Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. She additionally leads international research groups at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the Leibniz Institute for Infection Biology and Natural Products Research in Jena, Germany, and she is affiliated with the faculty of biological sciences at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. She is the President of the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology (ISBA), and she serves on the Leadership Team of the Max Planck – Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean (MHAAM), the Program Board of the American School for Prehistoric Research (ASPR), and the Board of Directors of the American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS). Warinner specializes in biomolecular archaeology, with an emphasis on reconstructing the prehistory of human foods and the evolution of the microbiome. She is known for her pioneering work in ancient DNA and proteins research, which has contributed significant insights into prehistoric human health, the ancestral human microbiome, the origins of dairying, and past human population history. In 2014 she published the first detailed metagenomic and metaproteomic characterization of the ancient human oral microbiome, and in 2015, she published a seminal study on the identification of milk proteins in ancient dental calculus and the reconstruction of prehistoric European dairying practices. In the same year, she was also part of a research team that published the first South American hunter-gatherer gut microbiome and identified *Treponema* as a key missing ancestral microbe in the microbiota of industrialized societies. In 2016 she and her colleagues reconstructed the early population history of the Himalayas and published the first complete genomes of ancient East Asians, and in 2022 her team reconstructed the peopling of the Tibetan plateau. In 2018 and 2020 her team identified the origins of dairying on the East Asian steppe, and in 2020, she published a 6,000 year population history of Mongolia based on more than 200 reconstructed ancient human genomes. She published a major article on the evolution and changing ecology of the oral microbiome in 2021, and in 2023 her team successfully reconstructed more than 200 ancient bacterial genomes dating up to 100,000 years old using de novo metagenomic assembly methods. Her work has additionally contributed to identifying the cause of the 1545 Mexican cocoliztli epidemic, to understanding the ritual life of the ancient Maya at Chichén Itzá, and to revealing the roles of women in medieval book production. She is currently leading multidisciplinary projects in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Nepal to understand the origins of dairying and the rich and complex history of human cultural and biological adaptations to fermented foods. She has published two books (*Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany* and *Ancient Maya Color*) and more than 70 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as *Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, Nature Genetics, Chemical Reviews, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Current Biology, Nature Communications, Current Anthropology, Latin American Antiquity, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology*, and the *Journal of Archaeological Science*. She contributed to eighth edition of Renfrew and Bahn’s *Archaeology: Theory, Methods, and Practice*, as well as to books on the prehistory of Mexico and Alaska. For a comprehensive list, see the [publications page](http://christinawarinner.com/publications/) of her research website. Warinner has served on funding review panels for the US National Institutes of Health and the European Commission, and she currently serves on multiple scientific advisory boards, steering committees, and standing committees related to microbiome research, professional and research ethics, and scientific practice. Warinner strives to make her research and data as accessible as possible, and since 2014, >75% of her journal research articles are available in open access format. Additionally, all published protocols and datasets generated by her lab are available in open access online repositories through protocols.io, NCBI, ENA, and ProteomeXchange, and are also curated on the [data resource page](http://christinawarinner.com/resources/data/) of her research website. Warinner was named a Trailblazing Women Scientist in 2020 by Science magazine, and one of the Top 10 Scientists to Watch in 2017 by Science News. In 2023, she received the Exemplary Cross-Fields Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Shanghai Archaeological Forum Research Award, and she won the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS) Article Award in 2022. Warinner is a 2014 US National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow and a 2012 TED Fellow, and her TED Talks have been viewed more than 2 million times. She has been featured in documentaries produced by PBS NOVA, Netflix, and the genome sequencing company Illumina, and her research on ancient Nepal appears in the award-winning children’s book, *Secrets of the Sky Caves*. Her research has been featured in more than a hundred news articles and programs, including stories in the *New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Scientific American, Archaeology Magazine, NPR’s Science Friday, the New Scientist, the Guardian, the Observer, WIRED UK*, and *CNN*, among others. In addition to her research, she is actively engaged in scientific and public outreach and has spoken around the world, ranging from classroom visits to public lectures in partnership with the American Center for Mongolian Studies, the Leakey Foundation, the Royal Society of London, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Wellcome Trust, EMBL, the American Museum of Natural History, the California Academy of Sciences, the Sino-Danish Center, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 2019, she co-organized the Wenner Gren Symposium on *Cultures of Fermentation* in Cascais, Portugal and the German Bundesministerium für Bildungund Forschung *Microbes on the Move* conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. In 2022 she co-created the [*Introduction to Ancient Metagenomics Summer Schoo*l](https://www.spaam-community.org/wss-summer-school/), which has educated more than 100 aspiring early career scientists from 18 countries, and in 2023 she led the development of the *Dairy Cultures* exhibit at the Natural History of Mongolia. She is the creator of the [*Adventures in Archaeological Science*](http://christinawarinner.com/outreach/children/adventures-in-archaeological-science/) coloring book, which is now available in more than 60 languages, including many indigenous and underrepresented languages. She is engaged in the open science movement, and her research group has been actively involved in improving scholarly communication, data sharing, and research transparency. Warinner received her MA and PhD at Harvard University and completed her postdoctoral training at the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zürich, Switzerland and the University of Oklahoma. She was previously a Presidential Research Professor and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. ### **Teaching** • Anthro 1060: Introduction to Archaeological Science • Anthro 1200: Osteoarchaeology (co-taught with Dr. Richard Meadow) • Anthro 1255: Human Diet – From Neanderthals to the Future of Food • Anthro 1270: Sick – 10,000 Years of Health and Disease • Anthro 2061: Advanced Archaeological Science • Anthro 3070: Professionalization in Archaeology - ## Person Categories [Faculty](/person-categories/faculty) - ## Program [Archaeology](/course-area/archaeology) - ## Faculty Role [Ladder Faculty](/faculty-role/ladder-faculty) - ## Role [Faculty](/role/faculty)