Hills and mountains, ecologically diverse and biologically rich, have long served people as places for living and extraction of resources, though potentially challenging for settlement, subsistence, and health. Archaeologists and palaeoecologists have found evidence of occupation and resource exploitation in middle and high altitudes, and have used it to reconstruct strategies of survival and adaptation to conditions diverging from those in the lowlands. This workshop facilitated the exchange of knowledge on the methods, data sets, and collaborations that hold potential for the study of past economies in the uplands of Eurasia. It confronted the knowns and unknowns, in order to identify where progress in the research on past human adaptation to high elevations should and can be made.

The Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group (DAE) is an independently operating scientific team falling within the initiatives of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. The team consists of an international group of scholars, who are taking a global-scale perspective and seeking to bridge the social and biological sciences. The team follows the scholarly belief that the evolutionary future of all life on Earth will be driven by human actions, whether through directed breeding, deforestation, climate change, overhunting/fishing, or through the introduction of invasive species. They also recognize that the only way to understand these anthropogenic changes to the course of evolution is by looking at the ways that humans changed the course of evolution in the past. The team is using archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, paleoclimatic, and molecular methods to better understand the ways that humanity has been altering the survivability and adaptability of all life through time.