Archaeologists, historians, scientists at Harvard and elsewhere are breaking down the silos that divide our traditional disciplines. If we come together and combine DNA, archaeology, ice cores, history, linguistics, and digital humanities, we will end the divide between “the two cultures” of Science and the Humanities. Together we can discover our ancestors and their lived experience, their successes and failures, and invent a new discipline, the Science of the Human Past.

Born on the banks of the Erie Canal, Michael McCormick received his Ph.D. from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) in 1979. He served on the faculty of the Department of History of the Johns Hopkins University from 1979 to 1991; was Research Associate at Dumbarton Oaks from 1979 to 1987, and has been at Harvard since 1991, where he is the Goelet Professor of Medieval History and chairs the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past (SoHP: http://sohp.fas.harvard.edu/). He has been awarded grants by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, etc. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation honored him with its Distinguished Achievement Award ($1.5m) in 2002. He is a Fellow or (Corresponding) Member of various learned academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, The Society of Antiquaries of London, Monumenta Germaniae historia (Munich), and the Académie royale de Belgique. He is the Director in Cambridge of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, a new transatlantic research center created jointly with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and focusing initially on the molecular and archaeological discovery of ancient diseases and the genetics of migration in the ancient Mediterranean. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx