If you enjoy long walks and take the time to look around, you might find incredibly old, petrified pieces of history right under your feet. It could be a fossilized seashell or, if you’re really lucky and find the right cave, a small bone of an ancient fox. However, you may never truly know what you've discovered. Perhaps it's just a stone, or maybe it's a piece of a mammoth slain by your distant ancestor.
You might think no detective can solve so a cold case. But Sam can! As a zooarchaeologist, she uses mass spectroscopy to take us back tens of thousands of years when prehistoric humans roamed the land where our Tübingen AI Center stands today.
Zooarchaeology is a truly interdisciplinary field: by ionizing peptides still left in the bones using lasers, Sam can reconstruct “fingerprints” of ancient species. Physics, chemistry, biology, zoology… and now machine learning is joining forces on the journey to discover the past of our ancestors and their incredibly rich and dangerous environment.
Continuing the work of Dr. Vadim Borisov, we at the MLColab are helping Sam to identify the extracted fingerprints from the distant past, telling apart a rabbit from a wolf, using modern neural networks. Of course, we want to share our tools with other researchers from this amazing field. So we set up an ML-powered web application to help them discover the secrets beneath our feet and keep revealing our history, one bone at a time.
Mass spectroscopy data - peptide fingerprints from different mammals.
This work is a collaboration between the ML Colab and Dr. Samantha Brown from the University of Tübingen