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 killed by your distant ancestor.
You might think no detective can figure that out since it was so long ago. But Sam can! Using mass spectroscopy, she explores the fascinating field of zooarchaeology, taking 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.
Together with Dr. Vadim Borisov, we at the MLColab are helping Sam to dechipher the extracted fingerprints and tell apart a rabbit from a wolf from the distant past using modern neural networks. Of course, we want to share our tools with other researchers from this amazing field. So we set up a ML-powered web application to help them discover the secrets beneath our feet and keep revealing our history, one bone at a time.
This work is a collaboration between the ML Colab and Dr. Samantha Brown from the University of Tübingen