Address:
Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment University of Tübingen
Hölderlinstr. 12
72074 Tübingen, Germany
Email:
PD Dr. Dorothée Drucker
I am a Senior Researcher in Quaternary Ecology at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment located at the University of Tübingen (Germany).
I use stable isotope tracking in bones and teeth of large mammals and human hunter-gatherers to investigate the climatic impact on the ecology of terrestrial animals and the evolution of subsistence in ancient hunter-gatherers during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. I have mainly worked on archaeological remains from the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic of Western and Central Europe. I supervise the part on collagen isotopic analysis to reconstruct the ecology of woolly mammoth during the Gravettian in Central Europe. Carbon and nitrogen isotopes will provide information on the diet and habitat of the mammoths and thus give information on the local environment. Sulfur stable isotopes in herbivores depend on those of the consumed plants which are themselves influenced by local soil conditions and atmospheric depositions. Measured on collagen, they should provide additional information on mammoth mobility at a large time scale. With Dr. Chris Baumann, as post-doc collaborator, we will examine the niche of the mammoth in Central Europe during the Gravettian using Bayesian modelling and explore possible direct competition vs dietary partitioning with other large herbivores. We will also consider the isotopic spacing between bone and dentine collagen from the same mammoth specimens to refine intra- and inter-individual comparison between different sources of data.
After completing a PhD in Biogeochemistry in 2001, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the Canadian Wildlife Service in Saskatoon (Canada), sponsored by the Fyssen Foundation, and at the Department of Geoscience of the University of Tübingen (Germany), funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, where I later worked as a research assistant from 2009 to 2012. I was then granted a fellowship from the Margarete-von-Wrangell program for academic women until 2017, when I defended my Habilitation in Paleobiology and Archaeological Sciences at the University of Tübingen.
Since then, I have been employed as a research fellow by the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research. I teach courses on palaeoecology and stable isotope tracking of Late Quaternary terrestrial ecosystems for Master’s degree in Geoecology, Geosciences and Archaeological Sciences.