Funding cuts upend projects piecing together saga of human history

Christina Warinner.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community
Funding cuts upend projects piecing together saga of human history

Ancient DNA expert Christina Warinner notes losses come just as innovations are driving major advances in field

Christy DeSmith

Harvard Staff Writer

August 8, 2025 6 min read

In February, Christina Warinner, M.A ’08, Ph.D. ’10, was accepting an award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science when she learned that one of her projects was on a list circulating in Washington of targeted federal research grants. A couple of months later, she appeared in Stockholm at a Nobel symposium and lost two National Science Foundation grants over the span of two weeks.

Warinner, Landon T. Clay Professor of Scientific Archaeology, is well-known in the field of ancient DNA, with her pioneering methods cracking several mysteries concerning early human diets and health. Hers were among the more than 1,600 NSF grants for active projects that were terminated in the spring.

“I recognize it can be hard to compare this work with medical research, which has such obvious applications for saving lives,” Warinner said. “But people also have a deep curiosity about who we are and where we come from. Our work is important because it uses our most powerful technologies to reveal how we, as humans, lived thousands of years ago so that we may better understand our world today.”

The cuts come at a critical time for practitioners of ancient DNA science, a discipline in rapid ascent due to recent advances in lab techniques and computing power. The multidisciplinary field got its start in the mid-1980s in the United States, but support here for the work has lagged behind Northern Europe during the 21st century.

“It’s just really sad,” Warinner said. “American archaeologists have been leaders in telling the stories of humankind. But if our funding is removed, we won’t be leaders anymore.”

“American archaeologists have been leaders in telling the stories of humankind. But if our funding is removed, we won’t be leaders anymore.”
Christina Warinner

The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was supposed to be a joyful occasion for Warinner, who was presented with its 2025 Robert W. Sussman Award for Scientific Contributions to Anthropology.

At the Boston reception, a fellow researcher told Warinner one of her major projects was on a database of recommended research cuts. She and her team have been in the thick of a three-year inquiry into the diplomatic role of marriage and extended kin networks in connecting ancient Maya kingdoms along a major river valley in Belize.

It’s one of the most intensely studied corners of the ancient Maya, yielding more than a century’s worth of archaeological discovery.

Cracking the civilization’s elaborate hieroglyphic script, with key breakthroughs made at Harvard in the 1950s, clarified the importance of intermarriage to maintaining inter-kingdom relations. Recent innovations in remote sensing helped researchers uncover a string of previously unknown settlements in a densely forested area known over thousands of years for its cacao harvests.

Was the Belize River Valley more tightly knit with cross-community relations than previously thought? Warinner and her collaborators were on the cusp of finding out.

“The genetic data would really help us tie it all together, to really understand how the ancient Maya political system worked,” she said.

Only in the last five or six years has such a revelation become possible with advancements in sequencing ancient genomes from hot, humid climates, where DNA is far quicker to deteriorate.

Researchers in Belize and at Harvard extracted genetic data from 400 individuals who inhabited the valley over hundreds of years, between 300 B.C.E. and 1000 A.D. To Warinner’s surprise, nearly all, sourced from newly identified sites as well as decades-old excavations, generated at least partial genomes.

“We never anticipated such a high success rate,” shared Warinner, a native Midwesterner who has been studying ancient Maya since her undergraduate years at the University of Kansas. “It’s wonderful. But it also makes our project more expensive than we originally budgeted.”

A May 15 letter canceling the project’s NSF funding dealt an unexpected second blow. Also lost was support for newer research on the practice of horse milking, with recent findings suggesting its origins may be close in age to horse domestication itself.

“Modern society was literally built on the backs of horses,” Warinner said. “But many people are surprised to learn that early domesticated horses were milked. We still don’t know where or when this practice began — that’s something we wanted to trace, to better understand these very earliest human-horse relationships.”

As an ancient DNA expert and also group leader at Germany’s Max Planck Institute, she had been invited by the Nobel Committee to present her work on ancient microbes at a Nobel Symposium on Paleogenomics. Warinner presented May 28 on the archaeology of infectious diseases, the history of fermented foods, and the evolution of the human microbiome.

The topic of horse milking fits squarely with this research focus. Of longstanding interest to Warinner is how milk and dairy products became dietary staples in a world where most are lactose-intolerant. “They are some of our oldest — and least-understood — manufactured foods,” she marveled.

Koumiss, a fermented beverage still popular in Central Asia, makes for a particularly fascinating case study. Made from horse milk, it hails from the very region where horse domestication is believed to have started more than 4,000 years ago. In fact, the mildly alcoholic drink is known to have fueled some of the great Eurasian nomadic empires, including the Mongols and the Xiongnu.

“The whole reason we have undertaken this project is because we believe it is important for understanding human history.”
Christina Warinner

Warinner and her collaborators proposed a novel approach to identifying when, and where, these grassland dwellers got their first sips of koumiss. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oklahoma, she was among the first to recognize that dental tartar functions could be a goldmine for archaeological scientists. The calcified buildup, she found, entraps and preserves biomolecules like DNA as well as proteins, providing unique insights into ancient diets.

Learning about the emergence of koumiss — or raw horse milk, for that matter — meant collaborating with researchers across Central Asia to perform dental cleanings on their archaeological collections.

“The whole reason we have undertaken this project is because we believe it is important for understanding human history,” Warinner offered. “Our grant proposal was successful because a panel of peer reviewers agreed, deeming our research vital science of high priority.

“It’s such an honor,” she added, “to receive funding this way.”