Christina (Tina) Warinner is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and the Sally Starling Seaver Associate Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. She is also a group leader in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and affiliated with the faculty of biological sciences at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany and the Leibniz Institute for Infection Biology and Natural Products Research.
Warinner specializes in biomolecular archaeology, with an emphasis on reconstructing the prehistory of human foods and the evolution of the microbiome. She is known for her pioneering work in ancient DNA and proteins research, which has contributed significant insights into prehistoric human health, the ancestral human microbiome, the origins of dairying, and past human population history. In 2014 she published the first detailed metagenomic and metaproteomic characterization of the ancient human oral microbiome, and in 2015, she published a seminal study on the identification of milk proteins in ancient dental calculus and the reconstruction of prehistoric European dairying practices. In the same year, she was also part of a research team that published the first South American hunter-gatherer gut microbiome and identified Treponema as a key missing ancestral microbe in the gut microbiome of industrialized societies. Later, she demonstrated that full mitochondrial genomes could be recovered from dental calculus, opening new opportunities for less destructive methods of collaborative paleogenomics research with Native American tribes and communities. In 2016 she and her colleagues reconstructed the early population history of the Himalayas and published the first complete genomes of ancient East Asians, and in 2022 her team reconstructed the peopling of the Tibetan plateau. In 2018 and 2020 her team identified the origins of dairying on the East Asian steppe, and in 2020, she published a 6,000 year population history of Mongolia based on more than 200 reconstructed ancient human genomes. She published a major article on the evolution and changing ecology of the oral microbiome in 2021, and in 2023 her team successfully reconstructed more than 200 ancient bacterial genomes dating up to 100,000 years old using de novo assembly methods. Her work has additionally contributed to identifying the cause of the 1545 Mexican cocoliztli epidemic and to revealing the roles of women in medieval book production. She is currently leading a large multidisciplinary project in Mongolia combining archaeology, ethnography, microbiology, and microbiome sciences to understand the origins of dairying and the rich and complex history of human cultural and biological adaptations to novel foods.