Joachim Burger (born 27 June 1969 in Aschaffenburg, West Germany) is a German anthropologist and population geneticist based at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, where he runs the Palaeogenetics Group at the Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolution (iOME).
Burger has pioneered the application of ancient DNA technology to resolve anthropological and archaeological questions, particularly concerning humans and domestic animals in the Holocene period.
The main focus of Burger's research is human population genetics of Europe in the early Holocene, and of Central Asia during Bronze and Iron Age.
[2][3][4] Together with an international team he showed in 2009 that the first European farmers were immigrants to the continent and not descendants of local hunter-gatherers.
Lazaridis, I., Patterson, N., Mittnik, A., Renaud, G., Mallick, S., Sudmant, P.H., Schraiber, J.G., Castellano, S., Kirsanow, K., Economou, Chr., Bollongino, R., ... 80 coauthors..., Eichler, E.E., Burger, J., Slatkin, M., Pääbo, S., Kelso, J., Reich, D., Krause, J.
(2014) Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present day Europeans.
Wilde, S., Timpson, A., Kirsanow, K., Kaiser, E., Kayser, M., Unterländer, M., Hollfelder, N., Potekhina, I.D., Schier, W., Thomas, M.G., and Burger, J.
(2014) Direct evidence for positive selection of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation in Europeans during the last 5,000 y. PNAS 111(13):4832 4837.
Bramanti, B., Thomas, M.G., Haak, W., Unterlaender, M., Jores, P., Tambets, K., Antanaitis Jacobs, I., Haidle, M.N., Jankauskas, R., Kind, C.J., Lueth, F., Terberger, T., Hiller, J., Matsumura, S., Forster, P., and Burger, J.
Haak, W., Forster, P., Bramanti, B., Matsumura, S., Brandt, G., Tänzer, M., Villems, R., Renfrew, C., Gronenborn, D., Alt, K.W., and Burger, J.