She has conducted fieldwork in different parts of Europe and Africa and contributed largely to the understanding of the relationship of morphological variability to population history and the environment.

Harvati has led recent breakthroughs in the understanding of modern human origins and Neanderthal behavior.

Her recent work on the fossil human remains from Apidima Cave, Southern Greece, pushed back the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe by more than 150 thousand years, showing an earlier and much more geographically widespread early modern human dispersal than was previously known (Harvati et al. 2019 Nature).

[15] She also led research overthrowing long held assumptions about increased levels of violence and traumatic injuries relative to modern humans (Beier et al. 2018) and pioneered work exploring the effects of hybridization on the early modern human cranial phenotype (Harvati and Ackermann 2022).

[18] Together with G. Jäger, she heads a Centre for Advanced Studies on linguistic, cultural and biological trajectories of the human past since 2015.