A new paper with a focus on archaeogenomics on the history of horse domestication has been published in Nature, in which the authors also report on the results of their study of Bronze Age artefacts from Hungary. Within the framework of the Pegasus project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), a 162-member research team led by Ludovic Orlando at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics in Toulouse (CAGT), archaeologists, archaeozoologists and archaeogeneticists from the Rippl-Rónai Museum in Kaposvár and the Institute of Archaeogenomics and the Institute of Archaeology of the ELKH Research Centre for the Humanities (RCH all participated in a large-scale study. By genomically analyzing the remains of 273 ancient horses, the researchers have provided new insights into the origin and distribution of the modern-day domestic horse in a broad international collaboration. 

The Battle of Mohács (29 August 1526) is a singular event of symbolic significance for Hungary and the whole of Central Europe. Over the last thirty years, extensive work by Hungarian historians to revise the “dark legend” of Mohács has resulted in a much more balanced account of the ruling Jagiellonian dynasty (1490–1526) and the thirty-five years that preceded the battle. The battle itself also has come to be viewed differently: having been previously dismissed by military historians as an “insignificant” encounter (where the “obsolete medieval Hungarian military organization” met its end), Mohács has been revealed as one of the largest battles of the early modern period, fought between two armies that were equally “modern”.

The Eötvös Loránd Research Network (ELKH) Secretariat has established the Eötvös Loránd Research Network Prize and the Róbert Bárány Prize applicable to young researchers to recognize outstanding academic performance within the network. In addition, it has also launched the distribution of the title of Research Professor Emeritus. The 2021 ELKH Award Ceremony was held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on November 9 as part of the “Celebration of the Hungarian Science“ program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Two researchers from the ELKH Research Centre for the Humanities, Eszter Bánffy and Anna Szécsényi-Nagy, participated in a multidisciplinary workshop aimed at developing ethical guidelines that can be applied globally to DNA testing of human remains. The five guidelines, developed with 68 researchers from 31 countries, were published in the prestigious journal Nature.