Miriam Noël Haidle is a prehistorian and paleoanthropologist. After completing her dissertation, she taught at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; at Aarhus Universitet in Denmark; and at the University of Tübingen, where she completed her habilitation in 2006. Since 2008, she has been scientific coordinator of the project “The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans” (ROCEEH) of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt/Main and the University of Tübingen. Her research focuses on cultural and cognitive human evolution and on how contemporary social issues are reflected in archeology.

Simone Pika studied biology at WWU Münster and earned her PhD in 2003 from the Institute for Neuro- and Behavioral Biology and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. She subsequently held postdocs at the University of Alberta in Canada and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and an assistant professorship at the University of Manchester in England. In 2010, Prof. Pika received the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and studied the complexity of gestures in children, great apes, and corvids as part of an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen. Since 2018, she has been Professor of Comparative BioCognition at Osnabrück University; as part of an ERC Consolidator Grant, she studies the evolutionary origin and development of communciation, cognition, and turntaking.

Voigt lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin. She has been professor of painting and drawing at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts since 2019. Her works have been exhibited internationally and can be seen in various public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich; the Morgan Library & Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; and federal collection of Germany.