Eske Willerslev (born 5 June 1971) is a Danish evolutionary geneticist notable for his pioneering work in molecular anthropology, palaeontology, and ecology. He currently holds the Prince Philip Professorship in Ecology and Evolution at University of Cambridge, UK and the Lundbeck Foundation Professorship in Evolution at Copenhagen University, Denmark. He is director of the Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics, a research associate at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and a professorial fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. Willerslev is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences (US) and holds the Order of the Dannebrog issued by her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in 2017.
Early life and education
Willerslev was born in Gentofte north of Copenhagen as the son of the historian Richard Willerslev and teacher Lona Loell Willerslev, and as identical twin brother of the anthropologist Rane Willerslev. He attended Ordrup Gymnasium.
Before becoming a scientist Willerslev led several expeditions in Siberia in the early 1990s with his twin brother, collecting ethnographic materials and megafauna skeleton remains that are stored at Moesgaard Museum in Denmark (the largest Siberian ethnographical collection in Denmark). Willerslev also lived as a fur trapper in the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic from 1993 to 1994. Willerslev handed in his PhD thesis as a doctoral thesis and obtained his Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from Copenhagen University in 2004.
Career
He moved to the University of Oxford as an independent Wellcome Trust Fellow, and became full professor at Copenhagen University at the age of 33. In 2014, he became an adopted member of the Crow Tribe in Montana (Apsaalooke), where he carries the name ChiitdeeXia’ssee (Well Known Scout). In 2015 Willerslev took up the Prince Philip Chair in Ecology and Evolution at the Department of Zoology at University of Cambridge. Willerslev is a Foreign Associate Member of The National Academy of Sciences (USA), elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and an Honorary Doctor at both University of Oslo and University of Tartu, Estonia. He also holds the Order of the Dannebrog (issued by her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark). He has been a visiting professor at Oxford University, UK, and a Visiting Miller Professor at UC Berkeley.
He has received several awards including the Antiquity Prize for the best paper in the journal Antiquity in 2009, the Danish Independent Research Council's Major EliteForsk Prize, the Rosenkjær Award and the Genius Award (Geniusprisen) of Danish Science journalists for "an impressive array of research successes in the public eye, combined with a unique tour-de-force through university".
In 2023 he was awarded the Balzan Prize.
Research
Environmental DNA
During his MSc project Willerslev and colleagues were the first to obtain ancient DNA directly from ice cores. Later, Willerslev and his team expanded on this approach and was the first to show that DNA from plants, mammals and birds can be obtained directly from environmental samples (environmental DNA) ancient as well as modern. He later showed that environmental DNA can also be obtained from a variety of settings including basal ice and revealed a forested Greenland some 400,000 years ago, questioning if southern Greenland was ice free during the last interglacial. His team has also used environmental DNA to reveal forested refugia in Scandinavia during the last interglacial, and that forbs rather than grasses were dominating the steppe environments of the northern hemisphere during the Pleistocene and were an important food source for the megafauna.
Using environmental DNA, Willerslev and collaborators estimated that woolly mammoth in mainland Alaska survived more than 3,500 years earlier than previously thought, thereby dismissing the Blitzkrieg and Impact hypotheses for megafauna extinction. They also clarified the importance of climate change as a driver of megafauna population dynamics, and the decline of protein rich forbs during the Pleistocene extinctions.