Recently, there has been an increasing number of reports of toxic algae – also known as blue-green algae or cyanobacteria – in many lakes around the world, mainly due to global warming and rises in nutrient inputs. By examining DNA from sediments of a lake in Germany, a team of scientists from the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences has discovered that humans have not only had an influence on the development of blue-green algae since modern times, but already since the Bronze Age (approximately 2,000 years...