Human Diversity Through Contacts

We reveal how contacts have shaped human diversity, and how they will continue to shape future generations. We focus on: (O1) Environmental and social drivers of encounters: How do sociocultural settings and ecological environments drive and hinder human contacts? (O2) Dynamics of contacts in the digital world: What do they tell about human diversity and its dynamics today? (O3) Shortterm legacies of contacts: What are the impacts from individual life-history outcomes to population-level alterations? (O4) Long-term legacies of contacts: Which genomic, linguistic and cultural traits and values remain and contribute to human diversity over centuries and millennia?

HuDi-Con is based on unique datasets and established interdisciplinary approaches: we have previously digitised data on linguistic, genetic and archaeological landscapes and human pedigrees with life histories and diseases in Finland. Now we also use massive webscale data and innovative new AI technologies and multilingual deep-learning to extend them. HuDi-Con combines these approaches creating a synthesis of innovative thinking and data analysis to unravel how human diversity evolves. Our results will have direct societal importance and impact: we will show which aspects of the social and ecological environment have the greatest impact on migrants’ lives, provide breakthrough insights into current debates about social and cultural drivers of recurrent infectious diseases, reveal dynamics of online communication and thus contribute to building fairer AI, and discover how our genomes, cultures and demography will be changing in the long run.

Our active dissemination program to the stakeholders will ensure policy impact and public outreach. Together with our international collaborators and team to be recruited, we will develop an integrative view of human and cultural diversity by capitalising on our ambitious aims, diverse existing expertise, thriving teams, and novel approaches and data.

Director of the CoE is Prof Virpi Lummaa and Vice directors are Prof Päivi Onkamo, Prof Veronika Laippala  and Associate Prof Outi Vesakoski