Research
Evolution through contact and communication networks (Human Diversity) identifies how human diversity develops through population encounters triggered by e.g. population expansion, migration, trading networks, and today’s digital communication. Unique interdisciplinary and digital datasets in humanities as well as natural and medical sciences are used to resolve how human contacts have influenced the cultural, linguistic, genetic, and phenotypic diversity of humans.
Human Diversity enhances multidisciplinary research and education by bringing together research on evolution and medicine, epigenetics, multigenerational cohorts, archaeology and genetics, cultural and biological evolution, language technology, and digital humanities. The overall goal of Human Diversity is to identify how human diversity develops through population encounters triggered by population expansion, migration, trading networks and todayʼs digital communication. The goal will be achieved by tackling cutting edge research on human diversity in the following 4 themes:
1. Drivers of human contacts and communication networks
Current models inferring optimal migration routes and settlement decision provide only general insights on human desicion making. This theme focuses on how have ecological, administrative, and social environments affected the formation of contact networks in (pre)history and in contemporary society.
2. Short-term impacts of contacts and communication networks
Human contacts not only influence today’s governmental policies and economy, but also exert consequences spanning from months – as in the case of spread of diseases – to centuries and millenia through impact on the linguistic and genetic landscape. This theme assesses the instant effects of encounters on the spread and exchange of diseases, genes, ideas, languages, material culture, or cultural traditions. It also evaluates how the short-term impacts influence individual success, transmit intergenerationally e.g. via epigenetic mechanisms, and change societies in short time-span.
3. Long-term outcomes of contacts and the communication networks
As some influences cascade over generations the focus in this theme is on evaluating how the long-term effects of encounters in prehistory have cascaded into the current cultural and biological diversity as well as into modern public health issues. This will be the first longitudinal analysis of the co-development of the genetic, archeological, and linguistic landscape in humans, and the first to investigate how population encounters drive such changes.
4. Predicting future
The physical human contacts and digital communication networks will strongly impact human diversity and its perception also in the future. This theme will reveal how our modern-world physical contacts and digital communication networks will modify the human diversity of future populations.