Project description
Ancient DNA provides new insights into life in the Paleolithic
People’s life in the Paleolithic was still very much shaped by their environment while networks helped them adjust to changing environmental conditions. New sources of ancient genetic material, archaeological sediments and speleothems forming in caves, have the potential to uncover unprecedented insights into the past lifeways of our ancestors. The EU-funded MicroStratDNA project places this new genetic data into a microstratigraphic framework with two goals in mind. First, to determine the origin, deposition and preservation characteristics of ancient DNA from environmental sources to facilitate its recovery. Secondly, to produce genomic time series of people living at archaeological sites and of changing environmental conditions to characterise how human interactions sustained our species.
Objective
Modern humans are defined and sustained by interactions and networks. In Paleolithic contexts, reconstructing interactions and networks is limited to inferences based on material culture or direct evidence of biological relatedness, but evidence on the latter in the form of human fossils is very rare. Still, archaeogenetic research can formulate supra-regional models for broad time periods based on only a few genomes by distinguishing ancient clades, but not to the level of interactions between human groups of particular cultural complexes. Recently, archaeological sediments and speleothems - karstic cave formations - have been revealed as a further genomic archive for past environments and past human populations initiating a new phase in archaeogenetic research. These new archives have the potential to greatly expand the archaeogenetic record as they stem from ubiquitous environmental sources and they do provide the spatial and temporal resolution to zoom into population dynamics at the group level. However, what this ancient DNA (aDNA) originates from and under what conditions it preserves over time are still open questions. I here suggest placing this paleogenomic data into a microstratigraphic framework, where individual depositional events are recorded in microscopic features, to overcome these problems and to provide high-resolution time series of population interactions. Using an interdisciplinary tool kit, I will (I) reconstruct the source, origin, and deposition of sedimentary and speleothem aDNA in archaeological contexts, (II) identify ideal preservation contexts for this type of aDNA with a focus on in-field assessments and (III) extract genomic time series from archaeological sediments and speleothems. I will apply this approach to Upper Paleolithic sites in Georgia to reconstruct the relatedness of the people using individual sites over time and across contemporaneous sites set against regional expressions of climate and paleoenvironment change.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics DNA
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences geology geomorphology speleology
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics genomes
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2021-STG
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1010 Wien
Austria
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