Movement networks and genetic evolution among tropical hunter-gatherers of island Southeast Asia

Project Information

MOBILE

Grant agreement ID: 950610

DOI

10.3030/950610

EC signature date 15 February 2021

Start date 1 April 2021

End date 30 September 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 991,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 991,00

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - MOBILE (Movement networks and genetic evolution among tropical hunter-gatherers of island Southeast Asia)

Reporting period: 2024-04-01 to 2025-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The world's traditionally hunting and gathering societies generally interact actively with their settled agricultural neighbours and are increasingly integrated into local economies. This brings major challenges and lifestyle changes, impacting mobility, diet and health. The detailed biological impacts of this transition are, however, poorly characterised – from changing social systems impacting human genetic diversity, to closer relationships with domestic animals, to changing microbiome diversity and pathogen risk. The MOBILE project is investigating how lifestyle changes impact tropical forest hunter-gatherer groups in Indonesia. The goals are twofold – to document and understand transitions and their impacts on present-day biological diversity and health, and to apply computational modelling to infer how social behaviour impacted biological variation among tropical forest hunter-gatherers in the past. The first goal will provide critical context for understanding present-day patterns of human and microbial diversity in society more broadly. The second goal offers evolutionary context, revealing the scales at which human behaviour, including our mobility and social networks, impacts diversity, and potentially structures adaptive evolution. The project combines surveys, remote mobility sensing, whole-community genomics and detailed simulation to link community diversity to evolutionary processes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project is at its midpoint, having started in April 2021, with field activities possible since October 2022. We have made considerable research progress. Firstly, we have analysed an initial human genetic dataset including several participant Punan communities. These analyses have revealed, for the first time, the demographic history of Punan populations in Borneo, resolving a long-standing anthropological debate regarding their history and origins. Secondly, we have generated an initial behavioural/dietary and microbiome dataset, with ongoing analyses identifying strong signals of taxa associated with hunter-gatherer subsistence and a large set of novel microbial species. This dataset is already the largest metagenomic microbiome analysis from Indonesia and a critical step in documenting and understanding biological diversity among the communities involved and in the broader region. Finally, we have completed the main data collection for the project, combining lifestyle, dietary and mobility information with extensive oral/skin swab/fecal microbiome sampling from six Punan and Orang Rimba groups. This sample collection is incredibly valuable and a significant achievement, requiring multiple trips to remote regions of Borneo and Sumatra. The careful and detailed individual annotation of the microbiome samples will enable pioneering analyses. We are in the process of arranging sequencing of these samples, and analysis of them will allow us to investigate our core research questions.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Our analyses describe in detail, for the first time, the genetic diversity of Punan communities in Borneo, as well as contributing important linguistic and ethnographic data. They have pushed understanding of human history in the region forward by revealing early, pre-Austronesian-expansion history of Punan groups. This is a significant advance, settling a long-standing anthropological debate concerning the origins and history of the Punan, and making a very important contribution to our understanding of the origins and nature of the largest linguistic family expansion in the world (Austronesian).

Our ongoing work on the pilot microbiome dataset will go beyond the state of the art as the largest metagenomic microbiome analysis in Indonesia, and the first to include traditionally hunter-gatherer populations. Our data collection is also pioneering – combining complex lifestyle and mobility data with multi-site microbiomes to answer novel research questions. This sample collection is globally unique and we are about to start sequencing. Together, the datasets that we are analysing as part of the project are extremely exciting. They will enable us to study lifestyle/microbiome correlations along a transition cline, to measure and build models of microbiome transmission, to describe microbial sharing between people and domestic dogs, and to study human genetic / microbiome co-divergence at microgeographic scales. These questions go beyond the state of the art, and together will provide an integrated biological and evolutionary understanding of subsistence transition in the tropics.

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