Bio-cultural interactions of Eurasia and Africa

The project aims to map bio-cultural interactions in the contact zones of larger civilisation circles. The research focuses on the Arabian Peninsula and the African Sahel, where two types of contact occur: Eurasian and Sub-Saharan civilisations meet there on the macro-level, as well as two subsistence strategies – farmers and pastoralists – on the micro-level. Conflicts between the latter two groups can be perceived as a source of political instability in times of climate changes, acting as a de facto catalyst for the migration crisis. We believe that understanding interactions in bio-cultural and long-term perspectives can also contribute in some way to development aid. Thus, we perceive the project as not only purely historical but also substantively topical.

Our aim is to attempt to evaluate the negatives and positives of interactions over a longer time horizon, both from the perspective of the natural (ecology, genetics, geology, geochemistry, proteomics ….) and social sciences (archaeology, history, cultural anthropology, ethnography…). We have to distinguish mobility or trends in mobility, which can be reconstructed e.g. through provenance analyses of objects or materials, from migration (gene flow), which is a purely biological but mobility-related matter. While archaeogenetics has shown the importance of population expansions with the onset of food production (i.e. Neolithic) and the subsequent mixing of originally isolated hunter-gatherer groups with a positive effect on the genetic adaptation of local populations, archaeology has placed these results in a historical context and has pointed to the fact that cultural and social adaptations often go hand in hand with genetic adaptations.