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

Human evolution has been punctuated by a handful of behavioural transitions driving greater social complexity – examples include the use of tools, language and farming. The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture specifically involved a series of new co-evolutionary relationships with other species, including domesticates, diseases, and our own microbiome. Unusually, these transitions are also ongoing. Those few hunting and gathering groups that remain are near-universally experiencing radical changes in mobility and diet as they interact more intensely with their settled, agricultural neighbours. MOBILE will study the impacts of mobility on biological diversity and evolution in some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers in rapidly developing Southeast Asia, an under-studied cradle of human evolution. The project will generate spatially embedded social networks from Indonesian hunter-gatherer communities at various stages of the lifestyle transition. It will combine this data with multi-species genomics and detailed simulations to understand how social interactions maintain community biological diversity in small, traditional societies, and how movement redistributes variation allowing for adaptation over rapid, intra-generational time scales. MOBILE will unify the genetic study of diversity, demography and natural selection at microgeographic scales using simulations and novel remote sensing mobility data, enriching our understanding of tropical forest hunter-gatherers and of the role of mobility as a force in human evolution more broadly.