HSD: Anthropological Modeling of Social Structure, Genetics, and Language Speciation in Indonesia

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In collaboration with Indonesian researchers and public health teams, this project will gather genetic, linguistic, medical, demographic, and environmental data from villages in the Indonesian archipelago. The data will be used to build and test mathematical models to improve our understanding of the genetic structure of populations, the origins of language change, and genetic variation affecting susceptibility to diseases such as malaria, hepatitis, tuberculosis, and dengue. Until recently, most studies of human genetics and languages focused on large-scale regional or continental patterns, but all such patterns originate in communities of interacting individuals. Newly available techniques for more detailed genetic analyses on several chromosomes will be used to investigate the emergence of patterns of genetic relatedness at the community scale. Genetics, demography, language change, and the spread of diseases are strongly interactive processes. Language barriers can maintain genetic variation, while the prevalence of diseases such as hepatitis B reflects historic population movements. Until recently, the entire 240 million population of Indonesia was represented by extremely limited genetic sampling at a handful of sites. Samples collected for this project will have associated medical, genealogical, linguistic, and sociological data, which together will form a unique anthropological dataset. New mathematical and computational tools will make possible the analysis of this data on a scale of time and space that previously has not been observed. This project will support continuing development of novel mathematical and computational methods for the analysis of genetic, demographic, and linguistic processes at the community scale over the last 5,000 years. The project's focus on community-scale processes and on gene-language co-evolution will define a specific domain of research requiring new computational and analytical tools. These new tools will enable researchers to both model and infer the effects of demographic processes on genetic patterns and language evolution (e.g. anthropological models of gene/language coevolution, neutral evolution vs. directional selection, drift and variance effects). Researchers at the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology will collaborate on this project. The project also will provide education and training opportunities for students, and it will result in completion of a half-hour video program, "Indonesian Origins: genes, languages and cultures," with assistance from a leading British television production company. The researchers also will work with staff at San Francisco's Exploratorium museum of science to create materials for use in both video and exhibit formats. An award resulting from the FY 2007 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.