As the world's remaining hunting and gathering societies interact more actively with their settled agricultural neighbours, they face major changes in their diet, mobility and community networks. The 5-year MOBILE project is studying the impact of these changes on the health and biological diversity of traditionally hunter-gatherer communities in Indonesia, in order to better understand human experience and evolution in tropical forest environments.

MOBILE works with communities now following a wide range of subsistence practices and mobility patterns.  The project is sequencing human and animal genomes along with microbiomes to broadly characterise community biological diversity. This is analysed in the context of remote sensing mobility data to discover how movement and social interactions maintain and structure biological diversity in small, traditional societies, across the lifestyle spectrum. Finally, we use computational modelling and simulation to determine the impact of mobility on longer-term diversity and evolutionary trends.

More information can be found at www.mobile-project.info

MOBILE is funded by the European Research Council (ERC-2020-STG #950610). The project involves extensive collaboration with institutions from Indonesia, Europe, the US and New Zealand.