The scientific team of the Faculty of Science of the University of Ostrava will look at ancient migration routes and the mixing of human populations in the historical steppe areas of eastern and central Europe. Thanks to a recently obtained ERC CZ grant, they will use genetic data to try to more accurately discern the movements of our ancestors in the distant past.
Scientists from Ostrava have been awarded a prestigious Czech ERC CZ grant worth more than CZK 13 million. Thanks to the support of the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, the team from the Department of Biology and Ecology at the Faculty of Science of the University of Ostrava, which is dedicated to archaeogenetics, can now build on its earlier, mainly methodological research on migration flows in Europe.
“This is a great honour and success for us, because it is not easy to get funding for this type of research. With this support, we want to focus more deeply on the study of the dispersal and connectivity of human populations in the historic steppe areas of eastern and central Europe. For example, we envisage taking samples from the temporal bones of the skulls found, which will then be analysed for DNA sequencing in the USA. We hope to obtain more detailed information on the migration routes and mixing of human populations, which will provide new insights into history that cannot be obtained from historical records or archaeological excavations alone,” explains Dr Piya Changmai, a Thai-born scientist, on behalf of the OU Faculty of Science team.
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