PROTOPEST · Infectious disease outbreaks as contributors to socio-cultural transformations in the 2nd millennium BCE

In recent years, rapid developments in the field of ancient metagenomics, enabled through advances in genomic sequencing and ancient DNA retrieval, have provided temporal transects of microbial diversity and have paved the way for studying human-pathogen interactions, on the biological and cultural dimensions, far earlier than the written historical record. With these tools at hand, PROTOPEST will utilise a timely opportunity for investigating the impact of infectious disease epidemics on prehistoric human societies. The project will be centred on the 2nd millennium BCE, a period of large-scale socio-cultural transformations witnessed differentially across the archaeological records of Europe, Near East and Asia. Until now, studies have focused on environmental changes, economic shifts, warfare and human migration to explain these phenomena. Crucially, the 2nd millennium bears the earliest textual evidence of infectious disease epidemics ever identified, yet, their possible contribution to observed transformations, as well as their trans-regional impact beyond textual descriptions, remain largely unexplored. PROTOPEST will produce extensive ancient metagenomic, pathogen genomic and human genomic datasets, generated from human and animal remains across key regions of Europe, the Near East and Central Asia. Co-analysed alongside cultural, isotopic, paleodemographic and palaeopathological information, these data will be used to expose the unknown landscape of Middle/Late Bronze Age epidemics across a large geographical expanse. Our unique multidisciplinary framework will define indicators of prehistoric community responses to infectious disease outbreaks, and reveal how pathogens emerged and disseminated within and across human populations. In this capacity, PROTOPEST will provide a deep evolutionary and cultural framework for empirically examining the diachronic challenges that pathogens have posed on human societies, to gain a more holistic view on human prehistory.