On November 6th of this year, at the Faculty of Medicine of Vilnius University, Prof. Kristiina Tambets from Tartu University delivered a lecture titled “Unveiling Human History Through Genetics: From Ancient Origins to Modern Insights.”
The lecture was attended by a diverse audience from the university community, including professors and students representing various fields of study, such as medicine, anthropology, biology, linguistics, archaeology, genetics, and other scientific areas.
In the lecture, the professor discussed the origins of ancient genetic material research and its further developments. She also explored the benefits of genomic research in explaining the origin of the human species, human connections with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the study of European origins. The importance of using genomic methods was discussed through specific cases of research on the Estonian population and ancient genetic material. The lecture demonstrated how the combination of linguistics, genetics, archaeology, and other fields can be used to reconstruct population history in the context of other populations. In the conclusion of the lecture, the professor reviewed the directions and perspectives of archaeogenomics as a scientific field and provided specific examples of how the results obtained in practice contribute to the study of contemporary human populations.
Dr. Kristiina Tambets is a professor of archaeogenomics and the founder of the archaeogenomics laboratory at the Genomics Institute of Tartu University. The interdisciplinary work led by her team combines archaeology, genetics, linguistics, anthropology, and other fields, allowing for a multi-dimensional analysis of the history of the Estonian people by considering space, time, and circumstances.
In the newly built Science Center at the Faculty of Medicine of Vilnius University, one of the laboratories is planned to house a similar interdisciplinary research group of Vilnius University researchers. These researchers will delve into the history of our country's people, using methods from various fields such as genetics, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, microbiology, and more. By employing transdisciplinarity, the aim is to integrate and refine existing results and answer old or new questions about the history of the region's people.
To foster collaboration between academic institutions, share best practices, and promote the idea of interdisciplinary research on ancient materials, researchers from the Faculty of Medicine at Vilnius University invited Professor K. Tambets, who received funding from the Lithuanian Research Council through the LINO LT program (Project No. LINO-PAR-21 (LINO-LYR-21)).
You can listen to an interview with Prof. K. Tambets given to LRT journalists here (starting at 6:33 minutes).
The lecture recording can be viewed on the VU Faculty of Medicine's YouTube channel.
Prof. Kristiina Tambets's lecture on MF's YouTube channel