KATHMANDU, FEBRUARY 23
An international team of scientists is offering a series of university symposia, public lectures, and classroom lessons in Kathmandu and Pokhara to share the results of 12 years of archaeological discoveries in the Upper Mustang of Nepal.
The team, led by Dr. Mark Aldenderfer (University of California Merced) and Dr. Christina Warinner (Harvard University), will host a series of university events in Kathmandu from March 4-6, followed by sessions in Pokhara from March 7-8.
Recent advances in the biological sciences are opening up dramatic new opportunities to study the human past. For the past 12 years, an international team of scientists has applied these cutting-edge techniques in the Upper Mustang, with the goal of understanding the lives of the first people to settle the High Himalayas more than 3,400 years ago and to reconstruct the trade routes they controlled for nearly three millennia.
Drawing on decades of archaeological fieldwork, the team used ancient DNA technologies to sequence the genomes and reconstruct the origin of early people in the High Himalayas and neighboring Tibetan Plateau.
They also studied genetic adaptations found in ancient and present-day Himalayan populations that help people live above 4,000 meters above sea level. More recently, they identified tantalizing clues about early malaria in Nepal and the role that long-distance trade may have played in its spread.
Finally, the team used a new technique called metagenomics to investigate residues found at the bottom of a 1,600-year-old copper cauldron and identified that it once contained chaang barley wine – making it the earliest chaang found to date.
The team welcomes the general public to attend public lectures offered on March 4 and 5 in Kathmandu and on March 7 in Pokhara to learn more about these and more exciting findings.
While these events welcome all attendees, the organizers have encouraged advance registration for the lectures on March 4 and March 7. For further details and registration, interested individuals can visit https://mustang-ancient-dna.github.io/#/.
