Interdisciplinary international project of ASU received support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the French National Center for Scientific Research

The main goal of the project is to obtain and summarize the results of archaeological, archaeozoological, paleogenetic, paleosocial and other studies to identify patterns of development of ancient societies of Altai and adjacent territories based on various forms of animal husbandry, in which horses were important. One of the tasks is the study of the genetic composition of the populations of ancient domesticated horses from different-time archaeological complexes of Altai and adjacent territories, as well as the establishment of a phylogenetic relationship between ancient and modern horse populations based on sequencing of phenotypic and phylogenetic DNA markers. This work will allow to reconstruct the early history of horse breeding in Altai, as well as to identify the role and significance of horses in the economic, military, social, ritual and other activities of the nomadic Altai and adjacent territories of the early Iron Age.

“Our main foreign partner is the Laboratory of Molecular Anthropobiology and Visualization of Synthesis at Paul Sabatier University (also known as Toulouse III) in France,” explained Professor Alexei Tishkin. “The laboratory is headed by world renowned specialist Professor Ludovic Orlando, with whom we have been cooperating since 2017. The laboratory is a member of European Research Infrastructure Consortium performing advanced research, including in the field of paleogenetics.

The received grant fits well into the modern direction of development of national science, which was recently determined at the meeting of President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin and President of the Russian Academy of Sciences A.M. Sergeyeva. But I would note another point. In addition to the staff of Altai State University, the main performers are researchers from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Novosibirsk), the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Yekaterinburg) and the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg). This integration provides a high level of research. I hope that their results will be published in leading journals.”