KINURA: Evolution of kinship in Uralic speaking populations

In KINURA we study the evolutionary history of human populations from the perspective of kinship, as family is the common core unit in which genes, languages, ideas, and artefacts are transmitted from one generation to another. We approach the evolution of kinship from the perspective of contact, which can be detected from linguistic, genetic and archaeological data. We conduct our study with Uralic speaking populations, which is a well-studied language family with a long research tradition in linguistics. It has had contacts with languages belonging to Indo-European and Turkic language families for several millennia making it well suited for the project.

The work is conducted by an interdisciplinary group of experts from the fields linguistics, archaeology, genetics, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. Our research questions cover, for example, reconstruction of kinship systems of Uralic proto-languages, detecting traces of kinship-related contacts from archaeological records and a multidisciplinary evaluation of kinship-related contacts. We will use both qualitative and quantitative methods to study these questions and to enlighten the evolutionary history of Uralic speaking populations.