So I'm interested in how modern human populations have evolved to their lifestyles or environments.

And so this is, we're talking in the last like 10,000 years or less.

And I got into that. I was actually, I've always been interested in evolution.

I actually started with a master's in astrobiology. So I was looking at very theoretical evolution.

But then I decided I wanted to actually work with humans. And so I was doing my PhD in Copenhagen

in Denmark. And I was working on a totally different project. and I heard about a group of divers in Indonesia.

And I thought, well, if ever there were an opportunity for evolution or natural selection to act in a modern human population, this would be the population.

And so when I saw that no one had done that study yet, I went to my supervisor and pitched it and said, can I, can I do this? And luckily,

I had a supervisor who was super supportive and that was the start of all of it for me.

How natural selection would work with these people in Indonesia who are, they lived on the water.

These are the nomadic spear fishermen group. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So they're called

sea nomads. Traditionally, they live their whole lives on houseboats. And that's changing,

you know, in a kind of a contemporary context. But traditionally they would get basically everything

they needed from the sea. And they do a lot of that through your breathhold diving. And they're

extremely good at it so they can

hold their breath for a really long time they can move underwater with like an incredible athleticism

and they do this to collect uh things like sea cucumbers they spear fish um and so the idea was that

diving is dangerous and so if people have been doing this to survive for thousands of years, they may have evolved in a way that made them better at it.

And what is it specifically about that part of the world that pushes them to be more of sea nomads, like to be exploring the sea for food and for this kind of

stuff. Is there a sparse, is there a very, um, limited amount of resources on land there?

I think it's actually that there are just so many resources in the water. So Indonesia, um, I mean,

that whole area, you have sea nomads throughout

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