Climate models for future climate change are tested using climate data from the past, which is obtained using proxies, for example those based on microbial lipid biomarkers. The paleotemperature proxy TEX86, based on lipids of marine Thaumarchaeota, has been widely used to reconstruct sea surface temperatures. However, despite its successful application, there are still substantial uncertainties regarding the biological sources and genetic controls of these lipids. To further develop this proxy, we need to determine which archaeal sources are contributing to the lipid pool, and also how the ability to synthesize the lipid was acquired through evolution to determine if the biology of the current producer can be extrapolated to the ancestor and how far back in time we can apply TEX86. For this, we will determine the archaeal diversity and membrane lipids produced in suspended particulate matter from different marine environmental settings in which we expect to find different archaea. In addition, we will perform incubation studies and enrichment cultures to select for uncultured archaeal groups known to coexist with Thaumarchaeota and we will determine their membrane lipid composition. The diversity of archaeal producers will be investigated by targeting the genes that are involved in the archaeal lipid biosynthetic pathway through metagenomics approaches, while the evolution of the acquisition of those archaeal membrane lipids will be determined by phylogenomic analyses. Ultimately, this information will be key for constraining under which conditions TEX86 is still applicable, which in turn is essential for more accurate paleotemperature reconstructions.

The birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Holocaust: such emblematic historical moments are regarded as the building blocks of a quintessentially European past. But how "European" is this past if many in the non-European world have claimed competing representations of it as their own, and if many in the European world, in turn, have appropriated non-European claims to bolster their own sense of identity? This CRP argues that, far from being Europes exclusive property, the pasts constructed through such emblematic moments were shaped in global circulations of meaning, and that their ongoing significance is the result of situated co-productions in Europe and East Asia. Our aim is to trace how intellectual entanglements across the Eurasian region from 1600 to the present shaped the conceptualization of historical temporalities, or "chronotypes." To substantiate this hypothesis, we examine four such chronotypes, those of "awakening and rebirth, "recurrence and return," "decline and fall, and "timelessness and permanence." Through academic works, exhibitions, teaching modules, public lectures and discussions, produced by an advanced postdoctoral team, the CRP will impact both scholars and non-academic stakeholders by piercing culturalist myths of nationally-owned "pasts" in Europe and East Asia.

The present project aims at stimulating further reflection about the question of multilingualism and minority languages in ancient Europe. Multilingualism is not only a feature of modern societies but also of the ancient European territory, which showed traces of it both in the zones that were under the authority of a single and cohesive national power such as the Roman Empire, as well as in those zones that were at the boundaries between two or more nations or populations, such as ancient Phrygia, the North-Western part of Greece, or some regions of Southern Italy. Investigating minority languages - the socalled Restsprachen - and multilingualism in Ancient Europe is thus crucial both to recover a significant and often ?submerged? section of the European past and also to better understand Europe nowadays with its distinctive features of multilingualism and languages in contact. The investigation conducted by the project is twofold. Each of the five research units will focus on a specific contact situation, which is poorly known or completely undocumented (e.g. Messapian, Phrygian and Lydian). Subsequently, the new philological data will be analyzed from a sociological perspective and on their value for supplying interesting parallels to reflect on multilingualism, linguistic (and social) identity and unity-in-diversity in the European Union nowadays, which is one of the key factors for building an inclusive, innovative and reflective Europe.