Bioarchaeological research development in Georgia: steps, peculiarities, directions

In Georgia, Bioarcheology in its broad sense started developing with the research in Paleoanthropology and Paleopathology. Paleoanthropology initially developed in line with Archaeology. The study of biomaterial through the angle of paleopathology started in 1956. Later works were devoted to Ethnogenesis, comparative Anthropology, spreading physiological stresses and other issues. In recent years newly discovered rich archeological materials and introduction of the modern methods of research has outlined new prospects, and our decision is to put them in to action. From our point of view the research methods and aims of Bioarchaeology include: 1. morphological study of biomaterial on the macroscopic level. 2. The research through chemical methods which gives us an opportunity to outline many parameters of life such as eating habits, the aspects of interrelation with the environment and metabolic processes through the spectrum analysis of main ingredients of material. The important part of this direction is the researching of stable isotopes which gives us additional and strong arguments. 3. Genetic research answers the following important questions: biomaterial's variety; racial and ethnic origin; time and place of migration processes traced on ethnogenesis; hereditary disease history (dating, the origin of the diseases, epidemics and other); human and animal genome evolution and mutational changes; the role of environment (food, ecosystems) in genome changes. The results of the above mentioned research allow answering a lot of important historical and biomedical issues. From these, we have started the comparative analyses of the Genographic data of Georgia, taking notes of the genetic changes which, in our opinion, are caused by the radical and stable changes of eating habits produced about 450-500 years ago, which probably resulted proportional imbalance of the diseases that appeared in the same period.