Skeletal remains are rare and deposited post-mortem, thus limiting our capacity to study human and animal activities during their lifespans, as well as their global impact through time. Sediments from caves usually represent precise archaeological contexts, enabling a direct link with past human occupation and behaviour spanning over a million years. Therefore, caves and their sediments are invaluable archives for examining long-term relationships and impacts that humans may have had on animal, plant and microbial communities, both within and outside of the immediate cave environment. Today, cave conservation specialists consider humans to be detrimental to cave environments. But in the past, humans resided in caves alongside other inhabitants. We investigate the impact humans have had on cave ecosystems through time.

In the first four years of funding, our goal is to create a strong network of researchers and students at Tübingen who study caves using a holistic approach by broadening existing synergies between the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP), the Science Faculty (Departments of Geosciences and Bioinformatics) and the Interfaculty Institute for Microbiology and Infection Medicine at the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen. Moreover, GACT develops and expands connections with local institutions including the UNESCO Global Geopark Swabian Alb, Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Landesverband für Höhlen- und Karstforschung and Arbeitsgemeinschaft Fledermausschutz Baden Württemberg, among others. Under the GACT umbrella these institutions combine their expertise in an entirely new framework built around Tübingen and help providing a platform for transforming innovative scientific research into societally relevant results.

GACT comprehensively investigates the relationship between human occupation of caves and their ecosystems from a multiscalar perspective. The three interlinked Research Areas (RA) span the microscopic to macroscopic and employ novel scientific approaches.