This is the blog for GW students taking Human Evolutionary Genetics. This site is for posting interesting tidbits on: the patterns and processes of human genetic variation;human origins and migration; molecular adaptations to environment, lifestyle and disease; ancient and forensic DNA analyses; and genealogical reconstructions.

GWHEG figure

GWHEG figure

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Adaptive Introgression

There have been many studies on variations in the human genome. As a species, we are generally curious as to our origin and how quickly adaptive traits such as skin pigmentation can occur in a population and how adaptive traits could have developed. It appears that there was admixture to some extent in human populations between African populations and Eurasian populations, as well as some gene flow between Eurasian humans and Neanderthals. The study touches on admixture between modern and archaic humans addresses the possible the adaptive advantages of Neanderthal and Desnovian populations mixing with archaic humans and to what extent hybridisation occurred. It is now generally accepted that Neanderthal and Desnovian DNA is present in non-African humans. It was believed to have occurred around 60mya which "largely post-dates the African–Eurasian population split, which is estimated to have occurred 100–160 kya (under the slow mutation rate) or 50–80 kya (under the fast rate)." The study focuses on to what extent introgression occurred and what potentially negative or beneficial adaptive outcomes occurred as a result.

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