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PMID: 18087044 Published · ppublish English Journal Article Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ·Vol. 104 ·No. 52 ·2007-12-26 ·Pages 20753-8

Hawks J, Wang ET, Cochran GM, Harpending HC, Moyzis RK

Abstract

Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we found that selection has accelerated greatly during the last 40,000 years. We tested the null hypothesis that the observed age distribution of recent positively selected linkage blocks is consistent with a constant rate of adaptive substitution during human evolution. We show that a constant rate high enough to explain the number of recently selected variants would predict (i) site heterozygosity at least 10-fold lower than is observed in humans, (ii) a strong relationship of heterozygosity and local recombination rate, which is not observed in humans, (iii) an implausibly high number of adaptive substitutions between humans and chimpanzees, and (iv) nearly 100 times the observed number of high-frequency linkage disequilibrium blocks. Larger populations generate more new selected mutations, and we show the consistency of the observed data with the historical pattern of human population growth. We consider human demographic growth to be linked with past changes in human cultures and ecologies. Both processes have contributed to the extraordinarily rapid recent genetic evolution of our species.

MeSH Terms
Animals Biological Evolution Cluster Analysis Evolution, Molecular Gene Frequency Genetics, Population Genome, Human Heterozygote Humans Linkage Disequilibrium Models, Genetic Models, Statistical Models, Theoretical Mutation Pan troglodytes Selection, Genetic
Authors & Affiliations
5 authors, click to expand affiliations / ORCID
Hawks John
Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA. jhawk@wisc.edu
Wang Eric T
Cochran Gregory M
Harpending Henry C
Moyzis Robert K
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Article Info
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Abbr.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
ISSN
1091-6490
DOI
10.1073/pnas.0707650104
Email
jhawk@wisc.edu
Published
2007-12-26
Epub
2007-00-17
Pages
20753-8
Language
English
Region
United States
NLM ID
7505876
PMCID
PMC2410101
Subset
IM
External Links
PubMed source DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707650104 PMC Full Text View journal details
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