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Did farming change the human genome?

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Did farming change the human genome?

Adaptations in ancient DNA/Harvard Medical School

If so, the genome has certainly been a work in rapid progress, and maybe regress too

From :

Genomic analysis of ancient human remains identifies specific genes that changed during and after the transition in Europe from hunting and gathering to farming about 8,500 years ago. Many of the genes are associated with height, immunity, lactose digestion, light skin pigmentation, blue eye color and celiac disease risk.

“From an archaeological perspective, it’s quite amazing,” said co-senior author Ron Pinhasi, associate professor of archaeology at University College Dublin. “The Neolithic revolution is perhaps the most important transition in human prehistory. We now have proof that people did actually go from Anatolia into Europe and brought farming with them. For more than 40 years, people thought it was impossible to answer that question.”

“Second,” he continued, “we now have evidence that genetic selection occurred along with the changes in lifestyle and demography, and that selection continued to happen following the transition.”

The DNA came from the remains of people who lived between 3,000 and 8,500 years ago at different sites across what is now Europe, Siberia and Turkey. That time span provided snapshots of genetic variation before, during and after the agricultural revolution in Europe. More.

Hmmm. Great potential here for recovering more of pre-literate history from the language of the genome.

But if these were significant changes, there wasn’t a lot of time for them. How long would it take to reverse them? Genomes could turn out to be a much messier work in progress than anyone imagined.

See also: What can we responsibly believe about human evolution?

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Here’s the abstract:

Ancient DNA makes it possible to observe natural selection directly by analysing samples from populations before, during and after adaptation events. Here we report a genome-wide scan for selection using ancient DNA, capitalizing on the largest ancient DNA data set yet assembled: 230 West Eurasians who lived between 6500 and 300 BC, including 163 with newly reported data. The new samples include, to our knowledge, the first genome-wide ancient DNA from Anatolian Neolithic farmers, whose genetic material we obtained by extracting from petrous bones, and who we show were members of the population that was the source of Europe’s first farmers. We also report a transect of the steppe region in Samara between 5600 and 300 BC, which allows us to identify admixture into the steppe from at least two external sources. We detect selection at loci associated with diet, pigmentation and immunity, and two independent episodes of selection on height. (paywall) – Iain Mathieson, Iosif Lazaridis, Nadin Rohland, Swapan Mallick, Nick Patterson, Songül Alpaslan Roodenberg, Eadaoin Harney, Kristin Stewardson, Daniel Fernandes, Mario Novak, Kendra Sirak, Cristina Gamba, Eppie R. Jones, Bastien Llamas, Stanislav Dryomov, Joseph Pickrell, Juan Luís Arsuaga, José María Bermúdez de Castro, Eudald Carbonell, Fokke Gerritsen, Aleksandr Khokhlov, Pavel Kuznetsov, Marina Lozano, Harald Meller, Oleg Mochalov, Vyacheslav Moiseyev, Manuel A. Rojo Guerra, Jacob Roodenberg, Josep Maria Vergès, Johannes Krause, Alan Cooper, Kurt W. Alt, Dorcas Brown, David Anthony, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Wolfgang Haak, Ron Pinhasi, David Reich. Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians. Nature, 2015; DOI: 10.1038/nature16152

Comments
I thought we'd agreed that Europeans got blue eyes and red hair from our Neanderthal cousins? If Farming has anything to do with blue eyes, then why aren't all of the Chinese, the ultimate Farmers, all blue eyed? We've known for decades that simply providing children with adequate levels of protein and vitamins causes them to be taller adults. Thus younger generations of Japanese, fed on McDonald's Cheeseburgers, are taller than their parents. I don't think any genes had to mutate to produce this change.mahuna
November 28, 2015
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