Resurrecting Surviving Neandertal Lineages from Modern Human Genomes
Abstract
Anatomically modern humans overlapped and mated with Neandertals such that non-African humans inherit ~1 to 3% of their genomes from Neandertal ancestors. We identified Neandertal lineages that persist in the DNA of modern humans, in whole-genome sequences from 379 European and 286 East Asian individuals, recovering more than 15 gigabases of introgressed sequence that spans ~20% of the Neandertal genome (false discovery rate = 5%). Analyses of surviving archaic lineages suggest that there were fitness costs to hybridization, admixture occurred both before and after divergence of non-African modern humans, and Neandertals were a source of adaptive variation for loci involved in skin phenotypes. Our results provide a new avenue for paleogenomics studies, allowing substantial amounts of population-level DNA sequence information to be obtained from extinct groups, even in the absence of fossilized remains.
- Publication:
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Science
- Pub Date:
- February 2014
- DOI:
- 10.1126/science.1245938
- Bibcode:
- 2014Sci...343.1017V
- Keywords:
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- GENETICS Genetics, Paleontology, Anthropology