Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

Metacelsus

See also the press release: https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-revea... This study covers about 10,000 years of recent human evolution in Europe and West Asia. From the abstract: >in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.

damnitbuilds

I always knew I was smarter than my parents.

vintermann

The dataset excites me more than the fairly vague conclusion that some SNPs possibly linked to traits were selected for (or hitched along to genes which were selected for). Genetic archaeology is just so much more exciting than this. But I bet there will be a ton more of that too, thanks to the high quality dataset.

bonsai_spool

Here's the paper - we ideally shouldn't be linking to PDFs of these things but it's paywalled https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10358-1

bcjdjsndon

How did they decide what made a trait adaptive?

rossdavidh

One of the authors of this paper, David Reich, has written a book called "Who We Are and How We Got Here", which is worth reading. My thoughts on it: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2605841954

trallnag

Big and true