title: Complex history of admixture between modern humans and Neandertals.
abstract: Recent analyses have found that a substantial amount of the Neandertal genome persists in the genomes of contemporary non-African individuals. East Asians have, on average, higher levels of Neandertal ancestry than do Europeans, which might be due to differences in the efficiency of purifying selection, an additional pulse of introgression into East Asians, or other unexplored scenarios. To better define the scope of plausible models of archaic admixture between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans, we analyzed patterns of introgressed sequence in whole-genome data of 379 Europeans and 286 East Asians. We found that inferences of demographic history restricted to neutrally evolving genomic regions allowed a simple one-pulse model to be robustly rejected, suggesting that differences in selection cannot explain the differences in Neandertal ancestry. We show that two additional demographic models, involving either a second pulse of Neandertal gene flow into the ancestors of East Asians or a dilution of Neandertal lineages in Europeans by admixture with an unknown ancestral population, are consistent with the data. Thus, the history of admixture between modern humans and Neandertals is most likely more complex than previously thought.
authors: Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, 3720 15(th) Avenue NE, PO Box 355065, Seattle WA 98195-5065, USA. Electronic address: bvernot@gmail.com.
authors: Benjamin
authors: B
authors: Vernot
authors: Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, 3720 15(th) Avenue NE, PO Box 355065, Seattle WA 98195-5065, USA. Electronic address: akeyj@uw.edu.
authors: Joshua M
authors: JM
authors: Akey
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D044466:Asian People / Q000235:genetics; D051456:Gene Flow; D005828:Genetics, Population; D016678:Genome; D006801:Humans; D008957:Models, Genetic; D059125:Neanderthals / Q000235:genetics*; D044465:White People / Q000235:genetics