"Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of population history, but its potential to reveal insights about human evolutionary biology has not been fully realized due to limited sample sizes and challenges in distinguishing between different types of selection."
"In the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection, indicating a significant evolutionary impact on human genetics."
"We document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits, including decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in cognitive performance."
"Our estimates of selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants enable a deeper understanding of how Darwinian forces interact with allelic effects, shaping the genetic architecture of complex traits."
Ancient DNA analysis has advanced understanding of human evolutionary biology, revealing strong directional selection on many alleles over the past ten millennia. A new method detects consistent trends in allele frequency changes, applied to a large dataset of West Eurasians. Findings indicate that classic hard sweeps are rare, while hundreds of alleles show significant selection effects. Changes in predicted traits include reduced body fat and schizophrenia, alongside increased cognitive performance. Selection coefficients at millions of variants provide insights into the relationship between Darwinian forces and genetic architecture of complex traits.
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