Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America.
PLoS Genet. 2018 May 31;14(5):e1007349. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1007349. eCollection 2018 May.
The complete sequencing of archaic and modern human genomes has revolutionized the study of human history and evolution. The application of paleogenomics has answered questions that were beyond the scope of archaeology alone-definitively proving admixture between archaic and modern humans. Despite the remarkable progress made in the study of archaic-modern human admixture, many outstanding questions remain. Here, we review some of these questions, which include how frequent archaic-modern human admixture was in history, to what degree drift and selection are responsible for the loss and retention of introgressed sequences in modern human genomes, and how surviving archaic sequences affect human phenotypes.
古人类和现代人类基因组的完整测序彻底改变了人类历史和进化的研究。古基因组学的应用回答了仅凭考古学无法解决的问题——明确证明了古人类和现代人类之间存在混合。尽管在古人类-现代人类混合的研究中取得了显著的进展，但仍有许多悬而未决的问题。在这里，我们回顾了其中的一些问题，包括古人类-现代人类混合在历史上的频率有多高，漂变和选择在多大程度上导致了现代人类基因组中被同化序列的丢失和保留，以及幸存的古序列如何影响人类表型。
