Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Curr Opin Genet Dev. 2018 Dec;53:1-8. doi: 10.1016/j.gde.2018.05.009. Epub 2018 Jun 9.
The sequencing of ancient DNA from archaic humans-Neanderthals and Denisovans-has revealed that modern and archaic humans interbred at least twice during the Pleistocene. The field of human paleogenomics has now turned its attention towards understanding the nature of this genetic legacy in the gene pool of present-day humans. What exactly did modern humans obtain from interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans? Was the introgressed genetic material beneficial, neutral or maladaptive? Can differences in phenotypes among present-day human populations be explained by archaic human introgression? These questions are of prime importance for our understanding of recent human evolution, but will require careful computational modeling and extensive functional assays before they can be answered in full. Here, we review the recent literature characterizing introgressed DNA and the likely biological consequences for their modern human carriers. We focus particularly on archaic human haplotypes that were beneficial to modern humans as they expanded across the globe, and on ways to understand how populations harboring these haplotypes evolved over time.
古人类 DNA 测序——尼安德特人和丹尼索瓦人——揭示了现代人种和古人类在更新世时期至少发生过两次杂交。人类古基因组学领域现在已经将注意力转向了解现代人类基因库中这种遗传遗产的本质。现代人种从与尼安德特人和丹尼索瓦人的杂交中到底获得了什么？引入的遗传物质是有益的、中性的还是适应不良的？现代人类群体之间表型的差异能否用古人类的基因渗入来解释？这些问题对于我们理解人类最近的进化至关重要，但在全面回答这些问题之前，需要进行仔细的计算建模和广泛的功能检测。在这里，我们回顾了最近的文献，这些文献描述了渗入的 DNA 及其对现代人类携带者的可能生物学后果。我们特别关注那些对现代人类在全球扩张有益的古人类单倍型，以及了解携带这些单倍型的人群如何随时间进化的方法。
