Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hu, Wangjie; Hao, Ziqian; Du, Pengyuan; Di Vincenzo, Fabio; Manzi, Giorgio; Cui, Jialong; Fu, Yun-Xin; Pan, Yi-Hsuan; Li, Haipeng
• 署名单位: Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS; Shanghai Institute of Nutrition & Health, CAS; East China Normal University; Shandong First Medical University & Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences; University of Florence; Sapienza University Rome; University of Texas System; University of Texas Health Science Center Houston; University of Texas School Public Health; Yunnan University; Chinese Academy of Sciences
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-12718
• DOI: 10.1126/science.abq7487
• 发表日期: 2023-09-01
• 页码: 979-984
• 关键词: human-population history; demographic history; genetic diversity; mutation-rates; melka kunture; homo; ancient; distributions; hitchhiking; migration

摘要

Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event.