População humana expandiu no último período da Idade da Pedra

Autosomal Resequence Data Reveal Late Stone Age Signals of Population Expansion in Sub-Saharan African Foraging and Farming Populations

Murray P. Cox1, David A. Morales2, August E. Woerner1, Jesse Sozanski1, Jeffrey D. Wall3, Michael F. Hammer1*

1 ARL Division of Biotechnology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, United States of America,

2 Department of Mathematics, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, United States of America,

3 Institute for Human Genetics and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America

Abstract Top

Background

A major unanswered question in the evolution of Homo sapiens is when anatomically modern human populations began to expand: was demographic growth associated with the invention of particular technologies or behavioral innovations by hunter-gatherers in the Late Pleistocene, or with the acquisition of farming in the Neolithic?

Methodology/Principal Findings

We investigate the timing of human population expansion by performing a multilocus analysis of≥20 unlinked autosomal noncoding regions, each consisting of ~6 kilobases, resequenced in ~184 individuals from 7 human populations. We test the hypothesis that the autosomal polymorphism data fit a simple two-phase growth model, and when the hypothesis is not rejected, we fit parameters of this model to our data using approximate Bayesian computation.

Conclusions/Significance

The data from the three surveyed non-African populations (French Basque, Chinese Han, and Melanesians) are inconsistent with the simple growth model, presumably because they reflect more complex demographic histories. In contrast, data from all four sub-Saharan African populations fit the two-phase growth model, and a range of onset times and growth rates is inferred for each population. Interestingly, both hunter-gatherers (San and Biaka) and food-producers (Mandenka and Yorubans) best fit models with population growth beginning in the Late Pleistocene. Moreover, our hunter-gatherer populations show a tendency towards slightly older and stronger growth (~41 thousand years ago, ~13-fold) than our food-producing populations (~31 thousand years ago, ~7-fold). These dates are concurrent with the appearance of the Late Stone Age in Africa, supporting the hypothesis that population growth played a significant role in the evolution of Late Pleistocene human cultures.

Citation: Cox MP, Morales DA, Woerner AE, Sozanski J, Wall JD, et al. (2009) Autosomal Resequence Data Reveal Late Stone Age Signals of Population Expansion in Sub-Saharan African Foraging and Farming Populations. PLoS ONE 4(7): e6366. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006366

Editor: John Hawks, University of Wisconsin, United States of America

Received: February 24, 2009; Accepted: June 2, 2009; Published: July 29, 2009

Copyright: © 2009 Cox et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: National Science Foundation grant BCS-0423670. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

* E-mail: mfh@u.arizona.edu

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