↵†  Present address: The Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, University of California, San Franc

An ancestral recombination graph of human, Neanderthal, and Denisovan genomes

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2021-07-20 05:30:08

↵† Present address: The Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA.

Many humans carry genes from Neanderthals, a legacy of past admixture. Existing methods detect this archaic hominin ancestry within human genomes using patterns of linkage disequilibrium or direct comparison to Neanderthal genomes. Each of these methods is limited in sensitivity and scalability. We describe a new ancestral recombination graph inference algorithm that scales to large genome-wide datasets and demonstrate its accuracy on real and simulated data. We then generate a genome-wide ancestral recombination graph including human and archaic hominin genomes. From this, we generate a map within human genomes of archaic ancestry and of genomic regions not shared with archaic hominins either by admixture or incomplete lineage sorting. We find that only 1.5 to 7% of the modern human genome is uniquely human. We also find evidence of multiple bursts of adaptive changes specific to modern humans within the past 600,000 years involving genes related to brain development and function.

Much of the current genetic variation within humans predates the split, estimated at 520 to 630 thousand years (ka) ago (1), between the populations that would become modern humans and Neanderthals. The shared genetic variation present in our common ancestral population is still largely present among humans today and was present in Neanderthals up until the time of their extinction. This phenomenon, which is known as incomplete lineage sorting (ILS), means that any particular human will share many alleles with a Neanderthal that are not shared with some other humans. Therefore, humans often share genetic variation with Neanderthals not by admixture but rather by shared inheritance from a population ancestral to us both. Because of this, any effort to map ancestry from archaic hominins in human genomes must disentangle admixture from ILS. Furthermore, a technique able to identify both admixture and ILS could produce a catalog of uniquely human genomic regions that is free of both and thereby shed light on the evolutionary processes that have been important in our origin as a unique species.

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