Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process

The history of human population size is important to understanding human evolution. Various studies 1-5 have found evidence for a founder event (bottleneck) in East Asian and European populations associated with the human dispersal out-of-Africa event around 60 thousand years ago (kya) before present. However, these studies have to assume simplified demographic models with few parameters and do not precisely date the start and stop times of the bottleneck. Here, with fewer assumptions on population size changes, we present a more detailed history of human population sizes between approximately ten thousand to a million years ago, using the pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent (PSMC) model applied to the complete diploid genome sequences of a Chinese male (YH) 6 , a Korean male (SJK) 7 , three European individuals (Venter 8 , NA12891 and NA12878 9 ) and two Yoruba males (NA18507 10 and NA19239). We infer that European and Chinese populations had very similar population size histories before 10–20kya. Both populations experienced a severe bottleneck between 10–60kya while African populations experienced a milder bottleneck from which they recovered earlier. All three populations have an elevated effective population size between 60–250kya, possibly due to a population structure 11 . We also infer that the differentiation of genetically modern humans may have started as early as 100–120kya 12 , but considerable genetic exchanges may still have occurred until 20–40kya.

The availability of complete human genome sequences from populations across the world has given rise to new population genetic inference methods that explicitly model their ancestral relationship under recombination and mutation. So far, application of these methods to evolutionary history more recent than 20-30 thousand years ago and to population separations has been limited. Here we present a new method that overcomes these shortcomings. The Multiple Sequentially Markovian Coalescent (MSMC) analyses the observed pattern of mutations in multiple individuals, focusing on the first coalescence between any two individuals. Results from applying MSMC to genome sequences from nine populations across the world suggest that the genetic separation of non-African ancestors from African Yoruban ancestors started long before 50,000 years ago, and give information about human population history as recently as 2,000 years ago, including the bottleneck in the peopling of the Americas, and separations within Africa, East Asia and Europe.

Plant domestication is an outstanding example of plant-animal co-evolution and is a far richer model for studying evolution than is generally appreciated. There have been numerous studies to identify genes associated with domestication, and archaeological work has provided a clear understanding of the dynamics of human cultivation practices during the Neolithic period. Together, these have provided a better understanding of the selective pressures that accompany crop domestication, and they demonstrate that a synthesis from the twin vantage points of genetics and archaeology can expand our understanding of the nature of evolutionary selection that accompanies domestication.