An Evolutionary Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2019
Modern humans evolved in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago (Campbell and Tishkoff 2010). As groups migrated out of Africa they underwent bottlenecks leading to sharp reductions in population size and genetic diversity (Amos and Hoffman 2010; Harpending and Rogers 2000; Ramachandran et al. 2005). To this day, African populations retain the most genetic diversity globally (Auton et al. 2015). In order to survive both within and out of Africa, early human populations had to adapt to their novel environments, including new food resources, colder climates, higher altitudes, and, especially, infectious diseases (Balaresque et al. 2007; Fumagalli et al. 2011). These adaptive requirements, facilitated by natural selection, led to an increased frequency of alleles that were beneficial in that environment. Due to the fact that these adaptive requirements were driven by local environmental pressures, some of these evolutionarily advantageous alleles display geographic and ancestral specificity, as observed in the genomes of present-day humans (Fumagalli et al. 2011).
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