The lingering load of archaic admixture in modern human populations

Angela

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[h=3]The admixture was on balance disadvantageous and we've been purifying our genome of those alleles ever since.[/h]The lingering load of archaic admixture in modern human populations.

Authors:
K. Harris1,2 ; R. Nielsen2,3


Institutes
1) Stanford University, Stanford, CA; 2) University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA; 3) Center for Bioinformatics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.


Abstract:

"Founder effects and bottlenecks can damage fitness by letting deleterious alleles drift to high frequencies. This almost certainly imposed a burden on Neanderthals and Denisovans, archaic hominid populations whose genetic diversity was less than a quarter of the level seen in humans today. A more controversial question is whether the out-of-Africa bottleneck created differences in genetic load between modern human populations. Some previous studies concluded that this bottleneck saddled non-Africans with potentially damaging genetic variants that could affect disease incidence across the globe today (e.g. Lohmueller, et al. 2009; Fu, et al. 2014), while other studies have concluded that there is little difference in genetic load between Africans and non-Africans (e.g. Simons, et al. 2014; Do, et al. 2015). Although previous studies have devoted considerable attention to simulating the accumulation of deleterious mutations during the out-of-Africa bottleneck, none to our knowledge have incorporated the fitness effects of introgression from Neanderthals into non-Africans. We present simulations showing that archaic introgression may have had a greater fitness effect than the out-of-Africa bottleneck itself, saddling non-Africans with weakly deleterious alleles that accumulated as nearly neutral variants in Neanderthals. Assuming that the exome experiences deleterious mutations with additive fitness effects drawn from a previously inferred gamma distribution, we predict that the fitness of the average Neanderthal was about 50% lower than the fitness of the average human, implying the existence of strong selection against early Neanderthal-human hybrids. This is a direct consequence of mutation accumulation during a period of low Neanderthal population size that is thought to have lasted ten times longer than the out-of-Africa bottleneck (Pruefer, et al. 2014). Although our model predicts some transmission of deleterious Neanderthal variation to present-day non-Africans, it also predicts that many Neanderthal alleles have been purged away, depleting conserved genomic regions of Neanderthal ancestry as observed empirically by Sankararaman, et al. (2014). Our results imply that the deficit of Neanderthal DNA from functional genomic regions can be explained without the action of epistatic reproductive incompatibilities between human and Neanderthal alleles.
 
Admixtures in Non-Africans is one thing, but there were also archaic admixtures in Africa from local hominins.
 
Admixtures in Non-Africans is one thing, but there were also archaic admixtures in Africa from local hominins.

Well, Neanderthals were also more archaic.

Anyway, the point is that they weren't very genetically fit, basically due to founder effects and bottlenecks (again).

One of my friends on here accused me of being prejudiced against Neanderthals??!! I, of course, vehemently denied it!

I just thought that's what the papers were showing, i.e. that the admixture wasn't advantageous to us and we've been purging their genes ever since. This one is just another in the list saying basically the same thing.
 
Well, Neanderthals were also more archaic.

Anyway, the point is that they weren't very genetically fit, basically due to founder effects and bottlenecks (again).

One of my friends on here accused me of being prejudiced against Neanderthals??!! I, of course, vehemently denied it!

I just thought that's what the papers were showing, i.e. that the admixture wasn't advantageous to us and we've been purging their genes ever since. This one is just another in the list saying basically the same thing.
Did they say in what way we are purging our genome? New mutations or borrowing the "fit" segments again from Africans?

It all should mean that Mesolithic Hunter Gatherers should have had way more Neanderthal genome, 10%, 20%, 30%?. They were true hybrids back then, as we have just leftovers left.
 
look at the Y DNA pedigree, haplogroup BT is 126000 year old

http://www.yfull.com/tree/BT/

it generated just 5 branches, B , C , D , E , F

B split to Africa

C,D,E,F all stayed in isolation till their expansion times +/- 50.000 years ago

that is a 75000 year bottleneck

how did they stay genetically fit?

55-60.000 years ago they would have admixed with Neanderthals (well, C,D,F, not E)
 
Admixtures in Non-Africans is one thing, but there were also archaic admixtures in Africa from local hominins.

there were bottlenecks in Africa too

that is why only haplogroup A survived and more archaic hominins went extinct

it is estimated that the last admixture between haplogroup A and archaic African hominins happened 40.000 years ago
 
so the consensus is moving from low levels of recent neanderthals admixture to high levels but deleterious?

that makes more sense than sudden instant extinction at least.
 
so the consensus is moving from low levels of recent neanderthals admixture to high levels but deleterious?

that makes more sense than sudden instant extinction at least.


[h=2]Oase 1[edit][/h]Against this background, particularly noteworthy is the fact that "Oase 1" exhibits morphological traits combining a variety of archaic Homo, derived early modern human, and possibly Neanderthal features.[5]
In June 2003 a further research team with Ștefan Milota, Ricardo Rodrigo and Mircea Gherase discovered additional human remains on the cave's surface. Thus, an entire anterior cranial skeleton was found along with a largely complete left temporal bone and a number of frontal, parietal and occipital bone segments.
Analysis of DNA from Oase-1 showed that he had approximately 6-9% Neanderthal ancestry, significantly more than any present-day human, derived (at least in part) from interbreeding 4 to 6 generations earlier. He was not more closely related to ancient European hunter-gatherers than to East Asians, suggesting that his population did not make a significant contribution to modern European ancestry. He carried modern human uniparental lineages - an extinct lineage of mitochondrial DNA haplogroup N and a form of Y DNA haplogroup F exclusive of G, H, and IJ.[6]

RomaniaPeştera cu Oase [Oase 1]
37,000–42,000 BPFY-calls Genetiker 24/6/15 pré-X (M2335)
NFu 2015M2335 : 1+&1- op 7

he got extra Neanderthal admixture, later than 55-60000 years ago

his line got extinct
 
Oase 1[edit]

Against this background, particularly noteworthy is the fact that "Oase 1" exhibits morphological traits combining a variety of archaic Homo, derived early modern human, and possibly Neanderthal features.[5]
In June 2003 a further research team with Ștefan Milota, Ricardo Rodrigo and Mircea Gherase discovered additional human remains on the cave's surface. Thus, an entire anterior cranial skeleton was found along with a largely complete left temporal bone and a number of frontal, parietal and occipital bone segments.
Analysis of DNA from Oase-1 showed that he had approximately 6-9% Neanderthal ancestry, significantly more than any present-day human, derived (at least in part) from interbreeding 4 to 6 generations earlier. He was not more closely related to ancient European hunter-gatherers than to East Asians, suggesting that his population did not make a significant contribution to modern European ancestry. He carried modern human uniparental lineages - an extinct lineage of mitochondrial DNA haplogroup N and a form of Y DNA haplogroup F exclusive of G, H, and IJ.[6]

RomaniaPeştera cu Oase [Oase 1]
37,000–42,000 BPFY-calls Genetiker 24/6/15 pré-X (M2335)
NFu 2015M2335 : 1+&1- op 7

he got extra Neanderthal admixture, later than 55-60000 years ago

his line got extinct

The D-stats of the Oase 1 paper are interesting not only because he was shown to be similarly unrelated to ancient HGs as to Eats Asians - so was Ust'Ishim - but other UP samples (Ust'Ishim and Kostenki 14) show that they are very unrelated to him, also Ust'Ishim.
 
Unrelatd at what level?
I'm amazed by some papers abstracts: some say there is no trace of severe genic selection among moderns Humans, other seem thinking bottlenecks augment deleterious genes distribution among genome; but these people survived and passed us (partially) their DNA; aside some exceptions I'm rather pushed to believe bottlenecks augment fitness at some level, at least for local conditions. They diminish quantity of variants, but variants are not always good gifts; it's almost sure nevertheless a great variance in genes allows more adaptation in case of mesologic changes but...
the elimination of deleterious (or considered like that) Neanderthal's genes in modern genomes does not need new genes created by mutation or crossings: the crossing of populations 'sapiens sapiens' and 'neanderthal' was surely at low level and the hybrids born like that re-mated with ordinary modern Humans; the selection play was sufficient to promote again the "good" modern genes against the "bad" neanderthal genes, (very often at low speed), keeping along the "good" neanderthl ones.
All these new surveys seem being born by an initial settled idea, and not by PURE practical empirism giving way to new ideas. Maybe I'm wrong?...
I red an abstract about recessive genes being "threw off" with time: recessive genes are often a bit deleterious, but not always; and even deleterious genes are kept very long time; when genetics gets close to medecine, I use to be afraid, cautious at least; I red so much rubbish and pure contradiction.
 
Unrelatd at what level?
I'm amazed by some papers abstracts: some say there is no trace of severe genic selection among moderns Humans, other seem thinking bottlenecks augment deleterious genes distribution among genome; but these people survived and passed us (partially) their DNA; aside some exceptions I'm rather pushed to believe bottlenecks augment fitness at some level, at least for local conditions. They diminish quantity of variants, but variants are not always good gifts; it's almost sure nevertheless a great variance in genes allows more adaptation in case of mesologic changes but...
the elimination of deleterious (or considered like that) Neanderthal's genes in modern genomes does not need new genes created by mutation or crossings: the crossing of populations 'sapiens sapiens' and 'neanderthal' was surely at low level and the hybrids born like that re-mated with ordinary modern Humans; the selection play was sufficient to promote again the "good" modern genes against the "bad" neanderthal genes, (very often at low speed), keeping along the "good" neanderthl ones.
All these new surveys seem being born by an initial settled idea, and not by PURE practical empirism giving way to new ideas. Maybe I'm wrong?...
I red an abstract about recessive genes being "threw off" with time: recessive genes are often a bit deleterious, but not always; and even deleterious genes are kept very long time; when genetics gets close to medecine, I use to be afraid, cautious at least; I red so much rubbish and pure contradiction.

I don't understand what's amazing about this abstract. It seems to represent a growing consensus as far as the general parameters are concerned, although some of their claims do contradict prior papers.

There's no question that founder effect and a bottleneck can create situations where if deleterious genes are present, they can rise to very high frequencies through the operation of drift, with unfortunate consequences for the people involved. Not all of the diseases or conditions in question result in the death of the fetus or the death of offspring in infancy. Indeed, many don't result in death until after the person has already mated, which is why the "trait" survives in the population. Some don't result in death at all, just decreased fitness of one kind or another. Just because it doesn't directly result in death doesn't mean it isn't deleterious.

Then one has to consider the operation of balancing selection as in the case of sickle cell anemia and protection against malaria. Two of subject genes mean you get sickle cell anemia and die, but one copy provides protection against malaria. So, the trait survives. I often think of King Tut when I think about this. It would seem he wasn't heterozygous for the sickle cell trait. I wonder what the frequency was among the common people?
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_selection

Of course, the traits that rise to fixation might also be advantageous. Or, you might have one set of traits that is advantageous, and one that is deleterious, both at high frequencies. However, in the case of random mutations, beneficial ones seem to be the rarest. (most seem to be neutral, thank goodness)

The examples are numerous: French Canadians, the Amish, certain communities in Sardinia, Ashkenazim, Indian communities in Britain, most of the royal families of Europe. Certain specific royal lines died out because of it. The hemophilia mutation that arose either in Queen Victoria, or immediately before her, spread throughout most of the royal houses of Europe because of the large amount of inbreeding among them. They didn't all die, but that isn't the point. I just yesterday posted a study done on a small, isolated, bottle-necked community in northeast Finland. The scientists found exceedingly high levels of schizophrenia and problems with cognitive functioning.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...ntal-Disorders-in-Founder-Populations-Finland

Indeed, a lot of genetics studies that we use for populations genetics purposes were actually done because the scientists were researching the extremely high levels of certain diseases in small, isolated communities. One was done a couple of years ago on some small language isolate communities in north-east Italy for the same reason.

In terms of the Neanderthals, we have some Neanderthal genomes and some human genomes, both ancient and modern. They can be compared. They can and did test and found out that Neanderthals had 4X less diversity than any humans. They can see the approximate amount of Neanderthal ancestry in modern humans versus ancient humans. They can see that Neanderthal ancestry in humans has decreased. They can see which Neanderthal genes have survived, and they can see the areas of the genome where there was once greater Neanderthal ancestry than there is today. Those areas are enriched by new mutations. The areas have to do, per prior papers, with cognitive functioning and autoimmune disorders like diabetes, lupus etc. among others.

Drift exists. In bottle necked communities the accumulation of deleterious mutations does exist. Selection also exists. Do the scientists know everything about it? No, they don't, and they may get the details wrong, but the general parameters haven't changed for more than 100 years.

Now, in this particular case we're only dealing with an abstract(unlike in the case of Sankararaman et al 2014.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072735/

We're also dealing with simulations, apparently, not with just comparisons with the genomes. We'll see how the paper reads when it's published. I want to see the proof for this, "We present simulations showing that archaic introgression may have had a greater fitness effect than the out-of-Africa bottleneck itself.

I'm also not sure about their claim that "Our results imply that the deficit of Neanderthal DNA from functional genomic regions can be explained without the action of epistatic reproductive incompatibilities between human and Neanderthal alleles."

ED. I don't mean to say that the scientists have selection and how it operates all figured out, because they don't. There's more than a few papers about it on the ASHG List. It's enough to make my head explode just reading the abstracts! :)
 
bicicleur

"he got extra Neanderthal admixture, later than 55-60000 years ago. his line got extinct"

Yes, so either he was the only one or there were many like that over a long period.

It's not a big deal; I just always thought the idea there was only one mixture event and then all the neanderthals dropped dead over night seemed very silly so I'm pleased it appears to be crumbling.


 
moesan

"I'm rather pushed to believe bottlenecks augment fitness at some level, at least for local conditions"

Yes, with the emphasis on local conditions.

If neanderthals were adapted for the cold and AMH were pushing into colder regions (as those regions were slowly warming) then it seems to me neanderthal genes are likely to have been pretty useful to them.

With more time and warmth I can see how the neanderthal genes may have become less useful over time and then selected against - implied anyway by the modern percentages.

So it seems to me a far more likely option than single admixture is a kind of rolling wave effect
as AMH moved north with neanderthal genes more favored (or less disfavored) on the forward edge of the advance and then selected out again behind the wave of advance in the warmer regions - almost like the neanderthals provided a genetic bridge into those colder regions which mostly disappeared later.

It's just a guess but I think it'll be proved eventually when some relatively recent but still heavily admixed bones are found up in the Himalayas.


 
This new paper certainly proposes a thought-provoking theory. I remains skeptical though that Neanderthals, who evolved and survived for over half a million years in Europe (if we count proto-Neanderthals), would have been less well adapted to the Eurasian environment than the African Homo sapiens. Besides founder effects would have been far greater among the small group of Homo sapiens who first ventured into the Middle East then Europe and Central Asia, even if it happened in several small waves at a time, than the already well established and diversified Neanderthalian population. Actually the Homo sapiens gene pool experienced a first bottleneck in the founding population that left Africa for the Middle East, then another one among the isolated tribes that made it to Europe.

I would rather think that if Neanderthal alleles survive today among Eurasians it is chiefly because they were positively selected for their adaptive advantages. For instance Abi-Rached et al. (2011) showed that a disproportionately high number of HLA haplotypes (regulators of the immune system) in Eurasians were inherited from Neanderthals rather than the original African Homo sapiens, because they were better adapted to local pathogens. The same is probably true of at least some fair pigmentation alleles. One reason why Neanderthalian DNA has been decreasing as a proportion of the human genome in Europe since the age of Cro-Magnon is that successive migrations from Africa to the Middle East (think hg E1b1b), and from the Middle East to Europe (Neolithic farmers, R1b to the Pontic Steppe then Europe, J2a expansion, etc.), and from southern to northern Europe (Bell Beakers, Romans) progressively lowered overall percentage of Neanderthal admixture.
 
bicicleur

"he got extra Neanderthal admixture, later than 55-60000 years ago. his line got extinct"

Yes, so either he was the only one or there were many like that over a long period.

It's not a big deal; I just always thought the idea there was only one mixture event and then all the neanderthals dropped dead over night seemed very silly so I'm pleased it appears to be crumbling.



till 50 ka modern humans and Neanderthals shared similar technology
50 ka modern humans developped new technologies, which Neanderthals didn't share
while modern humans expanded, Neanderthals started to decline
 
"Founder effects and bottlenecks can damage fitness by letting deleterious alleles drift to high frequencies.

I think it can work both ways.
In most bottlenecks there is a survival of the fittest and usefull genes get selected.

IMO that is how homo sapiens was born in Africa ,
that is also how the expansion of modern humans 50 ka got started, which was based on just 2 selected haplogroups, C and F
 
One reason why Neanderthalian DNA has been decreasing as a proportion of the human genome in Europe since the age of Cro-Magnon is that successive migrations from Africa to the Middle East (think hg E1b1b), and from the Middle East to Europe (Neolithic farmers, R1b to the Pontic Steppe then Europe, J2a expansion, etc.), and from southern to northern Europe (Bell Beakers, Romans) progressively lowered overall percentage of Neanderthal admixture.

In that case Aurignacians should have had more Neanderthal DNA than Gravettians.
Maybe one day this will be checked.
 
This new paper certainly proposes a thought-provoking theory. I remains skeptical though that Neanderthals, who evolved and survived for over half a million years in Europe (if we count proto-Neanderthals), would have been less well adapted to the Eurasian environment than the African Homo sapiens. Besides founder effects would have been far greater among the small group of Homo sapiens who first ventured into the Middle East then Europe and Central Asia, even if it happened in several small waves at a time, than the already well established and diversified Neanderthalian population. Actually the Homo sapiens gene pool experienced a first bottleneck in the founding population that left Africa for the Middle East, then another one among the isolated tribes that made it to Europe.
Exactly the dilemma I had reading their statement. I think it is just their explanation for loss of Neanderthal DNA from modern human genome. I would agree with them if our modern genome is being made "more fit" by borrowing DNA from SS African gene pool to replace Neanderthal segments. However if new "fit genome" is introduced via new mutations, then conclusion should be that neither Neanderthal nor ancient humans genome was fit as ours today.

I would rather think that if Neanderthal alleles survive today among Eurasians it is chiefly because they were positively selected for their adaptive advantages. For instance Abi-Rached et al. (2011) showed that a disproportionately high number of HLA haplotypes (regulators of the immune system) in Eurasians were inherited from Neanderthals rather than the original African Homo sapiens, because they were better adapted to local pathogens.
I heard that staggering 95% of immune part of human genome in Asians was replaced by Neanderthal and Denisovan segments.
 
I think it can work both ways.
In most bottlenecks there is a survival of the fittest and usefull genes get selected.

IMO that is how homo sapiens was born in Africa ,
that is also how the expansion of modern humans 50 ka got started, which was based on just 2 selected haplogroups, C and F

That's why i said this:
Of course, the traits that rise to fixation might also be advantageous. Or, you might have one set of traits that is advantageous, and one that is deleterious, both at high frequencies.
 
LeBrok;467070]Exactly the dilemma I had reading their statement. I think it is just their explanation for loss of Neanderthal DNA from modern human genome. I would agree with them if our modern genome is being made "more fit" by borrowing DNA from SS African gene pool to replace Neanderthal segments. However if new "fit genome" is introduced via new mutations, then conclusion should be that neither Neanderthal nor ancient humans genome was fit as ours today.

I think that's a good point. I'm interested to see how the authors explain it. It depends what they mean by "new mutations". From what I recall from other papers, a lot of what they called "replacement" was in the areas of the brain associated with verbal processing, general cognitive processing, etc.

I'm not sure if all studies find "new" mutations in that area, or just removal of "older" Neanderthal genetic material. I would have to go back and check them.

I heard that staggering 95% of immune part of human genome in Asians was replaced by Neanderthal and Denisovan segments.

I wonder what the figure is for West Eurasians? The whole issue about the immune system is interesting, since the incidence of auto-immune disorders has been linked to "Neanderthal" ancestry.

I think that this paper is trying to counter assertions by some prior papers that the decrease of Neanderthal genes in humans was because the initial offspring of the matings were either sterile or so "unfit" that a lot of them didn't survive.

Just generally, then, if Neanderthal ancestry was so advantageous, why has it declined? Advantageous genes would be preserved through selection, wouldn't they?
 

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