RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Analyses of Neanderthal introgression suggest that Levantine and southern Arabian populations have a shared population history
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 438390
DO 10.1101/438390
A1 Deven N. Vyas
A1 Connie J. Mulligan
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/08/438390.abstract
AB Objectives Modern humans are thought to have interbred with Neanderthals in the Near East soon after modern humans dispersed out of Africa. This introgression event likely took place in either the Levant or southern Arabian depending on which dispersal route out of Africa was followed. In this study, we compare Neanderthal introgression in contemporary Levantine and southern Arabian populations to investigate Neanderthal introgression and to study Near Eastern population history.Materials and Methods We analyzed genotyping data on >400,000 autosomal SNPs from seven Levantine and five southern Arabian populations and compared those data to populations from around the world including Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. We used f4 and D statistics to estimate and compare levels of Neanderthal introgression between Levantine, southern Arabian, and comparative global populations. We also identified 1,581 putative Neanderthal-introgressed SNPs within our dataset and analyzed their allele frequencies as a means to compare introgression patterns in Levantine and southern Arabian genomes.Results We find that Levantine and southern Arabian populations have similar levels of Neanderthal introgression to each other but lower levels than other non-Africans. Furthermore, we find that introgressed SNPs have very similar allele frequencies in the Levant and southern Arabia, which indicates that Neanderthal introgression is similarly distributed in Levantine and southern Arabian genomes.Discussion We infer that the ancestors of contemporary Levantine and southern Arabian populations received Neanderthal introgression prior to separating from each other and that there has been extensive gene flow between these populations.