Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01204-5

by unsuspecting • 3 months ago

119 166 3 months ago

Related: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47791282 (64 comments)

https://x.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967 (https://xcancel.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967)

A_D_E_P_T• 3 months ago

Not that surprising when you consider, as the paper does, the explosion of very meaningful traits such as the ability to digest lactose and various anti-malaria adaptations e.g. Sickle Cell and the Duffy-null mutation.

It's just controversial for obvious reasons. The notion that human groups may have meaningfully evolved in different ways over the past 10,000 years, and may still be evolving, is an unpopular one on both ends of the political spectrum.

AlotOfReading4• 3 months ago

The reason no one wants to talk is that these discussions are always co-opted by racists wanting to affirm their beliefs, regardless of the underlying science. Reich in particular is borderline deliberate about attracting those sorts with his lab's research, because of how badly he chooses to handle the topic and terminology of race.

nostromo• 3 months ago

Science is about truth not social outcomes.

People keep wondering why trust in scientific findings is in free fall. A big part of it is because many scientists have become comfortable lying when they feel it’s for a noble cause.

MontyCarloHall3• 3 months ago

Reich in particular is borderline deliberate about attracting those sorts with his lab's research, because of how badly he chooses to handle the topic and terminology of race.

Sorry, do you have any examples? His views that I've read [0, 1] are scientifically rigorous and terminologically precise, deftly navigating the politics that some consider extremely controversial. To wit, one of my favorite passages from [1], which deals specifically with terminology:

   But “ancestry” is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with “race.” Instead, the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them. It is now undeniable that there are nontrivial average genetic differences across populations in multiple traits, and the race vocabulary is too ill-defined and too loaded with historical baggage to be helpful. If we continue to use it we will not be able to escape the current debate, which is mired in an argument between two indefensible positions. On the one side there are beliefs about the nature of the differences that are grounded in bigotry and have little basis in reality. On the other side there is the idea that any biological differences among populations are so modest that as a matter of social policy they can be ignored and papered over. It is time to move on from this paralyzing false dichotomy and to figure out what the genome is actually telling us.

This particular passage is on p. 253 of [1], but everything in Chapter 11 ("The Genomics of Race and Identity," pp. 247-273) is well worth the read.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...

[1] https://sackett.net/reich_who_we_are_and_how_we_got_here.pdf

naasking4• 3 months ago

The reason no one wants to talk is that these discussions are always co-opted by racists wanting to affirm their beliefs

So? People need to stop undermining science and openly sharing information because some people have bad ideas.

phainopepla2• 3 months ago

Is it unpopular on the right? Genuine question. I have only seen people associated with the left deny or downplay this.

burnto• 3 months ago

Evolution itself has some skeptics among the religious right.

jetrink• 3 months ago

The religious right, specifically. They would say that all people are descended quite recently from Noah and his family.

mohamedkoubaa• 3 months ago

"To supercharge the search, Reich, Ali Akbari, a computational geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues amassed the largest-ever collection of genomic data from ancient humans — from a total of 15,836 individuals from western Eurasia — including more than 10,000 newly sequenced genomes."

Without commenting on the content of this sentence or article, I will say that it is refreshing to see sentences like this in the wild after being regularly and constantly subjected to LLM slop.

sho_hn• 3 months ago

And yet you managed to center AI in the discussion.

nefarious_ends• 3 months ago

Seriously what’s the point of this comment

like_any_other8• 3 months ago

Is there any species, other than humans, that is found all across the globe (i.e. geographically separated), and has not differentiated into subspecies? Wolves, elephants, tigers, bears, and foxes have all been categorized into multiple subspecies each, distinct but able to interbreed.

meroes• 3 months ago

Dogs?

paulryanrogers• 3 months ago

Aren't dogs technically one species?

like_any_other8• 3 months ago

I don't think you could have chosen a worse example. Dogs are themselves a subspecies, and are split into many different breeds, of wildly different character and physiology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#Taxonomy

erichocean• 3 months ago

Humans have, obviously. Just interbreeding with ancient species was enough to do it, even without separate evolution.

greazy2• 3 months ago

The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct.

Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.

So your question is hard to answer.

nelox• 3 months ago

I’ve often dreamt of breeding with that mythical bird far, far away.

John7878781• 3 months ago

Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.

Really? I thought the requirements for species classification were: (1) must be able to reproduce and (2) offspring must be fertile.

Is it less objective than that?

stainablesteel• 3 months ago

my understanding of what classifies something as being a part of the same species is the fact that they can make children that are viable to have children themselves

horses and donkeys can breed to make mules, but the mules usually cant reproduce, this is the same with tigons and ligers but sometimes the females are viable

so if they can produce children that can produce children, they're the same species. where this line is blurred, so is the species line. geographical barriers have nothing to do with it.

matt-attack3• 3 months ago

Seems to me, that we divide other animals based on some of the most minor of phenotypic expressions. The slight coloration of a bird’s crest, shape of some lizard’s nose.

Yet with Homo sapiens we seem to be allergic to the idea that our drastic swings in physical attributes could possibly qualify as a different species (we obviously call them “races”). But they plainly diverged from each other due to geographic and reproductive isolation and adaptation to environments. Which is precisely what causes species to diverge into new ones.

Are we supposed to pretend that Africans DONT have black skin due an adaptation to their environment?

Do other animals get divided into races? I know dogs have “breeds” and we don’t consider those species. But I don’t hear about “races” in other animals.

pegasus6• 3 months ago

The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct

That makes it sound like the boundaries between species are arbitrary, but they are not. Sure, there are corner cases where things become debatable, but those are the rare exceptions, not the rule.

Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.

This is only the case if the separation has been there long enough for the two groups to develop distinct genetic markers or physical traits (like the beak shape or plumage mentioned in the original comment). The deeper reason they are classified as different species it that they are de-facto on different evolutionary trajectories. Which doesn't happen for human populations because historically, whatever obstacle divide us, we find a way to get around it.

rolph10• 3 months ago

"The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct."

speciation is reproductive incompatability.

geographic isolation is more like founder effect than speciation.

renewiltord• 3 months ago

They have to be. The snail darter is genetically identical to another animal and is a separate species. Most likely different humans are as well.

yabutlivnWoods2• 3 months ago

...distinct but able to interbreed

I mean people won't like the idea but that's not my point; what you describe variety in superficial traits while maintaining common traits

Applied to humans; skin color, eyes, dwarfism, hypertrichosis... can still interbreed

When it comes to categorization and taxonomy in leaky abstractions like languages the boundaries get a bit hand wavy and usually land on whatever fits the prevailing social desirability bias of the day

like_any_other8• 3 months ago

you describe variety in superficial traits

The same selection pressures that produced the variety of "superficial" traits also act on "non-superficial" traits - nature does not recognize this distinction.

api2• 3 months ago

Not many. Part of why we are like this is extreme mobility. Even before modern times we were always good at getting around and seem to have a desire to roam. Or at least enough of us do to mix up those gene pools.

like_any_other8• 3 months ago

If that were true before modern times, distinctions in appearance never could have developed.

Edit as reply because "pOsTiNg tOo FaSt":

Before modern times there was enough mixing to keep speciation from occurring but not enough to fully homogenize.

I see. Is there some quantitative genetic similarity measure, by which it was determined that it was worth categorizing foxes and wolves and bears into distinct subspecies/breeds/whatever taxonomical categories, but not humans? I assume that's what your "speciation did not occur [enough to merit taxonomical distinction]" is based on.

I.e. by what measure are a Pygmy and a Norwegian more similar than a Sumatran and a Siberian tiger [1]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812581

showerst• 3 months ago

How about Taraxacum officinale, the common dandelion?

It’s not quite all across the globe but pretty close, and is so adapted that it is not considered invasive any more in most places.

chrisweekly2• 3 months ago

Or, it's equally invasive everywhere.

SloppyDrive• 3 months ago

We dont categorize humans that way; not because humans are different but because of cultural norms.

The generous idea is that "subspecies" does not provide an anthropologist a useful lens to look at humanity, therefore we do not classify.

The alternative is that "subspecies" is too close to "race" for scientists, publishers, and funding bodies to touch, so its deliberately ignored.

verisimi• 3 months ago

I agree - cultural educating trumps scientific definitions.

scotty794• 3 months ago

I think cultural norms enforced over generations can lead to altered genetic variability.

IncreasePosts2• 3 months ago

Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies? I assumed that they would but "the science community" is too scared of the implications when idiots learn about it.

I look at a sumatran tiger and a Siberian tiger and I see a lot less variance than I see when I look at a pygmy, a Norwegian, an sentinel islander, and a han Chinese person

krapp2• 3 months ago

Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies?

No. Multiple human subspecies did once exist (examples being Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Erectus, and Homo Floresiensis) but only our species, Homo Sapiens, remains (with traces of Neanderthal DNA so there was some interbreeding.) However race is a cultural and social construct. Different human races are not different human subspecies. A Pygmy, a Norwegian, a Sentinel Islander, and a Han Chinese person are all the same species. The superficial variations in average height, skin color, etc. do not vary enough to constitute species differentiation - humans share 99.9% of their DNA, and the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations (in other words, within "races") and not between them.

glerk6• 3 months ago

You are free to create your own human classification scheme with k sub-species and try to popularize it, there's nobody stopping you and there isn't some authority out there called "the scientific community" that's going to send you cease and desist letters.

There's just not much to gain from the exercise and there are better things to spend your time on.

samsartor• 3 months ago

My understanding is that humans have very limited genetic diversity compared to most other animals, because of the population bottlenecks we've been through. And further, that diversity is mostly between individuals, not between groups. The distinction is easy to see in cats vs dogs: they both have similar overall genetic diversity but two Chihuahuas have virtually all the same genes (the small angry ones) while two tabby cats are more distinct. The two cats have different combinations of big/small nice/mean smart/dumb, but the genes average out to the same "typical" kind of cat in both cases.

Because humans get around so much, and because we think interesting-looking people are hot, the diversity is spread pretty broadly across the whole population. The average european person and the average east asian person are a little bit different genetically, but way less different than any two real europeans or two east-asians are to one another.

In short, the distributions of individuals overlap so much that the trendlines are pretty close to useless. And historically speaking, the people who tried to make a hard distinction out of those trendlines had awful motives.

ralfd2• 3 months ago

The average european person and the average east asian person are a little bit different genetically, but way less different than any two real europeans or two east-asians are to one another.

This is always touted as an “racism-is-not-only-immoral-it-is-scientifically-wrong” argument, but it is a fallacy.

Example: The average height (a trait with very high heritability) of Dutch men is 6’0 feet (183 cm) and the average height of Philippine men is 5’4 (163 cm). This means the height difference between these two groups is 20 cm. And it is obvious that the difference inside one group MUST be larger, for example there are 6’4 Dutch basketballers but also certainly Dutch 5’2 horse riding jockeys.

And depending on context both of these insights are useful. For example if you manage a basketball team it is much more effective to consider people as individuals, simplified you should hire very tall people (regardless if they are Dutch or Philippines) who can throw precisely a ball into a basket. But the diversity between population groups points to real information too! If you sell shoes to both countries you shouldn’t provide the same one-size-fits-all and assume to catch the same percentage of the market.

Plus the overlap in one metric is expanding into separable clusters the more dimensions are used:

https://i.sstatic.net/r6cWd.jpg

Take a Dutch and Philippine who have the exact same height: Their own respective brothers (heck, even twins) will not be the same perfect match, instead being a bit taller or smaller. But the more variables you consider (weight, muscle composition, leg length, head radius, hand size, form of earlobe .. etc) you will find that holistically seen two brothers truly are much more similar to each other than to a stranger.

cineticdaffodil• 3 months ago

I ve read this in a breathless ("help my ideology is under attack by reality") voice and it took a page away fro interesting discussions.

My pet theory is that the species inherited a loop deformation by default from our ancestors, defacto splitting the species planetwide into three subspecieses. One adapted to peace, one adapted to strife, one adapted to all out carnage. The obvious benefits of various adaptions of what we perceive as mental sickness, but what are actual adaptions to the loop communicating themselves. In this small moment where one (peacetime) insanity is uprooted to replace with a (wartime) insanity, might we be free in the anti gravity of the situation to discuss complex answers before the yikes of you silence us for the rest of the cycle? Thanks for the gag in all these years, that helped and did nothing.

pfdietz4• 3 months ago

However, with a population of 8 billion and a genome of 3.1 billion base pairs, the entire space of single nucleotide mutations is produced in just a few generations. So any such useful single nucleotide mutation is going to become available regardless of past bottlenecks.

pegasus6• 3 months ago

Good points. On the bottleneck hypothesis, a new study came out in 2024 arguing that the 900kya population loss was, if not a statistical artifact, more likely a genetic sweep or genome takeover via adaptive advantage. Whatever might be the truth in this case, it is true that human evolution, especially on the cultural plane, has gone through a bunch of major leaps which have had the effect of one small population eventually dominating the global genetic pool. Basically, a winner-takes-all dynamic. One example would be the Proto Indo-Europeans who have replaced male lineages throughout Europe and beyond. There are other such examples as well, like Neanderthal extinction.

abc123abc123• 3 months ago

So have humans. There are white, red, black, brown, yellow people, and they live in their own happy places on the planet, except for the fact that we now move them around by plane, boat and goat.

liveoneggs• 3 months ago

I think subspecies is: "doesn't generally interbreed" and "generally lives apart"

throwup2382• 3 months ago

Many researchers now refer to neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of modern humans.

It doesn’t get talked about much because it’s a sideshow without an easy resolution, but the question of modern and archaic human speciation is far from a settled problem and many of the species formerly considered to be separate are now often lumped in as subspecies.

summa_tech• 3 months ago

First, I like your username. Second, I think it may be a problem of ebb and flow of scientific discourse (shifts in how we apply the definition of species) more than reflecting underlying reality, which - as you said - has no easy resolution.

usrnm2• 3 months ago

now refer to neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis

What do you mean "now", they definitely were called that 30 years ago, when I first learned about them

NelsonMinar• 3 months ago

Every time I read about ancient DNA work, it's about Reich's research. Can anyone expert in the field shed light on that? He certainly seems to have a successful research group. And he's a good communicator, I got a lot out of his 2018 book. Who else should I be reading or reading about?

rolph10• 3 months ago

chromosomal fusion as the explanation for the "loss" of a chromosome pair, in humans.

https://www.johnhawks.net/p/when-did-human-chromosome-2-fuse

also , independent confirmation of observations, are gold for research, however needless repetition of effort is not.

thus when someone is prolific,or uncannily mad about a topic it tends to be dominated by that persons submissions, and often any other contributors are on that lead researchers team.

vivzkestrel• 3 months ago

funny how racists on twitter havent learnt that skin color is a function of natural selection, how do we get this message to them in a non offensive yet informational enough way to change their perceptions of colored people

Mikhail_K2• 3 months ago

From the article:

We finally observed signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today are associated with three correlated behavioural traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing 0.74±0.12), household income (increasing 1.12±0.12) and years of schooling (increasing 0.63±0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 449–1,056 loci for the signals to become non-significant(Extended Data Fig.10). The signals are largely driven by selection before approximately 2,000 years , after which tends towards zero.

That's the part that the speech police is afraid of.

zozbot2346• 3 months ago

That's the part that the speech police is afraid of.

Why? This article just focuses on changes in West Eurasia (probably because that's what they had data for), but the bulk of changes that resulted in behavioral modernity surely occurred in Africa - where the genetic variability for them to occur was and still is far greater than elsewhere - and plausibly similar changes occurred in other regions such as Central Eurasia, Southeast Eurasia etc. West Eurasia was a backwater.

ralfd2• 3 months ago

and plausibly similar changes occurred in other regions

Sure. But did ALL regions change? And did they change to the same destination? When the environments differed so much? It is easy to see how answers (or the questions themselves) could be politically contentious.

Mikhail_K2• 3 months ago

the bulk of changes that resulted in behavioral modernity
surely occurred in Africa

"Surely" without examining the actual evidence is almost surely wrong.

Henchman21• 3 months ago

So it was the Anunnaki after all, eh? :)

green_wheel2• 3 months ago

It seemed unlikely that ancestral populations had so many physiological differences, but not cognition. This seems like the last piece to compliment observed IQ differences between groups and levels of civilizational attainment.

tptacek4• 3 months ago

I don't understand how that argument could even work. Since the dawn of recorded history there has been (1) wildly varying levels of civilizational achievement depending on the era and (2) not nearly enough time for meaningful selection effects to be the cause of those variations.

We could get into the reasons why physiological differences ("height") behave differently in genetics than behavioral differences ("cognition"), but we don't even reach that --- first you have to explain to me how genetic advantages are the reason European-extracted people are so successful now, but weren't in play when we were getting our asses handed to us by the Abbasids and Tang Dynasty Chinese.

EnPissant2• 3 months ago

There are multiple factors at play:

- Among those who believe in intellectual differences among human groups, very few believe Europeans are the most intelligent group. The prevailing opinion you would find is that both Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians (your second example) are more intelligent on average.

- Northwest Europeans encountered intense selection over a Millennia starting around 300AD through a couple of mechanisms: The Church banning cousin marriage, and Biparte Manorialism. This resulted in the destruction of kinship networks, established the nuclear family, and selected for the high-trust peoples that enabled a kind of society you can still only find among those peoples.

pfannkuchen3• 3 months ago

not nearly enough time for meaningful selection effects to be the cause of those variations

It isn’t enough time to produce many novel feature changes, but it is enough time to act as a filter, no?

squibonpig• 3 months ago

I saw in the article that male pattern baldness became way less common over the studied period. Their definition of "way less" was 1-2%. Even if it wasn't the case that, lacking natural weapons, generalizable cognitive faculties are highly advantageous for our species regardless of factors like climate, there's not any real reason to figure cognitive changes would occur way faster than the 1-2% reduction in MPB. So is the argument that some large scale population has a mean IQ that differs by 1-2%? That's vastly less than the impact of poverty or childhood nutrition.

Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution

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