Back

Deep coalescent history of the hominin lineage

Cousins, T.; Schweiger, R.; Durbin, R.

2024-10-19 genetics
10.1101/2024.10.17.618932 bioRxiv
Show abstract

1Coalescent-based methods are widely used to infer population size histories, but existing analyses have limited resolution for deep time scales (> 2 million years ago). Here we extend the scope of such inference by re-analysing an ancient peak seen in human and chimpanzee effective population size around 5-7 million years ago, showing that coalescent-based inference can be extended much further into the past than previously thought. This peak is consistently observed across human and chimpanzee populations, but not in gorillas or orangutans. We show that it is unlikely to be an artefact of model violations, and discuss its potential implications for understanding hominin evolutionary history, in particular the human-chimpanzee speciation.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.