The Combined Landscape of Denisovan and Neanderthal Ancestry in Present-Day Humans:

Some present-day humans derive up to ∼5% …of their ancestry from archaic Denisovans, an even larger proportion than the ∼2% from Neanderthals…We developed methods that can disambiguate the locations of segments of Denisovan and Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans and applied them to 257 high-coverage genomes from 120 diverse populations, among which were 20 individual Oceanians with high Denisovan ancestry…In Oceanians, the average size of Denisovan fragments is larger than Neanderthal fragments, implying a more recent average date of Denisovan admixture in the history of these populations (p = 0.00004). We document more Denisovan ancestry in South Asia than is expected based on existing models of history, reflecting a previously undocumented mixture related to archaic humans (p = 0.0013). Denisovan ancestry, just like Neanderthal ancestry, has been deleterious on a modern human genetic background, as reflected by its depletion near genes. Finally, the reduction of both archaic ancestries is especially pronounced on chromosome X and near genes more highly expressed in testes than other tissues (p = 1.2 × 10−7 to 3.2 × 10−7 for Denisovan and 2.2 × 10−3 to 2.9 × 10−3 for Neanderthal ancestry even after controlling for differences in level of selective constraint across gene classes). This suggests that reduced male fertility may be a general feature of mixtures of human populations diverged by >500,000 years.

Take a look at the supplements for the functional stuff. I am not going to address that. Much of those results have been circulation or in other papers over the years. Rather, I want to highlight the variation in patterns of Denisovan admixture in non-Oceanian groups. Here is an important section:

Taken together, the evidence of Denisovan admixture in modern humans could in theory be explained by a single Denisovan introgression into modern humans, followed by dilution to different extents in Oceanians, South Asians, and East Asians by people with less Denisovan ancestry. If dilution does not explain these patterns, however, a minimum of three distinct Denisovan introgressions into the ancestors of modern humans must have occurred.

You see it on the figure above. The South Asian groups consistently jump well above the trend line for inferred Denisovan as a function of shared ancestry with Australians non-West Eurasian ancestry. Also, if you look at the admixture patterns for Denisovan ancestry in South Asia you see they follow the ANI-ASI cline. That is, it seems to come into the South Asian populations through the “Ancestral South Indians.” Interestingly, the Onge sample of Andaman Islanders has less Denisovan than low caste South Asian groups, reminding us that though the Onge and their kin are the closest modern populations to the ASI, they are not descended from the ASI. The highest fraction of inferred Denisovan is in the Sherpa people of Nepal.

The figure to the right is from Admixture facilitates genetic adaptations to high altitude in Tibet, and the authors find that the Sherpa are at one extreme in an ancestry cline in comparison to other East Asians. The figure is hard to make out, so I will tell you that many of the Sherpa are fixed for the red component, while other Tibetans are in positions in the middle, and most East Asians have low fractions of the red, with the Dai having none. The Gujarati sample form the HapMap have low fractions of both East Asian components. This is almost certainly an artifact of the shared ancestry of all eastern Eurasians (and perhaps Oceanians), of which the ASI were one descendant group. The proportion of Denisovan in low caste South Asians indicates that the fraction in ASI was about at the same level as the Sherpa. I suspect that ASI and the Tibetan groups got their Denisovan via different paths, but it doesn’t seem like we know yet.

Overall I do marvel at what ancient DNA can tell us. Without it we wouldn’t be talking about any of these admixture events; they’d be signals too weak to have left an obvious mark in the genome.

By now you may have heard that mitochondrial DNA, passed down the female lineage, has been extracted from a ~400,000 year old human fossil from Spain. If you haven’t heard, I recommend Ewen Callaway and Carl Zimmer’s takes. The paper is at Nature, so gated, A mitochondrial genome sequence of a hominin from Sima de los Huesos. The big surprise is that these proto-Neandertals carry a mtDNA lineage which is closer to that of the Siberian Denisovans than that of later Neandertals. That’s the specific finding, and if you read the reaction it is rather clear that this is confusing researchers who work in this area. But take a step back, imagine what a world without ancient DNA would be like. Yes, the broad conjectures would be supported (e.g., Out of Africa), but many specific details would be off. So praise the data! Sometimes complexity is closer to the truth, and this is one of those cases. These are good problems to have.

In the primary figure of the paper you can see that these humans are closest on the mtDNA phylogenetic tree to the Denisovans. But, it is important to note that they’re also hundreds of thousands of years older than any other ancient human DNA. Because mtDNA is only passed down through females it tends to be more strongly subject to genetic drift, which might turn over lineages rather rapidly. It is not that unlikely that over hundreds of thousands of years some populations would lose ancestral mtDNA lines. This is what occurred with “mitochondrial Eve.” She wasn’t the only female alive in Africa at the time, but all the other direct maternal lineages went extinct. There are ‘ghost branches’ within the tree which terminated. All you see are the lines of descent back up to the single last common ancestor on the mitochondrial lineage. This doesn’t mean that the ancestry of these women who did not contribute mtDNA disappeared. It is just that their lines of descent may have passed through sons at a given point (my maternal grandmother’s specific mtDNA almost went extinct, she had six son and one daughter). And of course there are other explanations for this pattern, highlighted in the articles linked. Gene flow between lineages, or from a different lineage altogether. We have to remember that the mtDNA of the Denisovan human was more diverged from Neandertals than the whole genome was later found to be, perhaps indicating complex admixture scenarios. The mtDNA tree falsifies, but I do not think it allows us to draw any robust conclusions.

These results are going to get updated in the next year or so with autosomal DNA from the rest of the genome. Even if they can’t get the whole genome sequenced, even a few tens of thousands of markers should be sufficient to clarify issues. Though all of these findings need to be interpreted cautiously in light of the fact that this is a very old lineage, perhaps closer to the time period of diversification for many Eurasian ‘archaic’ H. sapiens than we may have thought.

Citation:
Q Fu, M Meyer, XGao, U Stenzel, H A. Burbano, J Kelso, S Pääbo
DNA analysis of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, China
PNAS 2013 ; published ahead of print January 22, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1221359110

The above is a graph which illustrates phylogenetic relationships using the TreeMix package. It is from the paper I alluded to yesterday. The paper, DNA analysis of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, China, is open access, so everyone should be able to read it. Its mtDNA analysis shows that the Tianyuan sample, from the region of Beijing and dating to ~40,000 years B.P., is a basal clade in haplogroup B, which is common in eastern Eurasia and the New World. This is a satisfying result insofar as the understanding in relation to this haplogroup is that it diversified ~50,000 years B.P. There is very strong support in these data for the proposition that Tianyuan forms a distinct clade with the populations you see above, as opposed to western Eurasians. This is important because this sample seems to date with relatively good precision to 40,000 years B.P., supporting the archaeological contention that modern humans were already diversifying into western and eastern lineages 40-50,000 years ago. In contrast statistical genomic inferences tend toward a lower date for divergence. We can be moderately confident at this point that some aspect of the west-east divergence predates subsequent later gene flow events, which might lead to confusing archaeology-blind methods.

By now you have probably seen the new Denisovan paper in the media. John Hawks has an excellent overview, as you’d expect. The only thing I will add is to reiterate that I think population movements in near and far prehistory significantly obscure our comprehension of the patterns of past genetic variation. One reason that the Denisova hominin presents conundrums (e.g., how did Australians and Melanesians admix with a population whose only remains are found in Siberia) is that we’re viewing it through the lens of the present. What other lens can we view it through? We’re not time travelers. But we should be perhaps more conscious of the filter which that imposes upon our perception and model of the world. This is probably a time when it is best to have only a modest confidence in any given proposition about the prehistoric past.

Also, I don’t know why, but I much like this tree:

In The New York Times, DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All:

The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins.

The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.

Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.

Their DNA lives on in us even though they are extinct. “In a sense, we are a hybrid species,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who is the research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said in an interview.

First, for reasons of novelty we are emphasizing the exotic tendrils of the human family tree. Even Chris Stringer, the modern paleontological father of “Out of Africa,” is claiming we’re hybrids! But let’s not forget that non-Africans are the product of a very rapid radiation out of the margins of the Afrotropic ecozone within the last ~50-100,000 years. I am not entirely sure that this is as true of Africans (recall how extremely basal Bushmen are to the rest of humanity; they seem to have diverge well before the “Out of Africa” pulse).

The Pith: More caveman admixture in modern humans, especially Melanesians!

A new paper on archaic adaptive introgression among Melanesians has been discussed elsewhere. But I think it is worth reviewing, because it’s probably a foretaste of what’s to come. Researchers are combing through the human genome, as more and more genomes come on line, in the search of weird and unexpected variation. The paper is in Molecular Biology and Evolution, and is titled Global genetic variation at OAS1 provides evidence of archaic admixture in Melanesian populations (why is it that this journal doesn’t even allow supplemental information to be free to the public?). The two primary figures from this paper do a good job of illustrating the main result.

The first figure is a phylogenetic tree of haplotypes at the OAS1 locus, with pie charts showing the proportion of individuals from a set of populations which contribute to the total number for that haplotye. So you see above that the “deep lineage” is relatively distant from a cluster of other haplotypes (as measured by mutational differences which are proportional to depth of common ancestry), and, that deep linage is exclusively found in Papuans in this set. The second figure shows the frequency of the deep lineage haplotype over a larger set of populations. I cut off the section which shows that Africans are at zero percent. The haplotype is found almost exclusively in Melanesian populations, except for the fact out of over 200 South Asians they sampled, 3 of them carried it (2 Pakistanis, 1 Sri Lankan). There is aspect though not evident in the figures above, but which is clear in the abstract that you need to know:

A new paper in PNAS, Archaic human ancestry in East Asia: “These results suggest admixture between Denisovans or a Denisova-related population and the ancestors of East Asians, and that the history of anatomically modern and archaic humans might be more complex than previously proposed.” It’s open access, so do go read it. John Hawks has a long rumination. My main thought is that I’m starting to think that people are squeezing this orange too much. I wouldn’t be surprised if the broad conclusions here are correct, and in fact I’d lean in that direction. But is the discovery of relatively trace ancestry all that earthshaking? The reality is that a little over a year ago the interpretative framework of science in this area shifted. That was because of the concreteness of ancient DNA, which allowed for a direct comparison, instead of statistical sifting through the genomes of extant populations. Remember, before 2010 there were plenty of papers utilizing subtle statistics and computational muscle which “proved” and “confirmed” an Out-of-Africa with replacement model. The power and precision of these techniques tended to overshadow the reality of a margin of error, and uncertainty in their conclusions. We need to be cautious when the machinery turns itself in the opposite direction, gleaning glimpses of what we now know is likely there….

The class human or H. sapiens refers to a set of individuals. On the grand scale it’s really not all that clear and distinct. When do “archaic” humans become “modern” humans? Taking into account human variation, what is a “human universal”? A set of organisms are given a name which denotes the reality that they may share common ancestry, and interact behaviorally, and are potential mates. But many of these phenomenon are fuzzy on the margins. Many of the same issues which emerge in the “species concept” debates are rather general up and down the scales of natural complexity. A similar problem crops up when we conflate the history of genes with the history of populations. Such a conflation has value and utility to a first approximation. The story of mitochondrial Eve was actually the history of one particular locus, the mitochondrial genome. But it did tell us quite a bit about the history of the human species, even if in hindsight it looks as if some scientists overinterpreted those findings. One of the major issues I’ve noticed over the past year, with the heightened likelihood of archaic admixture in the modern human genome, is that people regularly get confused by the difference between total genome ancestry, and the evolutionary history of one particular gene.