Archaeologists Say Early Humans Avoided Inbreeding

LONDON – A group of scientists reanalyzed DNA primordial man who lived 45,000 years ago. The results are surprising that early humans rarely chose their cousins ​​or blood relatives as partners.

As reported by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Thursday (16/9/2021), in a global data set of 1,785 individuals, only 54, which is about three percent, show typical signs of their parents as cousins.

All 54 are not clustered in space or time, indicating that cousin marriage is a sporadic event in ancient population which are studied. In particular, even in the hunter-gatherer category that lived more than 10,000 years ago, marriage between cousins ​​was an exception.

Researchers developed a new computational tool to screen ancient DNA on parental linkage. This tool detects long strands of identical DNA in two DNA copies, one inherited from the mother and one from the father.

The closer the parents are related, the longer and more identical the segments are.

“By applying this new technique, we were able to screen more than ten times more ancient genomes than before,” said Harald Ringbauer of MPI-EVA, the study’s lead investigator.

In addition to identifying the marriages of close relatives, the new method also allows researchers to study background linkages. The association stems from usually many unknown distant relationships in small populations.

As a primary outcome, the researchers found a substantial demographic impact of agricultural innovations. This is always followed by a marked decrease in the parental background relationship, indicating an increase in population size.

By analyzing the time transects of more than a dozen geographic regions around the world, the researchers expands on previous evidence that population size increases in communities that practice agriculture compared to hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies.

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