Origins and Adaptation in Humans A Case Study of Taste and Lifestyle

Abstract: In this thesis, I use population genetics and statistical approaches to investigate early human demography, infer local adaptation in diverse sets of populations, and study the genetic basis for taste perception.In the first paper, I examine the genomic evidence for a severe bottleneck, which has been suggested based on paleontological and climate studies to coincide with the emergence of anatomically modern humans. Using a Bayesian approach, I evaluate the genetic evidence of a bottleneck between 190,000 and 130,000 years ago and find that the data is in favor of a model without bottleneck at this time point.I further develop a method to detect local adaptation based on frequencies of private haplotypes. I first show, using simulated data, that this method can detect local adaption. Applied to large-scale human genotype data, this method detects known signals of positive selection in human data such as the positive selection around the lactase gene in Europeans and East Africans. Also, this method permits to improve knowledge on potential adaptation events in humans as it finds several regions potentially selected that were not previously described. I further investigate patterns of adaptation in whole genome data based on a diverse set of African populations. The results from the regions potentially selected show that diet and pathogens are the common driving forces of adaptation in all studied populations.There is evidence that taste perception have evolved in concert with diet, environment, and the organismal needs in humans. For this reason, I study taste perception in populations differing on lifestyle (hunter-gatherers, farmers and nomad herders). I present taste perception phenotypes for all tastes (sweet, bitter, sour, salty and umami) and relate them to high density genotype data. I show that taste and taste-involved genes have evolved with lifestyle. By performing an association study, I also show that variation in taste perception involves more genes than only the taste receptors genes.In this thesis, by analyzing human genetic data with a population genetics approaches, I covered several topics of human ancient demography and adaptation and show the utility of using large-scale genetic data to better understand human history.