How long have adult humans been consuming milk? Gerbault, Pascale; Roffet‐Salque, Mélanie; Evershed, Richard P. ...
IUBMB life,
December 2013, 2013-Dec, 20131201, Letnik:
65, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Many defining human characteristics including theory of mind, culture and language relate to our sociality, and facilitate the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships. Therefore, ...deciphering the context in which our sociality evolved is invaluable in understanding what makes us unique as a species. Much work has emphasised group-level competition, such as warfare, in moulding human cooperation and sociality. However, competition and cooperation also occur within groups; and inter-individual differences in sociality have reported fitness implications in numerous non-human taxa. Here we investigate whether differential access to cooperation (relational wealth) is likely to lead to variation in fitness at the individual level among BaYaka hunter-gatherers. Using economic gift games we find that relational wealth: a) displays individual-level variation; b) provides advantages in buffering food risk, and is positively associated with body mass index (BMI) and female fertility; c) is partially heritable. These results highlight that individual-level processes may have been fundamental in the extension of human cooperation beyond small units of related individuals, and in shaping our sociality. Additionally, the findings offer insight in to trends related to human sociality found from research in other fields such as psychology and epidemiology.
Recent ancient DNA studies on European Neolithic human populations have provided persuasive evidence of a major migration of farmers originating from the Aegean, accompanied by sporadic ...hunter-gatherer admixture into early Neolithic populations, but increasing toward the Late Neolithic. In this context, ancient mitochondrial DNA data collected from the Neolithic necropolis of Gurgy (Paris Basin, France), the largest mitochondrial DNA sample obtained from a single archeological site for the Early/Middle Neolithic period, indicate little differentiation from farmers associated to both the Danubian and Mediterranean Neolithic migration routes, as well as from Western European hunter-gatherers. To test whether this pattern of differentiation could arise in a single unstructured population by genetic drift alone, we used serial coalescent simulations. We explore female effective population size parameter combinations at the time of the colonization of Europe 45000 years ago and the most recent of the Neolithic samples analyzed in this study 5900 years ago, and identify conditions under which population panmixia between hunter-gatherers/Early-Middle Neolithic farmers and Gurgy cannot be rejected. In relation to other studies on the current debate of the origins of Europeans, these results suggest increasing hunter-gatherer admixture into farmers' group migrating farther west in Europe.
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