Figure 5 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Content may be subject to copyright.
Environmental reconstruction for the Arabian Standstill. AMH groups on the Arabian Peninsula experienced severe cold conditions with the onset of Marine Isotope Stage 4 (~79ka), potentially further exacerbated by the Toba Eruption (~74ka). (A) NGRIP δ 18 O record reported on the GICC05 timescale Before Present (CE 1950) 49 ; Greenland Stadial 13 (GS-13) and Heinrich 5 (H5), and Mt. Toba eruption 36 are shown. (B) Mean annual sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from the Gulf of Aden marine core MD90-963 35 . Late Holocene (last 2.5ka) temperature range shown for comparison. (C) Hydroclimate changes in northeast Africa reconstructed from stable hydrogen isotopic composition of leaf waxes corrected for ice volume contributions from MD90-963 35 . Horizontal bars define age ranges for key AMH events across the Arabian Peninsula and Eurasia, including potential for earlier Neandertal gene flow (dashed line) during Arabian Standstill 26,44 .
Source publication
The evolutionarily recent dispersal of Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) out of Africa and across Eurasia provides an opportunity to study rapid genetic adaptation to multiple new environments. Genomic analyses of modern human populations have detected limited signals of strong selection such as hard sweeps, but genetic admixture between populations...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... is notable that 14 of the hard sweeps (~25%) overlap with known regions of introgressed archaic hominin DNA that have previously been identified as putative targets of selection (Extended Data Figs. 5, 6), raising the possibility that some of the 56 sweeps may have been driven by adaptively-introgressed (AI) hominin variants. This is consistent with suggestions that Neandertal genetic adaptation to colder northern environments may have provided beneficial alleles to the early Eurasian populations, and known AI variants associated with immune 25 , dietary, and climate adaptation 26 (Supplementary Information 3). ...
