Humans may be just as vulnerable to environmental change as other animals, according to our new research analysing genetic data from more than a thousand people who lived across Europe and Asia over the past 45,000 years.
We found traces of more than 50 “hard sweeps” in which a rare genetic variant rapidly swept through a population – most likely after a change in conditions in which those lacking the variant died out. The most striking sweep occurred among early Anatolian farming people, in a genetic region associated with the immune system called MHC-III.
