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Edited by Ofer Bar-Yosef, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved February 18, 2011 (received for review January 8, 2010)
Abstract
The invention of agriculture is widely assumed to have driven recent human population growth. However, direct genetic evidence for population growth after independent agricultural origins has been elusive. We estimated population sizes through time from a set of globally distributed whole mitochondrial genomes, after separating lineages associated with agricultural populations from those associated with hunter-gatherers. The coalescent-based analysis revealed strong evidence for distinct demographic expansions in Europe, southeastern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa within the past 10,000 y. Estimates of the timing of population growth based on genetic data correspond neatly to dates for the initial origins of agriculture derived from archaeological evidence. Comparisons of rates of population growth through time reveal that the invention of agriculture facilitated a fivefold increase in population growth relative to more ancient expansions of hunter-gatherers.
Footnotes
↵1C.R.G. and B.M.H. contributed equally to this work.
- ↵2To whom correspondence should be addressed: E-mail: chris.gignoux{at}ucsf.edu.
↵3Present address: Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.
Author contributions: C.R.G. and B.M.H. designed research; C.R.G. and B.M.H. performed research; C.R.G. and B.M.H. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; C.R.G., B.M.H., and J.L.M. analyzed data; and C.R.G., B.M.H., and J.L.M. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The sequences reported in this paper are publicly available in the GenBank database (accession nos. available in SI Materials and Methods).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.0914274108/-/DCSupplemental.
Rapid, global demographic expansions after the origins of agriculture
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