Natural selection continued to sculpt humanity’s genetic identity after the Stone Age gave way to farming around 11,000 years ago, according to a new DNA analysis.
A team led by Jonathan K. Pritchard of the University of Chicago identified survival-enhancing gene variants that began spreading through human populations between roughly 10,800 and 6,600 years ago.
The scientists scanned the genomes of 89 East Asians, 60 Europeans, and 60 Africans to find DNA stretches recently affected by natural selection.
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