Introgression from Gorilla caused the Human-Chimpanzee split
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Anthropology, Evolutionary Studies, Genomics
- Keywords
- evolution, human, chimpanzee, gorilla, introgression
- Copyright
- © 2018 Nygren
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Introgression from Gorilla caused the Human-Chimpanzee split. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27134v5 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27134v5
Abstract
ABSTRACT: The Gorilla Genome Project (Scally, 2012) showed that 30% of the gorilla genome introgressed into the ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, and that the two species diverged through lineage sorting with 15% ending up in Pan and another 15% in Homo. That introgression is the Pan-Homo split, hybridization, which led to speciation as the new hybrid lineages became reproductively isolated from one another.
The NUMT on chromosome 5 (“ps5”) (Popadin, 2017) fits perfectly with the introgression speciation model, it was formed from mtDNA that had diverged from the common ancestor of Pan-Homo for 1.8 Myr at the time of insertion into the nuclear genome, and originated in the Gorilla lineage. The ps5 pseudogene was transferred to Pan and Homo during the introgression event that led to the Pan-Homo split, 6 million years ago.
Author Comment
To make the manuscript more self-contained, I added a section on ps5. It also includes a revised estimate of the insertion of the ps5 NUMT, the thesis itself is sufficient without that, but it is a nice addition.