ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2010
Mobile elements reveal small population size in the ancient ancestors of Homo sapiens.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- Look past the cooperative eye hypothesis: reconsidering the evolution of human eye appearance.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Biases in ARG-Based Inference of Historical Population Size in Populations Experiencing Selection.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Genetic decline and recovery of a demographically rebuilt fishery species.Molecular ecology · 2022Article
- The evolution of language by sexual selection.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Adaptive Preferential Sampling in Phylodynamics With an Application to SARS-CoV-2.Journal of computational and graphical statistics : a joint publication of American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Interface Foundation of North America · 2022Article
- Middle Pleistocene fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Practical Speedup of Bayesian Inference of Species Phylogenies by Restricting the Space of Gene Trees.Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Phylogenetic Conflict in Bears Identified by Automated Discovery of Transposable Element Insertions in Low-Coverage Genomes.Genome biology and evolution · 2017Article
- Adult sex ratios and partner scarcity among hunter-gatherers: implications for dispersal patterns and the evolution of human sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Cross-cousin marriage among the Yanomamö shows evidence of parent-offspring conflict and mate competition between brothers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Article
- A renewal theory approach to IBD sharing.Theoretical population biology · 2014Article
- Rates and patterns of great ape retrotransposition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2013Article
- Mobile DNA distributions refine the phylogeny of "matsutake" mushrooms, Tricholoma sect. Caligata.Mycorrhiza · 2013Article
- Mobile element biology: new possibilities with high-throughput sequencing.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2013Review
- Gene genealogies within a fixed pedigree, and the robustness of Kingman's coalescent.Genetics · 2012Article
- An autosomal analysis gives no genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees.Molecular biology and evolution · 2012Article
- Darwin in mind: new opportunities for evolutionary psychology.PLoS biology · 2011Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The genealogies of different genetic loci vary in depth. The deeper the genealogy, the greater the chance that it will include a rare event, such as the insertion of a mobile element. Therefore, the genealogy of a region that contains a mobile element is on average older than that of the rest of the genome. In a simple demographic model, the expected time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) is doubled if a rare insertion is present. We test this expectation by examining single nucleotide polymorphisms around polymorphic Alu insertions from two completely sequenced human genomes. The estimated TMRCA for regions containing a polymorphic insertion is two times larger than the genomic average (P < <10(-30)), as predicted. Because genealogies that contain polymorphic mobile elements are old, they are shaped largely by the forces of ancient population history and are insensitive to recent demographic events, such as bottlenecks and expansions. Remarkably, the information in just two human DNA sequences provides substantial information about ancient human population size. By comparing the likelihood of various demographic models, we estimate that the effective population size of human ancestors living before 1.2 million years ago was 18,500, and we can reject all models where the ancient effective population size was larger than 26,000. This result implies an unusually small population for a species spread across the entire Old World, particularly in light of the effective population sizes of chimpanzees (21,000) and gorillas (25,000), which each inhabit only one part of a single continent.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.