ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
The great human expansion.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 159 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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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
159 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 409 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pan-UK Biobank genome-wide association analyses enhance discovery and resolution of ancestry-enriched effects.Nature genetics · 2025Pooled it
- Effects of Linguistic Distance on Second Language Brain Activations in Bilinguals: An Exploratory Coordinate-Based Meta-Analysis.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Precision oncology without borders: the role of biobanking in integrating Africa's genetic diversity into global genomic research.NPJ precision oncology · 2026Review
- A Male Expressed Copulatory Plug Increases Female Fertility inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The Vertebrate Genomes Project Phase I: A global reference genome resource.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Allele frequency patterns of 78,122,254 SNPs illuminate diverse possible evolutionary trajectories of human populations.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
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- Neandertal Cold Adaptation: Technological, Anatomical, and Physiological Responses to Cold Stress in One of Our Closest Fossil Relatives.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene-Culture Coevolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Molecular characterization of the archaic HLA-B∗73:01 allele reveals presentation of a unique peptidome and skewed engagement by KIR2DL2.The Journal of biological chemistry · 2025Article
- Onset of extensive human fire use 50,000 y ago.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Assessing simulation-based supervised machine learning for demographic parameter inference from genomic data.Heredity · 2025Article
- Identifying Rare Germline Variants Associated with Metastatic Prostate Cancer Through an Extreme Phenotype Study.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Clinical Actionability of the NUDT15 *4 (p.R139H) Allele and Its Association With Hispanic Ethnicity.Clinical pharmacology and therapeutics · 2025Article
- Patterns of population structure and genetic variation within the Saudi Arabian population.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Europeans and Americans of European origin show differences between their biological pathways related to the major histocompatibility complex.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Range expansions across landscapes with quenched noise.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Polygenic Indices (a.k.a. Polygenic Scores) in Social Science: A Guide for Interpretation and Evaluation.Sociological methodology · 2024Article
- Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.Nature communications · 2024Article
99 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Genetic and paleoanthropological evidence is in accord that today's human population is the result of a great demic (demographic and geographic) expansion that began approximately 45,000 to 60,000 y ago in Africa and rapidly resulted in human occupation of almost all of the Earth's habitable regions. Genomic data from contemporary humans suggest that this expansion was accompanied by a continuous loss of genetic diversity, a result of what is called the "serial founder effect." In addition to genomic data, the serial founder effect model is now supported by the genetics of human parasites, morphology, and linguistics. This particular population history gave rise to the two defining features of genetic variation in humans: genomes from the substructured populations of Africa retain an exceptional number of unique variants, and there is a dramatic reduction in genetic diversity within populations living outside of Africa. These two patterns are relevant for medical genetic studies mapping genotypes to phenotypes and for inferring the power of natural selection in human history. It should be appreciated that the initial expansion and subsequent serial founder effect were determined by demographic and sociocultural factors associated with hunter-gatherer populations. How do we reconcile this major demic expansion with the population stability that followed for thousands years until the inventions of agriculture? We review advances in understanding the genetic diversity within Africa and the great human expansion out of Africa and offer hypotheses that can help to establish a more synthetic view of modern human evolution.
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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.