ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Adaptive, convergent origins of the pygmy phenotype in African rainforest hunter-gatherers.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers.
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50 citing papers in PubMed.
- Insights into human adaptation from ancient DNA.Nature genetics · 2026Review
- A causal model of human growth and its estimation using temporally sparse data.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Natural selection and adaptive traits in the Maniq, a nomadic hunter-gatherer society from Mainland Southeast Asia.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Adipose development is consistent across hunter-gatherers and diverges from western references.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Genomic imputation of ancient Asian populations contrasts local adaptation in pre- and post-agricultural Japan.iScience · 2024Article
- Sex-biased gene regulation varies across human populations as a result of adaptive evolution.American journal of biological anthropology · 2024Article
- Whole genomes from Angola and Mozambique inform about the origins and dispersals of major African migrations.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Human subsistence and signatures of selection on chemosensory genes.Communications biology · 2023Article
- A genetic and linguistic analysis of the admixture histories of the islands of Cabo Verde.eLife · 2023Article
- The Legacy of Infectious Disease Exposure on the Genomic Diversity of Indigenous Southern Mexicans.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Article
- Impact of natural selection on global patterns of genetic variation and association with clinical phenotypes at genes involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Population interconnectivity over the past 120,000 years explains distribution and diversity of Central African hunter-gatherers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Hunter-gatherer genomes reveal diverse demographic trajectories during the rise of farming in Eastern Africa.Current biology : CB · 2022Article
- The distinct morphological phenotypes of Southeast Asian aborigines are shaped by novel mechanisms for adaptation to tropical rainforests.National science review · 2022Article
- Reproductive seasonality in the Baka Pygmies, environmental factors and climatic changes.PloS one · 2022Article
- Article
- Impact of natural selection on global patterns of genetic variation, and association with clinical phenotypes, at genes involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2021Article
- Impact of natural selection on global patterns of genetic variation, and association with clinical phenotypes, at genes involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection.Research square · 2021Article
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14 authors.
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Abstract
The evolutionary history of the human pygmy phenotype (small body size), a characteristic of African and Southeast Asian rainforest hunter-gatherers, is largely unknown. Here we use a genome-wide admixture mapping analysis to identify 16 genomic regions that are significantly associated with the pygmy phenotype in the Batwa, a rainforest hunter-gatherer population from Uganda (east central Africa). The identified genomic regions have multiple attributes that provide supporting evidence of genuine association with the pygmy phenotype, including enrichments for SNPs previously associated with stature variation in Europeans and for genes with growth hormone receptor and regulation functions. To test adaptive evolutionary hypotheses, we computed the haplotype-based integrated haplotype score (iHS) statistic and the level of population differentiation (FST) between the Batwa and their agricultural neighbors, the Bakiga, for each genomic SNP. Both |iHS| and FST values were significantly higher for SNPs within the Batwa pygmy phenotype-associated regions than the remainder of the genome, a signature of polygenic adaptation. In contrast, when we expanded our analysis to include Baka rainforest hunter-gatherers from Cameroon and Gabon (west central Africa) and Nzebi and Nzime neighboring agriculturalists, we did not observe elevated |iHS| or FST values in these genomic regions. Together, these results suggest adaptive and at least partially convergent origins of the pygmy phenotype even within Africa, supporting the hypothesis that small body size confers a selective advantage for tropical rainforest hunter-gatherers but raising questions about the antiquity of this behavior.
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