Science
Ancient DNA Reveals Natural Selection Accelerated During Bronze Age Europe
Dwarkesh Patel Podcast
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
"We were able to show that this is explained by at least two factors. So one of them is that we actually, in this part of the world, Europe and the Middle East, are in a period of accelerated natural selection. And one way to see this is to look at this enrichment pattern that we're observing where immune traits are unusually associated with these selection signals. And we could compare the last 5,000 years of our, of our time period, what's called the Bronze Age and further onward, uh, to the previous 5,000 years. And what we see is that this intensification of selection around immune traits, similarly the intensification around metabolic traits, has accelerated over this time period."
Harvard geneticist David Reich presented evidence from 16,000 ancient genomes showing natural selection intensified dramatically during the Bronze Age (5,000-2,000 years ago) rather than earlier agricultural transitions. This challenges the prevailing view that selection has been quiescent over recent human history. The findings suggest Bronze Age population density and disease exposure created unprecedented evolutionary pressure.
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Dwarkesh Patel Podcast