New Study Identifies 3,800 Human Genome Locations Under Recent Selection Pressure

What was said

"By another criteria of more than 50% confident that they're real, we think that about 3,800 positions are all pushing in the same direction. So this is like a crazy number of results, given that in our work previously, in other people's work, there were at most a couple of dozen discoveries coming from a single scan."

Reich's lab analyzed 10 million genetic positions across 16,000 ancient individuals and found approximately 3,800 locations in the human genome showing evidence of directional selection over the last 18,000 years—more than 150 times previous estimates. The discovery fundamentally revises understanding of human evolutionary dynamics, showing selection has been far more active than previously believed despite representing only 2% of frequency changes.