There’s a new paper on Tibetan adaptation to high altitudes, Evolutionary history of Tibetans inferred from whole-genome sequencing. The focus of the paper is on the fact that more genes than have previously been analyzed seem to be the targets of natural selection. And I buy most of their analyses (not sure about the estimate of Denisovan ancestry being 0.4%…these sorts of things can be tricky).
But they fancy it up with a ∂a∂i model of population history, as well as using MSMC to account for gene flow. I don’t understand why they didn’t use something simpler like TreeMix, which can also handle more complex models. I guess because they wanted to focus on only a few populations?
Years ago I asked the developer of MSMC, Stephan Schiffels, if assuming an admixed population is not admixed might cause weird inferences. Why yes, it would. For example, admixed populations might show higher effective population since they’re pooling the histories of two separate populations. As for ∂a∂i, the model above leaves me literally scratching my head.
…predicted that the initial divergence between Han and Tibetan was much earlier, at 54kya (bootstrap 95% C.I 44 kya to 58 kya). However, for the first 45ky, the two populations maintained substantial gene flow (6.8×10-4 and 9.0×10-4 per generation per chromosome). After 9.4 kya (bootstrap 95% C.I 8.6 kya to 11.2 kya), the gene flow rate dramatically dropped (1.3×10-11 and 4×10-7 per generation per chromosome), which is consistent with the estimate from MSMC.
Mystifying. The separation between Chinese and Tibetans is pretty much immediately after modern humans arrive in East Asia. Then there’s a lot of reciprocal gene flow…which ends during the Holocene.
We’re being told here that there are two populations which persisted in some form for ~45,000 years. Is this believable? That these two populations maintained some sort of continuity, and, remained in close proximity to engage in gene flow. And then ~10,000 years ago the ancestors of the Tibetans separated from the ancestors of the modern Han Chinese.
The latter scenario I can imagine. It’s this ~45,000 year dance I’m confused by. If there is substantial gene flow between the two groups why did they keep enough distinctive drift to be separate populations?
With what we know about ancient DNA from Europe if we posited such a model for that continent we’d be way off. There’s been too many population turnovers. Is East Asia different? I’m moderately skeptical of that. I think perhaps researchers should be very aware of the limitations of ∂a∂i when it comes to fine-grained population genomic analyses.
Note: This is a cool paper, and this small section is not entirely relevant. Which is why I’m confused about it since it seems the weakest part of the analysis in terms of originality, and the least believable.