The evolutionary history of Neanderthal and Denisovan Y chromosomes

Martin Petr , Mateja Hajdinjak , Qiaomei Fu , Elena Essel , Hélène Rougier , Isabelle Crevecoeur (1) , Patrick Semal , V Liubov , Vladimir B Doronichev , Carles Lalueza-Fox , Marco de La Rasilla , Antonio Rosas , Michael V Shunkov , Maxim B Kozlikin , Anatoli P Derevianko , Benjamin Vernot , Matthias Meyer , Janet Kelso

1 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Ancient DNA has allowed the study of human history in previously unseen detail. However, we lack comprehensive studies of the Y chromosomes of Denisovans and Neanderthals. Sequencing Y chromosomes from two Denisovans and three Neanderthals shows that the Y chromosomes of Denisovans split around 700 thousand years ago from a lineage shared by Neanderthals and modern human Y chromosomes, which diverged from each other around 370 thousand years ago. The phylogenetic relationships of archaic and modern human Y chromosomes differ from the population relationships inferred from the autosomal genomes and mirror mitochondrial DNA phylogenies, indicating replacement of both the mitochondrial and Y chromosomal gene pools in late Neanderthals. This replacement is plausible if the low effective population size of Neanderthals resulted in an increased genetic load in Neanderthals relative to modern humans.

Domaines: Sciences de l'environnement; Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Martin Petr, Mateja Hajdinjak, Qiaomei Fu, Elena Essel, Hélène Rougier, et al.. The evolutionary history of Neanderthal and Denisovan Y chromosomes. Science, 2020. ⟨hal-02990265⟩