Genomic signatures of diet-related shifts during human origins

Abstract

There are numerous anthropological analyses concerning the importance of diet during human evolution. Diet is thought to have had a profound influence on the human phenotype, and dietary differences have been hypothesized to contribute to the dramatic morphological changes seen in modern humans as compared with non-human primates. Here, we attempt to integrate the results of new genomic studies within this well-developed anthropological context. We then review the current evidence for adaptation related to diet, both at the level of sequence changes and gene expression. Finally, we propose some ways in which new technologies can help identify specific genomic adaptations that have resulted in metabolic and morphological differences between humans and non-human primates.

Figure 1.

A timeline showing some of the temporal intersections of diet, natural selection and one of the many changes in human morphology. Green bars indicate the temporal range on which different methods for scanning for selection are optimized to identify relevant changes in the genome (reviewed in [111]). Blue bars indicate the times in which there is evidence for shifts in human dietary intake [6,17,28,36,112,113]. The coloured bubbles are a general schematic of the time and range in size of cranial capacity found in various hominin species adapted from Schoenemann [27] with additional data from White et al. [114].