By the advent of the warmer Holocene period, approximately 11,000 years ago, human populations had expanded out of their African origin to populate all major continents except for Antarctica, over a period of 40 thousand years. As the climates warmed came a remarkable convergent transformation of human lifestyles that occurred independently in multiple continents and human populations. This transition from a hunter-gatherer subsistence, for which only small group sizes could be sustained, to food production lifestyles such as animal herding and crop agriculture, fundamentally shaped the human condition and global biodiversity today. It catalysed large-scale population growth, offering the opportunity for increased rates of adaptation, but also rapidly presented a great number of human populations with a new evolutionary challenge.
This project aims to understand how convergent adaptation to new food-producing lifestyles impacted the genomes of human populations and accompanying domestic dog populations, and to which extent phenotypic convergence was driven by the same underlying genetic architecture. This will include gaining a deepening understanding of the genetic history and demography that preceded agriculture and unfolded during its expansion. It includes understanding the geographic origin of the first domestic animal: the domestic dog, which may have ushered in later developments in managing livestock and food production, and how the dog continued to adapt to agriculture alongside humans.
