Title: Adapting to the farming life-style: disentangling the causes of changes in adult height during the Early Neolithic
Summary: Adoption of farming lifestyle has been associated with decrease in height in the European archaeological record but the relative role of environmental factors, natural selection and population movements and admixture in shaping spatial and temporal patterns of adult height is poorly understood. To disentangle the contributions of natural selection and past admixture on past adult height we devised a polygenic-score-based test, specifically aimed for ancient DNA data. We apply this test to genetic data from Early Holocene individuals from Europe and show that selection was operating not only for reduced height but also a wide set of epidemiologically linked traits (ranging from bone mineral density to age of menopause onset). We show that this selection was directly counteracting the gene-flow from resident European hunter-gatherers supporting the hypotheses that different subsistence strategies favour different life-history strategies.
Biography: Liisa’s research is focussed the evolution of complex human traits. She is a broadly trained evolutionary geneticist, with her first degree in Biological Anthropology (U. Kent), an MSc in Human Evolution from UCL, and doctoral studies at the Research Laboratory for Archaeological Science at U. Oxford. During her postgraduate studies Liisa developed several analytical methods to quantify past levels of mobility and infer past genetic selection and other evolutionary processes using genetic data from archaeological and fossil specimens (also known as ancient DNA).
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