Assortative Mating on Ancestry-Variant Traits in Admixed Latin American Populations

This study serves as an example of how population genomic analyses can yield novel insights into human behavior. Introduction Mate choice is a fundamental dimension of human behavior with important implications for population genetic structure and evolution (Vandenburg, 1972; Buss, 1985; Robinson et al., 2017). It is widely known that humans choose to mate assortatively rather than randomly. That is to say that humans, for the most part, tend to choose mates that are more similar to themselves than can be expected by chance. Historically, assortative mating was based largely on geography, whereby partners were chosen from a limited set of physically proximal individuals (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994). Over millennia, assortative mating within groups of geographically confined individuals contributed to genetic divergence between groups, and the establishment of distincthuman populations, such as the major continental population groups recognized today (Rosenberg et al., 2002; Li et al., 2008; Genomes Project et al., 2015). However, the process of geographic isolation followed by population divergence that characterized human evolution has not been strictly linear. Ongoing human migrations have continuously brought previously isolated populations into contact; when this occurs, the potential exists for once isolated populations to admix, thereby forming novel population groups (Hellenthal et al., 2014). Perhaps the most precipitous example of this process occurred in t...
Source: Frontiers in Genetics - Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Source Type: research