Genetic dietary adaptation in Neandertal, Denisovan and Sapiens revealed by gene copy number variation
Journal: bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Year: 2021

Abstract Dietary adaptation involves evolving an efficient system to digest food available in an ecosystem. The diet of archaic humans is traditionally reconstructed by isotopic analyses of human remains combined with the faunal assemblages found on the sites, and, recently, from metagenomic analyses of dental calculus. Here, we propose a new computational approach to find the genetic basis for human dietary adaptation. We searched 15 genomes from Neandertal, Denisovan and Early Sapiens for food