Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia
. By contrast, in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.
Authors
- Annabel Perry (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9904-0824)
- Alison R. Barton (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0882-0196)
- David Reich (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7037-5292)
- Alissa Mittnik (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6963-4824)
- Ron Pinhasi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1629-8131)
- Swapan Mallick (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4531-4439)
- Alkes L. Price (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2971-7975)
- Matthew Mah (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8987-6436)
- Zheng Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5826-1316)
- Mohammadreza Kariminejad
- Nick Patterson
- Yating Zeng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8968-5932)
- Steven Gazal
- Eric S. Lander
- Nadin Rohland
Institutions
- Broad Institute (US)
- University of Southern California (US)
- University of Vienna (AT)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- University of Michigan (US)
- Harvard University Press (US)
- Yale University (US)
- Technical and Vocational University (IR)
- Evolutionary Genomics (United States) (US)
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (DE)
- Center for Systems Biology (US)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature
- Published
- 2026-04-15
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10358-1
- Citations
- 3
- Primary Topic
- Forensic and Genetic Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 58.87