Human Evolutionary Genetics

Human Evolutionary Genetics reaches its third edition at a time when sequencing and analyzing whole genomes, modern and ancient, has become rapid, affordable, and routine. These advances have led to an avalanche of data on present-day and archaic humans, and a remarkable series of revelations about our past. This new and completely revised edition makes sense of this rich and complex information, tying it into other sources of evidence from paleontology, archaeology, paleoclimatology and linguistics. The book takes readers on a journey from the prehistoric origins of our ancestors through to the historical era.

Chapters describing genome variation and how it can tell us about demography and selection provide a firm foundation for readers to understand the rest of the content. The book describes the functional and evolutionary consequences of genome variation for genetic disorders, infectious disease susceptibility, and normal phenotypic variation. A new chapter places other species in the human evolutionary story, including domesticated animals, and the parasites and microbes that live within us. The book ends by examining the personal genome, the rise of direct-to-consumer testing, and the possible future of human evolution.

Key Features

• Embraces genome-wide approaches throughout while explaining the contribution of studies of single genes and loci

• Comprehensively integrates evidence from present-day and ancient genomes

• Explores social and cultural influences on current patterns of genetic diversity

• Addresses the ethical issues around studying human genetic variation

• Comprehensively and beautifully illustrated, with artwork elucidating different concepts and presenting complex experimental data clearly

• Each chapter concludes with a series of review questions, allowing students to test their understanding of chapter content and to link concepts between chapters

• References listed at the end of each chapter include highlighted key papers, which are recommended reading for students

Mark Jobling is a Professor of Genetics at the University of Leicester, UK. His interests are in human and animal genetic diversity and applications in fields such as forensics, conservation biology and evolutionary genetics.

Ed Hollox is Professor of Genetics at the University of Leicester, UK. His research interest is genomic structural variation, its evolution and its consequences for disease.

Toomas Kivisild is a Professor of Human Evolutionary Genetics at KU Leuven, Belgium. His interests are in human evolutionary and population genetics, with both modern and ancient DNA methods used to address questions about population histories, genetic relatedness and selection.

Chris Tyler-Smith led the Human Evolution team at The Wellcome Sanger Institute where his research focused on human and gorilla genetic diversity and the insights they provide into our evolutionary history.

Luca Pagani is a professor of Molecular Anthropology at the University of Padova, Italy. He is interested in how past encounters shaped the history and biology of present, ancient and archaic humans. He believes that almost nothing in evolution makes sense if not in the light of admixture.

Brenna Henn is the Associate Director for Human Genomics at the University of California, Davis, USA. Her lab studies human genetic diversity in Africa, and how alleles that affect phenotype are shared across different global populations