Signatures of adaptive evolution in platyrrhine primate genomes
Byrne, Hazel , Timothy H. Webster, Sarah F. Brosnan, Jessica W. Lynch
Primates of South and Central America known as platyrrhines show broad phenotypic diversity, but we know very little about the genetic changes underlying this diversity or at what point during platyrrhine evolutionary history they arose. Particularly notable are capuchin monkeys for their many parallels with humans and apes, including large brains, intelligence, long lives, and tool usage. Here, we generate a set of high-quality, manually curated protein-coding alignments for comparative genomic analysis of platyrrhines, focusing on the family Cebidae (capuchin and squirrel monkeys). We uncover signatures of selection related to brain development and other cebid traits, lending insight into major periods of cebid adaptive evolution and the evolutionary mechanisms underlying convergence between capuchins and apes.
“Among New World primates, Cebidae are considered the closest to Hominidae in terms of “social conventions and traditions, complex relationships, high dexterity, sensorimotor intelligence with tool use and extractive foraging, advanced derived cognitive abilities, diverse behavioral repertoire and flexibility, and slow maturation.”
At the time when both the old Out-of-Africa paradigm in human origins research and the Clovis-I paradigm in the study of the origin of American Indians (Native Americans, Amerindians) have failed to account for the rapidly growing body of data, this blog provides a unique and previously unrecognized solution to the puzzle of human origins and dispersals. Drawing on linguistics, kinship studies, ethnology, genetics, paleobiology and archaeology, it brings American Indian populations into the focus on modern human origins research, documents back-migrations of American Indians to the Old World and explores the possibility of modern human origins not in Africa but in America. Only scientific facts are used and only scientific method is employed to derive a theory radically different from mainstream academic and popular science. This said, the blog is not a simple advocacy for an Out-of-America theory but a holistic anthropological critique of Eurocentric, Old World-centric, reductionist, positivist, vulgar materialistic and monodisciplinary approaches to the origin of modern human anatomy, behavior, language and culture. It's my contention that the mainstream science of human origins is driven not only by theory building and data accumulation but also by cultural stereotypes rooted in pre-scientific worldviews. The secondary nature of American Indian populations compared to Old World populations and the recency of human occupation of the Americas is one such stereotype. Correspondingly, the wide-spread belief in the supreme antiquity of Bushmen and Pygmies in Africa is another stereotype.
I first sketched out an "Out-of-America" theory of human origins in my two books (the first one was published in Russian, the second one in English) devoted to the phenomenon of human kinship and the global diversity of kinship terminologies.
German Dziebel’s Books
The Genius of Kinship (2007) analyzes a database of 2500 kin terminologies to arrive at a number of diachronic universals suggestive of the origin of behaviorally modern humans in the New World
My 2001 Russian book introduces the phenomenon of kinship as an interdisciplinary field of study (idenetics or gignetics) strategically positioned between linguistics and genetics as a premier source of information about human prehistory.
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