Modern humans have adapted to their local environments over many thousands of years, but how genetic variation contributed to this adaptation remains debated. Using genomes from humans that lived between 45,000 and 7,000 years ago, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have shown that adaptation to local environments has resulted in genetic variants reaching high frequencies in European groups. Interestingly, most of the adaptive variants were present already in an early hunter-gatherer, but not in an early farmer. This suggests that hunter-gatherers, who lived in Europe for thousands of years before the arrival of farmers, were adapted to local environments and contributed adaptive genetic variants to present-day Europeans.
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