Predicting environmental and ecological drivers of human population structure

Abstract

Landscape, climate, and culture can all structure human populations, but few methods are designed to disentangle the importance of these many variables. We developed a machine learning method for identifying the variables which best explain migration rates, as measured by the coalescent-based program MAPS that uses shared identical by descent tracts to infer and extrapolate spatial migration across a region of interest. We applied our method to 30 human populations in eastern Africa with high density SNP array data. The remarkable diversity of ethnicities, languages, and environments in this region offers a unique opportunity to explore the variables that shape migration and genetic structure in humans. We explored more than twenty spatial variables relating to landscape, climate, and presence of tsetse flies (an important regional disease vector). The full model explained ~40% of variance in migration rate over the past 56 generations. Precipitation, minimum temperature of the coldest month, and altitude were the most important variables. Among the three groups of tsetse flies, the most important was the fusca group which is a vector for livestock trypanosomiasis. We also performed a selection scan on a subgroup of the populations who live in Ethiopia at relatively high altitudes. We did not identify well-known high-altitude genes, but we did find signatures of positive selection related to metabolism and disease. We conclude that environment has notably shaped the migration and adaptation of human populations in eastern Africa; the remaining variance in structure is likely due to cultural factors not captured in our model.