The focus of my resaerch is to trace back human population history and how culure has an impact on human genetic diversity. I am the writter of "L'Odyssée des gènes" 2020, a book that was awarded several prices in scientific communication. Translated in Italian, Chinses, Roumanian, Russian
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Papers by Evelyne Heyer
based on approximately 2,700 ascending pedigrees of contemporary people from Saguenay Lac-St-Jean (Quebec, Canada). This allowed us to appreciate the accumulated inbreeding and to follow the evolution of these coefficients
since the founding of Quebec. One of the results was the expected increase in FST. Relying on this parameter, we computed the effective size (Ne) of the contemporary population, obtaining a value around 1,000, in agreement with
previous estimations. We noticed a decrease of Ne through history despite the population‘s growing size.
The extent to which social organization of human societies impacts the patterns of genetic diversity remains an open question. Here, we investigate the transmission of reproductive success in patrilineal and cognatic populations from Central Asia using a coalescent approach.
METHODS:
We performed a study on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome polymorphism of patrilineal and cognatic populations from Central Asia. We reconstructed the gene genealogies in each population for both kind of markers and inferred the imbalance level of these genealogies, a parameter directly related to the level of transmission of reproductive success.
RESULTS:
This imbalance level appeared much stronger for the Y chromosome in patrilineal populations than in cognatic populations, while no difference was found for mtDNA. Furthermore, we showed that this imbalance level correlates negatively with Y-chromosomal, mtDNA, and autosomal genetic diversity.
CONCLUSIONS:
This shows that patrilineality might be one of the factors explaining the male transmission of reproductive success, which, in turn, lead to a reduction of genetic diversity. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that our population genetic approach clearly shows that there is a strong male-biased transmission of reproductive success in patrilineal societies, it also highlights the fact that a social process such as cultural transmission of reproductive success could play an important role in shaping human genetic diversity, although we cannot formally exclude that this transmission has also a genetic component. Am J Phys Anthropol :1-7, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.