Abstract
Assortative mating is a universal feature of human societies, and individuals from ethnically diverse populations are known to mate assortatively based on similarities in genetic ancestry. However, little is currently known regarding the exact phenotypic cues, or their underlying genetic architecture, which inform ancestry-based assortative mating. We developed a novel approach, using genome-wide analysis of ancestry-specific haplotypes, to evaluate ancestry-based assortative mating on traits whose expression varies among the three continental population groups – African, European, and Native American – that admixed to form modern Latin American populations. Application of this method to genome sequences sampled from Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico revealed widespread ancestry-based assortative mating. We discovered a number of anthropometric traits (body mass, height, and facial development) and neurological attributes (educational attainment and schizophrenia) that serve as phenotypic cues for ancestry-based assortative mating. Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) loci show population-specific patterns of both assortative and disassortative mating in Latin America. Ancestry-based assortative mating in the populations analyzed here appears to be driven primarily by African ancestry. This study serves as an example of how population genomic analyses can yield novel insights into human behavior.
Highlights
Mate choice is a fundamental dimension of human behavior with important implications for population genetic structure and evolution (Vandenburg, 1972; Buss, 1985; Robinson et al, 2017)
We developed a test statistic – the assortative mating index (AMI) – that evaluates this prediction for individual gene loci, and we applied it to sets of genes that function together to encode polygenic phenotypes
In addition to evaluating individual phenotypes for statistically significant Assortative Mating Index (AMI) values, we looked for polygenic phenotypes that showed the most similar or dissimilar patterns of assortative mating across the four admixed Latin American populations
Summary
Mate choice is a fundamental dimension of human behavior with important implications for population genetic structure and evolution (Vandenburg, 1972; Buss, 1985; Robinson et al, 2017). Perhaps the most precipitous example of this process occurred in the Americas, starting just over 500 years ago with the arrival of Columbus in the New World (Mann, 2011) This major historical event quickly led to the co-localization of African, European and Native American populations that had been (mostly) physically isolated for tens of thousands of years (Jordan, 2016). The geographic reunification of these populations was accompanied, to some extent, by genetic admixture and the resulting formation of novel populations This is true for populations in Latin America, which often show high levels of three-way genetic admixture between continental population groups (Wang et al, 2008; Bryc et al, 2010; Ruiz-Linares et al, 2014; Montinaro et al, 2015; Rishishwar et al, 2015)
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