A new study suggests ancient potato farming in the Andes may have shaped human evolution in an unexpected way.
According to a UCLA article, published by SciTechDaily, indigenous communities in the Andes were the first to domesticate the potato, turning this starch-rich crop into a major food source for people living at high altitude long before it spread worldwide. Today, Indigenous descendants in Peru have the highest known copy numbers of a starch digestion gene found in any human population.
A new study led jointly by researchers at UCLA and the University at Buffalo found that natural selection started favoring Indigenous Andeans with unusually many copies of the salivary amylase gene, known as AMY1, around the time potatoes were first cultivated in the Andean highlands, about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Their findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.
People who carry more copies of AMY1 generally make more amylase enzyme in their saliva, which is thought to help them break down starch more efficiently, said Abigail Bigham, an associate professor of anthropology at UCLA who studies communities in the Peruvian Andes and the Himalayas of Nepal.
For the study, Bigham and her team of evolutionary anthropologists collected DNA from Quechua-speaking Andean people in Peru. They then compared those samples with genomic databases containing thousands of DNA samples from dozens of present day human populations.
“The high-altitude Andes are known for being a rich region for understanding human evolutionary adaptation — for instance, hypoxia, in which tissues do not get enough oxygen,” said Bigham, whose previous work with co-author Kelsey Jorgensen, then a post-doctoral scholar with Bigham, provided evidence of selection in the starch digestion pathway of Andean peoples.
“This new research highlights how the Andes are useful for understanding human evolutionary adaptation to other selective environmental pressures like diet.”
Source: UCLA via SciTechDaily. Full article here
Image: Credit Shutterstock via SciTechDaily
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