The discovery of Paranthropus deyiremeda in 3.3-3.5 million year old fossil sites in Afar, together with 30% of the gorilla genome showing lineage sorting between humans and chimpanzees, and a NUMT ("nuclear mitochondrial DNA segment") on chromosome 5 that is shared by both gorillas, humans and chimpanzees, and shown to have diverged at the time of the Pan-Homo split rather than the Gorilla/Pan-Homo split, provides conclusive evidence that introgression from the gorilla lineage caused the Pan-Homo split, and the speciation of both the Australopithecus lineage and the Paranthropus lineage.
The Gorilla lineage as the "missing link" "During many years I collected notes on the origin or descent of man, without any intention of publishing on the subject, but rather with the determination not to publish, as I thought that I should thus only add to the prejudices against my views." -Charles Darwin, 1871 Genome sequencing has been evolving along the law of accelerating returns (Kurzweil, 2004), the total amount of sequence data produced doubling approximately every seven months (Stephens, 2015). With the genetic revolution, phylogenetic relationships are no longer limited to morphological characters, they can instead be read like an open book. The fossil record, when combined with genomics, can reveal an evolutionary history that were unimaginable based on just morphological analyses. This thesis will explore a new chapter, that shows how hominin evolution is not a single continuous lineage, instead the hybridization of two separate lineages, separated over millions of years, whose genomes recombined into the hybrid lineages Paranthropus and Australopithecus . Curiously, that hybridization also accounts for the "missing link", the hybridization of two lineages explains the absence of a single continuous lineage.
The protagonist of the thesis is a single gene, a pseudogene on chromosome 5, tentatively called “ps5”, that originates from the mitochondrial genome and belongs to a class of genes that have unique properties for tracing hybridization where it would have otherwise been impossible to read (Perna, 1996;Bensasson, 2001;Hazkani-Covo, 2010). This pseudogene alone provides definitive evidence that there was gene transfer between Gorilla , Pan and Homo at the time of the Pan-Homo split.
With clear evidence of introgression, the rest of the genetic trail of hybridization can be read with ease, standing on a strong foundation of indisputable proof.
Australopithecus afarensis 3.7-2.9 Ma that traits that have evolved independently in the gorilla lineage were transferred into the hybrid lineages.
Paranthropus are often described as “gorilla-like”, they have sagittal crests which suggest strong muscles of mastication, and broad, grinding herbivorous teeth, that led to the name “nutcracker man” for Paranthropus boisei who lived between 2.4-1.4 Ma.
In early screening of mitochondrial pseudogenes within the human genome, a pseudogene sequence on chromosome 5 was discovered (Li-Sucholeiki et al., 1999), which later turned out to be a large (~9kb) NUMT, tentatively called “ps5” (Popadin, 2017). With advances in genome sequencing of Gorilla and Pan , the same ~9kb pseudogene sequence was discovered at homologous chromosomal positions in both those lineages, while it was absent in Pongo .
The pseudogene, when compared to mitochondrial branches of Gorilla , Pan and Homo , is shown to have diverged between the three lineages not at the Gorilla/Pan-Homo split, rather at the Pan-Homo split (Popadin, 2017), clear evidence that there was gene transfer between the three lineages at that time.
The ps5 pseudogene shares affinities with the gorilla lineage mtDNA (Popadin, 2017) which suggests that it originated in the gorilla lineage. With the probability of a NUMT insertion being unaffected by hybridization, it is clear that the insertion happened prior to the introgression event, and that the pseudogene had been evolving in the gorilla lineage for a period of time before introgressing into Pan and Homo . (Popadin, 2017) With high availability of genetic data for both mitochondrial DNA and the pseudogene sequence, the exact history of ps5 can be read by comparing mutations within all three lineages.
The ratio of synonymous to non-synonymous mutations is a marker to distinguish between coding and non-coding gene sequences, because non-synonymous mutations are selected against until the gene is inactivated (Tomoko, 1995). For the “stem” of the ps5 pseudogene (the mutations that have accumulated prior to its divergence into three lineages), the fraction of coding (“mitochondrial”) mutations to non-coding (“pseudogenic”) mutations is 3/4 (Popadin, 2017).
The mutation rate in the mitochondrial genome is significantly higher than in the nuclear genome, which means that the 25% pseudogenic mutations have needed proportionally longer time to accumulate. With the estimate of 10x higher mutation rates in mtDNA (Brown, 1979), and 3x more “mitochondrial” mutations, it took 3.3x longer to accumulate the “pseudogenic” mutations, giving a rough estimate of the insertion happening at 1.8 Myr after the Gorilla/Pan-Homo split, 4.2 Myr before the introgression event that led to the Pan-Homo split.
The Gorilla Genome Project was the first complete genome of Gorilla , from a female western lowland gorilla, and it revealed a closer relationship between humans and gorilla than what morphological analyses had shown: in 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other. At the time interpre
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