Paternal and maternal demographic histories (Lippold et al. 2014)

A new preprint on the bioRxiv on the different male/female demographic history of humans.

Red=female, blue=male.

This is probably related to the new paper on selection on the Y chromosome which interprets reduced diversity as evidence for selection.

doi: 10.1101/001792

Human paternal and maternal demographic histories: insights from high-resolution Y chromosome and mtDNA sequences 

Sebastian Lippold et al.

To investigate in detail the paternal and maternal demographic histories of humans, we obtained ~500 kb of non-recombining Y chromosome (NRY) sequences and complete mtDNA genome sequences from 623 males from 51 populations in the CEPH Human Genome Diversity Panel (HGDP). Our results: confirm the controversial assertion that genetic differences between human populations on a global scale are bigger for the NRY than for mtDNA; suggest very small ancestral effective population sizes (less than 100) for the out-of-Africa migration as well as for many human populations; and indicate that the ratio of female effective population size to male effective population size (Nf/Nm) has been greater than one throughout the history of modern humans, and has recently increased due to faster growth in Nf. However, we also find substantial differences in patterns of mtDNA vs. NRY variation in different regional groups; thus, global patterns of variation are not necessarily representative of specific geographic regions.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/001792v1