A new paper has appeared at BioRxiv, The Genomic Health Of Ancient Hominins (2017) by Berence, Cooper and Lachance.
Important results are available at: http://popgen.gatech.edu/ancient-health/.
While the study’s many limitations are obvious to the authors, they still suggest certain interesting possibilities as the most important conclusions:
- In general, Genetic risk scores (GRS) are similar to present-day individuals
- Genomic health seems to be improving over time
- Pastoralists could have been healthier than older and modern populations
Some details and shortcomings of the study (most stated by them, bold is from me) include:
- Allele selection: only some of the known