Figure 4: Patterns of elevated diversity in face-associated loci across populations. | Nature Communications

Figure 4: Patterns of elevated diversity in face-associated loci across populations.

From: Morphological and population genomic evidence that human faces have evolved to signal individual identity

Figure 4

The face-associated loci with elevated diversity consistent with selection for identity signalling tend to be shared across populations both within and between continents. The heatmap highlights loci on the extreme ends of the distributions for π (controlling for divergence with macaque) and Tajima’s D. Columns correspond to populations and rows correspond to individual loci. Squares that are fully filled in with dark blue designate loci with evidence of elevated diversity (>95th percentile for both summary statistics). A greater number of loci show evidence of elevated diversity in at least one population for faces (9/58) compared with height (6/356; χ2=23.5, P<0.0001) and intergenic regions (57/4,873; χ2=78.8, P<0.0001). Additionally, patterns of elevated diversity are more consistently shared across populations for face-associated regions compared with the neutral regions (5/9 face regions versus 1/57 neutral regions, χ2=27.2, P<0.0002). To facilitate visual comparison, representative subsamples of height and intergenic regions are shown here. Subsamples were generated by randomly selecting loci from the height and neutral lists, which we confirmed did not deviate from the distribution of the total sample. All analyses reported were conducted on the full data sets.

Back to article page