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Abstract

The role of natural selection in shaping biological diversity is an area of
intense interest in modern biology. To date, studies of positive selection
have primarily relied on genomic datasets from contemporary populations,
which are susceptible to confounding factors associated with complex
and often unknown aspects of population history. In particular, admixture
between diverged populations can distort or hide prior selection events
in modern genomes, though this process is not explicitly accounted for in
most selection studies despite its apparent ubiquity in humans and other
species. Through analyses of ancient and modern human genomes, we show
that previously reported Holocene-era admixture has masked more than 50
historic hard sweeps in modern European genomes. Our results imply that
this canonical mode of selection has probably b

een underappreciated in the
evolutionary history of humans and suggest that our current understanding
of the tempo and mode of selection in natural populations may be
inaccurate