Evolutionary Responses to a Constructed Niche: Ancient Mesoamericans as a Model of Gene-Culture Coevolution

Hünemeier, Tábita; Amorim, Carlos Eduardo Guerra; Azevedo, Soledad; Contini, Veronica; Acuña-Alonzo, Víctor; Rothhammer, Francisco; Dugoujon, Jean-Michel; Mazières, Stephane; Barrantes, Ramiro; Villarreal-Molina, María Teresa; Paixão-Côrtes, Vanessa Rodrigues; Salzano, Francisco M.; Canizales-Quinteros, Samuel; Ruiz-Linares, Andres; Bortolini, Maria Cátira

Human cultural practices have drastically modified environmental conditions and behaviors, promoting rapid and substantial genomic changes often associated with positive selection and adaptation (gene-culture dynamics [1, 2] ). In the history of Homo sapiens sapiens, a particularly important event that triggered a new and striking gene-culture-coevolution cycle was the development of agriculture and animal domestication during the Neolithic period (,10,000 years ago). Further, the human gene-culture coevolution mediated by the domestication of plants and animals has been argued to provide some of the clearest and most spectacular examples of niche construction. The Niche Construction Theory can be defined as a branch of evolutionary biology that emphasizes on the ability of organisms to modify the pressure of natural selection in their environment and thereby act as codirectors of their own evolution, as well as that of other directly associated species [3] [4] [5] [6] .