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The fungus Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici causes wheat powdery mildew disease. Here, we study its spread and evolution by analyzing a global sample of 172 mildew genomes. Our analyses show that B.g. tritici emerged in the Fertile Crescent during wheat domestication. After it spread throughout Eurasia, colonization brought it to America, where it hybridized with unknown grass mildew species. Recent trade brought USA strains to Japan, and European strains to China. In both places, they hybridized with local ancestral strains. Thus, although mildew spreads by wind regionally, our results indicate that humans drove its global spread throughout history and that mildew rapidly evolved through hybridization. The fungus Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici causes wheat powdery mildew disease. Here, Sotiropoulos et al. analyze a global sample of 172 mildew genomes, providing evidence that humans drove global spread of the pathogen throughout history and that mildew rapidly evolved through hybridization with local fungal strains.

The Central Andes and Pacific coast of Peru were an important center of cultural development in prehistoric South America. In particular, the North Coast of Peru had a significant demographic weight and witnessed a succession of societies and polities, some of which achieved state-level complexity. To understand the impact of this legacy on the genetic diversity of people living today, we generated 76 Y-chromosomal STR profiles and 143 full mtDNA sequences from four communities of the Peruvian North Coast. We reconstruct genealogical trajectories and search for connections to other living populations from South America, as well as with ancient individuals from archaeological contexts. We find characteristic paternal and maternal lineages, found only in the North Coast. These distinct genetic profiles are deeply rooted, and some of them can be linked with ancient individuals from local archaeological sites such as La Galgada (4000 years ago), and Moche sites like El Brujo (1600 years ago) and Huaca Prieta (1400 years ago). Additionally, a north–south divide from haplotype sharing profiles partly mirrors archaeological and linguistic dissimilarities already present at the time of the Moche culture. The multidisciplinary evidence examined suggests that the demographic distinctiveness of the North Coast populations of Peru is paired by exchanges with neighboring Peruvian and Ecuadorian groups and a high intrapopulation diversity.

The evolutionary history of African hunter-gatherers holds key insights into modern human diversity. Here, we combine ethnographic and genetic data on Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHG) to show that their current distribution and density are explained by ecology rather than by a displacement to marginal habitats due to recent farming expansions, as commonly assumed. We also estimate the range of huntergatherer presence across Central Africa over the past 120,000 years using paleoclimatic reconstructions, which were statistically validated by our newly compiled dataset of dated archaeological sites. Finally, we show that genomic estimates of divergence times between CAHG groups match our ecological estimates of periods favoring population splits, and that recoveries of connectivity would have facilitated subsequent gene flow. Our results reveal that CAHG stem from a deep history of partially connected populations. This form of sociality allowed the coexistence of relatively large effective population sizes and local differentiation, with important implications for the evolution of genetic and cultural diversity in Homo sapiens.

Human history is written in both our genes and our languages. The extent to which our biological and linguistic histories are congruent has been the subject of considerable debate, with clear examples of both matches and mismatches. To disentangle the patterns of demographic and cultural transmission, we need a global systematic assessment of matches and mismatches. Here, we assemble a genomic database (GeLaTo, or Genes and Languages Together) specifically curated to investigate genetic and linguistic diversity worldwide. We find that most populations in GeLaTo that speak languages of the same language family (i.e., that descend from the same ancestor language) are also genetically highly similar. However, we also identify nearly 20% mismatches in populations genetically close to linguistically unrelated groups. These mismatches, which occur within the time depth of known linguistic relatedness up to about 10,000 y, are scattered around the world, suggesting that they are a regular outcome in human history. Most mismatches result from populations shifting to the language of a neighboring population that is genetically different because of independent demographic histories. In line with the regularity of such shifts, we find that only half of the language families in GeLaTo are genetically more cohesive than expected under spatial autocorrelations. Moreover, the genetic and linguistic divergence times of population pairs match only rarely, with Indo-European standing out as the family with most matches in our sample. Together, our database and findings pave the way for systematically disentangling demographic and cultural history and for quantifying processes of shifts in language and social identities on a global scale.

The evolutionary history of African hunter-gatherers holds key insights into modern human diversity. Here we combine ethnographic and genetic data on Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHG) to show that their current distribution and density is explained by ecology rather than by a displacement to marginal habitats due to recent farming expansions, as commonly assumed. We also predict hunter-gatherer presence across Central Africa over the past 120,000 years using paleoclimatic reconstructions, which were statistically validated by dated archaeological sites. Finally, we show that genomic estimates of separation times between CAHG groups match our ecological estimates of periods favouring population splits, and that recoveries of connectivity would have facilitated subsequent gene-flow. Our results reveal that CAHG stem from a deep history of partially connected populations. This form of sociality allowed the coexistence of relatively large effective population sizes and local differentiation, with important implications for the evolution of genetic and cultural diversity in Homo sapiens. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

The Chonos archipelago, located in northwestern Chilean Patagonia, was historically inhabited by an Indigenous sea-faring population known to the European colonists as the \"Chono\". Previous research has contextualized the human occupation of this region with radiocarbon dates and ancient mitochondrial genomes, offering a partial perspective on the history of its inhabitants. Here we present a paleogenomic analysis of 20 ancient human individuals from 6 archaeological sites, dated between 1,600-50 years before present (BP). We successfully captured over 100,000 SNPs from 15 of 20 individuals and recovered 12 full mitogenomes. All individuals presented unadmixed Indigenous South American ancestry and formed a separated genetic cluster relative to other ancient and modern South American genomes, indicating a unique Chonos ancestry. This Chonos ancestry falls within a broader cluster of late-Holocene Patagonian ancestry, most similar to the Kawésqar peoples who neighbour to the south. Within the Chonos, we distinguish a northern and southern ancestry cluster. The northern Chonos cluster exhibits some genetic connections to the present-time inhabitants of the neighbouring island of Chiloé, who are connected to Huilliche Indigenous history. Our findings reveal a point of contact between southern Chonos/Patagonian ancestry to the south and Mapuche ancestry to the north, and confirm that sea-faring subsistence was a knowledge transferred between Patagonian peoples.