Sánchez Quinto, Federico A, 1985-Botigué, Laura R.Civit, SergiArenas, ConxitaÁvila Arcos, María C.Bustamante, Carlos D.Comas, David, 1969-Lalueza Fox, Carles, 1965-2015-05-122015-05-122012Sánchez-Quinto F, Botigué LR, Civit S, Arenas C, Avila-Arcos MC, Bustamante CD et al. North African populations carry the signature of admixture with neandertals. PLoS ONE. 2012;7(10):e47765. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.00477651932-6203http://hdl.handle.net/10230/23560One of the main findings derived from the analysis of the Neandertal genome was the evidence for admixture between Neandertals and non-African modern humans. An alternative scenario is that the ancestral population of non-Africans was closer to Neandertals than to Africans because of ancient population substructure. Thus, the study of North African populations is crucial for testing both hypotheses. We analyzed a total of 780,000 SNPs in 125 individuals representing seven different North African locations and searched for their ancestral/derived state in comparison to different human populations and Neandertals. We found that North African populations have a significant excess of derived alleles shared with Neandertals, when compared to sub-Saharan Africans. This excess is similar to that found in non-African humans, a fact that can be interpreted as a sign of Neandertal admixture. Furthermore, the Neandertal's genetic signal is higher in populations with a local, pre-Neolithic North African ancestry. Therefore, the detected ancient admixture is not due to recent Near Eastern or European migrations. Sub-Saharan populations are the only ones not affected by the admixture event with Neandertals.application/pdfeng© 2012 Sánchez-Quinto et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Genètica de poblacions humanes -- Àfrica del NordDemografia -- Àfrica del Nord -- Aspectes genèticsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047765info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess