Mark G. Thomas

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Mark G. Thomas (born 5 June 1964 on Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, England) is a human evolutionary geneticist, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London since 2009. [1] Prior to this, he was Cancer Research Campaign Postdoctoral Research Fellow at King's College London and then Wellcome Trust postdoctoral researcher in the department of Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. [2] He has acted as Editor-in-chief of the journal Annals of Human Genetics from 2015 to 2019 and Oct 2020 to Jan 2021. [3]

Contents

Scientific career

Thomas is notable for a number of scientific publications in the fields of human demographic and evolutionary history inference, molecular phylogenetics of extinct species using ancient DNA, Cultural evolutionary modelling, and molecular biology. In 1994 Thomas was one of the first people to read the DNA sequence of the extinct woolly mammoth [4] and in 1998 he coauthored a paper providing genetic support to the claim of recent patrilineal common ancestry among the Jewish priestly caste known as Kohanim (singular "Kohen", "Cohen", or Kohane). Between 2000 and 2003 Thomas coauthored several other papers on the origins of various Jewish and Judaic groups, including the Lemba, otherwise known as the "Black Jews of Southern Africa". [5] In 2002 Thomas coauthored a paper providing Y chromosome evidence for a very high Anglo-Saxon component of patrilineal ancestry in central England. [6] This result proved unpalatable for many archaeologists and led to Thomas developing the "apartheid-like social structure" model [7] to explain the discrepancy between archaeological and genetic estimates of the scale of Anglo-Saxon migration.

Thomas has also worked extensively on the evolution of lactase persistence (see Lactose intolerance), the ability of some humans to produce the enzyme lactase throughout their adult life and thus to consume appreciable quantities of fresh milk without the discomforts of lactose malabsorption. In 2004 he led a study to show that most lactase persistent Africans did not have the same mutation causing it as Europeans. [8] In 2007, in collaboration with Joachim Burger's group in Mainz, Germany, he showed that the genetic variant that causes lactase persistence in most Europeans (-13,910*T) was rare or absent in early farmers from central Europe. [9] In 2009 Thomas led a computer simulation study indicating that lactase persistence started to co-evolve with the culture of dairying in the LBK (Linearbandkeramik) culture. [10]

In 2009 – in collaboration with Prof Stephen Shennan and Dr Adam Powell – Thomas published a study in the journal Science showing that population density and or migratory activity are likely to be a major determinants in the maintenance or loss of culturally inherited skills, and that this seemed to explain a number of curious features of the appearance of behavioural modernity in humans at different times in different parts of the world. [11] [12]

Together with Kristian Kristiansen at the University of Gothenburg and Kurt Kjaer at the University of Copenhagen, Thomas was awarded a major European Research Council synergy grant in 2020, totalling €10 million over six years. This project (titled 'COREX: From correlations to explanations: towards a new European prehistory') will study human biological and cultural evolution from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age through a combination of genomic, archaeological, environmental and isotopic datasets. [13]

Selected scientific publications

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lactase</span> Milk-sugar digesting enzyme

Lactase is an enzyme produced by many organisms and is essential to the complete digestion of whole milk. It breaks down the sugar lactose into its component parts, galactose and glucose. Lactase is found in the brush border of the small intestine of humans and other mammals. People deficient in lactase or lacking functional lactase may experience the symptoms of lactose intolerance after consuming milk products. Microbial β-galactosidase can be purchased as a food supplement and is added to milk to produce "lactose-free" milk products.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lactose intolerance</span> Inability to digest lactose

Lactose intolerance is caused by a lessened ability or a complete inability to digest lactose, a sugar found in dairy products. Humans vary in the amount of lactose they can tolerate before symptoms develop. Symptoms may include abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea, flatulence, and nausea. These symptoms typically start thirty minutes to two hours after eating or drinking something containing lactose, with the severity typically depending on the amount consumed. Lactose intolerance does not cause damage to the gastrointestinal tract.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neolithic Europe</span> Era of pre-history

The European Neolithic is the period from the arrival of Neolithic technology and the associated population of Early European Farmers in Europe, c. 7000 BC until c. 2000–1700 BC. The Neolithic overlaps the Mesolithic and Bronze Age periods in Europe as cultural changes moved from the southeast to northwest at about 1 km/year – this is called the Neolithic Expansion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Niche construction</span> Process by which an organism shapes its environment

Niche construction is the ecological process by which an organism alters its own local environment. These alterations can be a physical change to the organism’s environment, or it can encompass the active movement of an organism from one habitat to another where it then experiences different environmental pressures. Examples of niche construction include the building of nests and burrows by animals, the creation of shade, the influencing of wind speed, and alternations to nutrient cycling by plants. Although these modifications are often directly beneficial to the constructor, they are not necessarily always. For example, when organisms dump detritus, they can degrade their own local environments. Within some biological evolutionary frameworks, niche construction can actively beget processes pertaining to ecological inheritance whereby the organism in question “constructs” new or unique ecologic, and perhaps even sociologic environmental realities characterized by specific selective pressures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheddar Man</span> Remains of a prehistoric human male found in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England

Cheddar Man is a human male skeleton found in Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England. The skeletal remains date to around the mid-to-late 9th millennium BC, corresponding to the Mesolithic period, and it appears that he died a violent death. A large crater-like lesion just above the skull's right orbit suggests that the man may have also been suffering from a bone infection.

Lactase persistence or lactose tolerance is the continued activity of the lactase enzyme in adulthood, allowing the digestion of lactose in milk. In most mammals, the activity of the enzyme is dramatically reduced after weaning. In some human populations though, lactase persistence has recently evolved as an adaptation to the consumption of nonhuman milk and dairy products beyond infancy. Lactase persistence is very high among northern Europeans, especially Irish people. Worldwide, most people are lactase non-persistent, and are affected by varying degrees of lactose intolerance as adults. However, lactase persistence and lactose intolerance can overlap.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Haplogroup E-M215</span> Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup

E-M215 or E1b1b, formerly known as E3b, is a major human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup. E-M215 has two basal branches, E-M35 and E-M281. E-M35 is primarily distributed in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, and occurs at moderate frequencies in the Middle East, Europe, and Southern Africa. E-M281 occurs at a low frequency in Ethiopia.

Haplogroup K, formerly Haplogroup UK, is a human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup. It is defined by the HVR1 mutations 16224C and 16311C. It is now known that K is a subclade of U8.

In genetics, a selective sweep is the process through which a new beneficial mutation that increases its frequency and becomes fixed in the population leads to the reduction or elimination of genetic variation among nucleotide sequences that are near the mutation. In selective sweep, positive selection causes the new mutation to reach fixation so quickly that linked alleles can "hitchhike" and also become fixed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genetic history of Europe</span>

The genetic history of Europe includes information around the formation, ethnogenesis, and other DNA-specific information about populations indigenous, or living in Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Haplogroup N1a (mtDNA)</span> Human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup

Haplogroup N1a is a human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Light skin</span> Human skin color

Light skin is a human skin color that has a low level of eumelanin pigmentation as an adaptation to environments of low UV radiation. Due to migrations of people in recent centuries, light-skinned populations today are found all over the world. Light skin is most commonly found amongst the native populations of Europe, East Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, Siberia, and North Africa as measured through skin reflectance. People with light skin pigmentation are often referred to as "white" although these usages can be ambiguous in some countries where they are used to refer specifically to certain ethnic groups or populations.

The genetic history of the British Isles is the subject of research within the larger field of human population genetics. It has developed in parallel with DNA testing technologies capable of identifying genetic similarities and differences between both modern and ancient populations. The conclusions of population genetics regarding the British Isles in turn draw upon and contribute to the larger field of understanding the history of the human occupation of the area, complementing work in linguistics, archaeology, history and genealogy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wezmeh</span> Cave and archaeological site in Iran

The Wezmeh Cave is an archaeological site near Islamabad Gharb, western Iran, around 470 km (290 mi) southwest of the capital Tehran. The site was discovered in 1999 and excavated in 2001 by a team of Iranian archaeologists under the leadership of Dr. Kamyar Abdi. Wezmeh cave was re-excavated by a team under direction of Fereidoun Biglari in 2019.

Joachim Burger is a German anthropologist and population geneticist based at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, where he runs the Palaeogenetics Group at the Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolution (iOME).

Recent human evolution refers to evolutionary adaptation, sexual and natural selection, and genetic drift within Homo sapiens populations, since their separation and dispersal in the Middle Paleolithic about 50,000 years ago. Contrary to popular belief, not only are humans still evolving, their evolution since the dawn of agriculture is faster than ever before. It has been proposed that human culture acts as a selective force in human evolution and has accelerated it; however, this is disputed. With a sufficiently large data set and modern research methods, scientists can study the changes in the frequency of an allele occurring in a tiny subset of the population over a single lifetime, the shortest meaningful time scale in evolution. Comparing a given gene with that of other species enables geneticists to determine whether it is rapidly evolving in humans alone. For example, while human DNA is on average 98% identical to chimp DNA, the so-called Human Accelerated Region 1 (HAR1), involved in the development of the brain, is only 85% similar.

Allele age is the amount of time elapsed since an allele first appeared due to mutation. Estimating the time at which a certain allele appeared allows researchers to infer patterns of human migration, disease, and natural selection. Allele age can be estimated based on (1) the frequency of the allele in a population and (2) the genetic variation that occurs within different copies of the allele, also known as intra-allelic variation. While either of these methods can be used to estimate allele age, the use of both increases the accuracy of the estimation and can sometimes offer additional information regarding the presence of selection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eastern hunter-gatherer</span> Archaeogenetic name for an ancestral genetic component

In archaeogenetics, eastern hunter-gatherer (EHG), sometimes east European hunter-gatherer or eastern European hunter-gatherer, is a distinct ancestral component that represents Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Eastern Europe.

Sarah Anne Tishkoff is an American geneticist and the David and Lyn Silfen Professor in the Department of Genetics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. She also serves as a director for the American Society of Human Genetics and is an associate editor at PLOS Genetics, G3, and Genome Research. She is also a member of the scientific advisory board at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

References

  1. "UCL – University College London". 13 February 2019.
  2. Prof Mark Thomas Archived 2010-09-29 at the Wayback Machine , UCL School of Life and Medical Sciences
  3. "UCL – University College London". 13 February 2019.
  4. Hagelberg et al., 1994; Thomas et al., 2000a
  5. Thomas et al., 2000b.
  6. Weale et al., 2002.
  7. Thomas et al., 2006
  8. Charlotte A. Mulcare, Michael E. Weale, Abigail L . Jones, Bruce Connell, David Zeitlin, Ayele Tarekegn, Dallas M. Swallow, Neil Bradman and Mark G. Thomas (2004) The T allele located 13.9 kb upstream of the lactase gene (LCT) (C-13.9kbT) does not predict or cause the lactase persistence phenotype in Africans. [ permanent dead link ] American Journal of Human Genetics 74: pp1102–1110.
  9. J. Burger, M. Kirchner, B. Bramanti, W. Haak, M. G. Thomas (2007) Absence of the Lactase-Persistence associated allele in early Neolithic Europeans Archived 2008-10-31 at Archive-It . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 104: pp3736-3741.
  10. Yuval Itan, Adam Powell, Mark A. Beaumont, Joachim Burger and Mark G. Thomas (2009) The Origins of Lactase Persistence in Europe [ permanent dead link ]. PLoS Comput Biol 5(8): e1000491.
  11. Powell, A., Shennan, S., and Thomas, M.G. (2009) Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior. Science 324: pp. 1298–1301
  12. Blood and Treasure [ permanent dead link ], The Economist, Jun 4th 2009
  13. "Brining to light patterns of migration from 6 000 to 500 BC". Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS).