
(credit: Hans Splinter)
A new study of hundreds of human genomes has revealed that groups in various regions of the world have evolved for diets with different amounts of meat and vegetables. People from Europe, particularly its southern regions, are optimized for a high-plant diet. But people from other areas, such as the Inuit of Greenland, have a biochemistry that is better able to process lots of meat fat.
The study, which appeared in Molecular Biology and Evolution, would not have been possible without recent advances in ancient genome sequencing. UC Berkeley Integrative Biology professor Rasmus Nielsen and his colleagues had access not only to hundreds of genome sequences from humans today, but also to sequences from 101 people who lived in Europe 5,000
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