Scientists track last 2,000 years of British evolution

Scientists track last 2,000 years of British evolution
Evolution in action. "Over the past 2,000 years, British people have adapted to become taller and blonder, more likely to have blue eyes and better able to digest milk, according to researchers who have developed a technique to track very recent changes in the human genome. Some previous methods to suss out such adaptation could only do so over the past 25,000 years. Others have been able to track selection pressures that work to shape the modern human genome over shorter time periods, but they rely upon ancient human DNA or the comparison of closely related populations, which are often unavailable. The new technique, which is based on a statistical analysis of whole-genome sequences, narrows this window to just two millennia. It is also able to pinpoint the adaptation of complex traits — such as height — which are influenced by many different genes, the researchers report in a paper posted to the preprint server bioRxiv1."