Modeling the influence of human social organizations on genetic diversity

International audienceHuman populations display a wide diversity of social organizations. These organizations are shaped by three major rules: the descent rule, the alliance rule and the post-marital residence rule. Nowadays, patrilineal and patrilocal organizations, for which individuals are affiliated to their paternal group and women settle in their husband’s village, are dominant among human populations, but the past history of human social organizations is currently poorly understood. Previous studies have highlighted that social organizations induce sex- biased behaviours and influence the diversity of uniparental markers (mitochondrial DNA and the non recombining portion of the Y chromosome), but also of autosomal markers (X/autosomes diversity ratios). In this study, we modeled different descent and post-marital residence rules to understand better their effects on human genomic diversity and to identify relevant diversity estimators that can be applied to ancient DNA data, in order to trace back the history of human social organizations in space and time