The evolutionary history of hominins has been characterized by significant dietary changes, which include the introduction of meat eating, cooking, and the changes associated with plant and animal domestication. Decades of anthropological research have been devoted to elucidating this dietary history, in part because these shifts were likely associated with major anatomical and cultural changes (e.g., the increase in relative brain size and the advent of modern civilization via agriculture). However, this reconstruction is also crucial for understanding the evolutionary context of our modern diets and the diseases often associated with them.
In parallel with the historical reconstruction of hominin diets, molecular evolutionary analyses have been used to interrogate the genome for signals of genetic adaptations to different dietary regimes. A major advantage of many evolutionary genetic approaches is that they do not necessarily require strong assumptions about the specific genes and alleles that were targets of diet-related selective pressures. For this reason, evolutionary genetic analyses have the potential not only to inform existing adaptive hypotheses of hominin dietary history, but also to help generate new ones.
Here, we bring together these two areas of inquiry, namely anthropology and evolutionary genetics, to highlight their recent findings related to human dietary history and to discuss the limitations of different approaches. We start by providing a brief overview of the major dietary shifts in hominin evolution and discussing the evolutionary genetics methods and approaches used to identify signals of natural selection. We then review the results of genetic studies aimed at detecting the loci that played a major role in dietary adaptations and conclude by outlining the potential of future studies in this area.
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