Recent human effective population size estimated from linkage disequilibrium

Abstract

Effective population size (N_e) determines the amount of genetic variation, genetic drift, and linkage disequilibrium (LD) in populations. Here, we present the first genome-wide estimates of human effective population size from LD data. Chromosome-specific effective population size was estimated for all autosomes and the X chromosome from estimated LD between SNP pairs N_e are lower than previously published estimates based on heterozygosity, possibly because they represent one or more bottlenecks in human population size that occurred ∼10,000 to 200,000 years ago.