Does the human genome look “domesticated” because of bottlenecking?

I think the answer is yes. I heard somewhere once (on a documentary I think) that the human genome looks domesticated, which throws up amusing and interesting images of humans having accidentally domesticated ourselves. However, I think it was probably just that we seem to have gone through a bottleneck process some time in the past (which is basically where the population drops down to a small number of individuals, and then grows again from that small pool). This results in a large group of people having fairly little genetic diversity, which is one of the main features of domesticated species (presumably because they went through a kind of artificial bottleneck, in that we bred all the individuals we wanted from a small pool of desirable individuals).

We know that non-African humans went through a bottleneck because there is more genetic diversity within Africa than there is outside of it, indicating that a fairly small group of individuals (perhaps more than once) migrated out of Africa and then populated the rest of the planet. Interestingly, bottlenecking may be why we have 2 fewer chromosomes than other apes (46 vs 48) – basically two chromosomes fused together in our ancestors, and the chances of that spreading throughout the population is pretty tiny unless the population is small. (This would have happened before the migration bottlenecking, because African humans have the same number of chromosomes as non-African humans.)

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