Relationship between rice farming and polygenic scores potentially linked to agriculture in China

• Main Authors: Chen Zhu, Thomas Talhelm, Yingxiang Li, Gang Chen, Jiong Zhu, Jun Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Royal Society 2021-08-01
• Series: Royal Society Open Science
• Subjects: rice farming; agriculture; genetic adaptation; polygenic scores; China
• Online Access: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210382

Following domestication in the lower Yangtze River valley 9400 years ago, rice farming spread throughout China and changed lifestyle patterns among Neolithic populations. Here, we report evidence that the advent of rice domestication and cultivation may have shaped humans not only culturally but also genetically. Leveraging recent findings from molecular genetics, we construct a number of polygenic scores (PGSs) of behavioural traits and examine their associations with rice cultivation based on a sample of 4101 individuals recently collected from mainland China. A total of nine polygenic traits and genotypes are investigated in this study, including PGSs of height, body mass index, depression, time discounting, reproduction, educational attainment, risk preference, ADH1B rs1229984 and ALDH2 rs671. Two-stage least-squares estimates of the county-level percentage of cultivated land devoted to paddy rice on the PGS of age at first birth (b = −0.029, p = 0.021) and ALDH2 rs671 (b = 0.182, p < 0.001) are both statistically significant and robust to a wide range of potential confounds and alternative explanations. These findings imply that rice farming may influence human evolution in relatively recent human history.