For thousands of years, the potato has been the backbone of life in the Andes — and it appears to have left a permanent mark on human evolution. A new study co-led by UCLA and the University at Buffalo found that Indigenous people in Peru today carry an average of 10 copies of the salivary amylase gene AMY1, which helps break down starch in the mouth. That is two to four copies more than any of the other populations examined, making them the world's most efficient starch digesters.
10,000 Years of Potato Farming Wrote a 'Digestive Superpower' Into Andean DNA
Indigenous Peruvians carry more copies of the starch-digesting AMY1 gene than any other population on Earth — an adaptation that natural selection honed over roughly 10,000 years of potato farming, new research in Nature Communications shows.
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