Evidence of Late Pleistocene origin of Astyanax mexicanus cavefish

We found higher substitution rates in cavefish compared with surface fish, in accordance with a smaller cavefish population size which has allowed more rapid fixation of derived alleles present in the ancestral population. This result also implies that the Pachón cave population is much “younger” than previously estimated. The comparison of these data with simulations suggests that the Pachón cavefish population has probably been underground less than 30,000 years. This new time frame, together with other evidence, indicate that the evolution of cave phenotypes mainly involves the fixation of cryptic genetic variants present in surface fish populations within a short period of time.