In the recent paper, Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure, there was a section natural selection. Since my post on the paper was already very long I didn’t address this dynamic.
But now I want to highlight this section:
The functional category that displays the most extreme allele frequency differentiation between present day San and ancient southern Africans is ‘‘response to radiation’’ (Z = 3.3 compared to the genome-wide average). To control for the possibility that genes in this category show an inflated allele frequency differentiation in general, we computed the same statistic for the Mbuti central African rainforest hunter-gatherer group but found no evidence for selection affecting the response to radiation category.
…
We speculate that the signal for selection in the response to radiation category in the San could be due to exposure to sunlight associated with the life of the Khomani and Juj’hoan North people in the Kalahari Basin, which has become a refuge for hunter-gatherer populations in the last millenia due to encroachment by pastoralist and agriculturalist groups.
I’m a bit puzzled here, because the implication seems to be that the San populations are darker than they were in the past. And yet earlier this summer I saw a talk which strongly suggested that there was a selection in modern Bushman populations for the derived variant of SLC24A5, presumably introduced through admixture from East African populations with Eurasian admixture.
In comparison to their neighbors the San are quite light-skinned, so it’s a reasonable supposition that they have been subject to natural selection recently. The Hadza, in contrast, seem to have the same complexion as their Bantu neighbors.