Very readable review, Gene Discovery for Complex Traits: Lessons from Africa. It’s open access, so I recommend it. The summary:
The genetics of African populations reveals an otherwise “missing layer” of human variation that arose between 100,000 and 5 million years ago. Both the vast number of these ancient variants and the selective pressures they survived yield insights into genes responsible for complex traits in all populations.
The main issue I might have is I’m not sure that focusing on 5 million year time spans is particularly useful. Rather, looking at the last major bottleneck for modern humans before the “Out of Africa” event would be key, since that’s when a lot of the common variation would disappear, and very rare variants probably don’t have deep time depth in any case. With all that being said, the qualitative analysis is on point.
One of the major issues in the “SNP-chip” era has been that ascertainment of variation has been skewed toward Europeans. Though more recent techniques have tried to fix this…this review points out that if you by necessity constrain the SNPs of interest to those that vary outside of Africa (most of the world’s population), you are taking may alleles private to Africa off the table. This is relevant because the “Out of Africa” bottleneck ~50,000 years ago means that African populations harbor a lot more genetic variation than non-African populations do.
The move to high-quality whole genome sequencing obviates these concerns. As a matter of course African variation will be “picked up” since the marker set is not constrained ahead of time.
Importantly the authors focus on South Africa and the Xhosa population. This group has about ~20% Khoisan genetic ancestry, which is very diverse, and, very distinct, from that of the remaining ~80% of its ancestry. With its large African immigrant population and highly diverse native groups, some of them quite admixed, South Africa could actually provide some hard-to-substitute value in biomedical genetics.