Category: Africa Genetics
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The non-European admixture in Afrikaners
About seven years ago I got my hands on some white South African individuals from the Family Tree DNA database. It was immediately clear that a subset of them had […]
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Selection swimming against the genomic tide
One of the major issues that confuses people is that the distribution of a trait or gene is often only weakly correlated with overall phylogeny and the rest of the genome. To give a strange but classic example, the MHC loci are subject to strong balancing selection. This means that novel alleles do not substitute…
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Genetic variation and disease in Africa
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…