All the commotion within Africa
Unless you’ve been asleep, you probably know by now that the Reich lab has come out with a paper that analyzes the remains of 4 individuals from western Cameroon, dating to 8,000 and 3,000 years ago (2 of each, with one of the older individuals yielding 18.5x coverage DNA!). The location and timing both matter. […]
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 […]
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 […]