Eurasia became a melting pot during the Holocene
One of the things you notice when you look at genome-wide data are peculiar populations that seem to be shifted on PCA and other metrics in relation to exotic genetic affinities. For example, Sardinians, Japanese, and Taiwanese aborigines exhibit this pattern. When looking at Han Chinese data, many of the southern samples seem a bit […]
The Belgians did not invent the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, who have different origins
Since I resurrected the analysis of Tutsi genotypes last year I’ve been getting a fair number of emails and messages from people. The issue is that periodically someone, usually, but not always, a white male, will explain that “actually, Tutsis and Hutus aren’t real ethnic groups, and were invented by the Belgian colonialists….” Many people […]
PCA remains the swiss-army-knife to explore population structure
genotype-based methods? — Razib Khan (@razibkhan) November 15, 2017 I put up a poll without context yesterday to gauge people about what methods they preferred when it came to population genetic structure.* PCA came out on top by a plural majority. More explicitly model-based methods, such as Structure/Admixture, come in right behind them. Curiously, the […]
The population genetic structure of Northeast Africa
The major frontier in the understanding of human population genetic structure in the next five years is going to be Africa. There are several reasons for this. The ‘standard model’ of late has been that a group of humans left eastern Africa ~50,000 years ago, and swept across the world in one go. Though Africa […]
Africa in 12 ADMIXTURE chunks
Some have asked what the point is in poking around African population structure when Tishkoff et al. and Henn et al. have done such a good job in terms of coverage. First, it is nice to run your own analyses so you can slice & dice to your preferen…
“Asian” in all the right places
mtDNA haplogroup G1a2
The pith: In this post I examine the most recent results from 23andMe for my family in the context of familial and regional (Bengal) history. I also use these results to offer up a framework for the ethnognesis of the eastern Ben…
To classify humanity is not that hard
In my post below I quoted my interview L. L. Cavalli-Sforza because I think it gets to the heart of some confusions which have emerged since the finding that most variation on any given locus is found within populations, rather than between them. The standard figure is that 85% of genetic variance is within continental […]
Differences in swine flu response by population
Remember when there was talk about how SARS might disproportionately hit Chinese in comparison to other populations? Here’s a new paper on how Swine Flu may progress in different populations, Clinical Findings and Demographic Factors Associated With ICU Admission in Utah Due to Novel 2009 Influenza A(H1N1) Infection: The ICU cohort of 47 influenza patients […]