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 preference, and not rely on the constrained menu provided by others. There’s value in home cooking; you can flavor to your taste. Second, you never know what data people might leave on your doorstep. I’ve received the genotypes of three Somalis. Nothing too surprising, a touch more Cushitic than the Ethiopians in Behar et al., but interesting nonetheless.
Also, you can see how ADMIXTURE tends to come to weird conclusions in certain circumstances. Below is a K = 12 run ~50,000 SNPs. I’ve included in a few Behar et al. and HGDP populations to the Henn et al. set, as well as pruned a lot of the African groups which seem redundant in terms of information. I’ve added a few geographically informative labels as well.
Observe below that there is a Fulani cluster. I think this is pretty much an artifact. At K = 7 the Fulani have a majority component …