Tutsis are less Nilotic than the Maasai
Last spring I was approached by some Tutsis in the Diaspora to analyze their genomes. The first thing that jumped out at me is how genetically similar Tutsis were to the Maasai. Since that time readers have suggested other datasets. One particular dataset was very rich in Sudanese ethnic groups. Generating a new PCA you […]
Africa, the churning continent
Martin Meredith’s The Fortunes of Africa glosses very quickly over one of the major reasons that the “great scramble” for the continent occurred in the late 19th century, the discovery of the usefulness of quinine as an anti-malarial agent. Perhaps because I’ve read Plagues and Peoples and The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History […]
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’s hidden people hold the keys to the past
I mentioned this in passing on my post on ASHG 2012, but it seems useful to make explicit. For the past few years there has been word of research pointing to connections between the Khoisan and the Cushitic people of Ethiopia. To a great extent in the paper which is forthcoming there is the likely […]
The Fulani have an old “Berber” (?) element
After the second Henn et al. paper I did download the data. Unfortunately there are only 62,000 SNPs intersecting with the HGDP. This is somewhat marginal for fine-grained ADMIXTURE analyses, though sufficient for PCA from what I recall. That being said, the intersection with the HapMap data sets runs from ~190,000 SNPs, to the full […]
Tutsi genetics, ii
In my post below, Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu, there were many comments. Some I did not post because they were rude, though they did ask valid questions. I will address those issues, but let me quote one comment:
That’s an interes…
The Sandawe: after the demographic flood
Over the past few days I’ve been trying to read a bit on the Sandawe. Most of the stuff I’ve been able to find is in the domain of linguistics, and is basically unintelligible to me in any substantive manner. The crux of the curiosity here …
The men of Africa
Khoikhoi on the move….
Dienekes mentioned today a new paper, Signatures of the pre-agricultural peopling processes in sub-Saharan Africa as revealed by the phylogeography of early Y chromosome lineages. Because of the recent comments in this s…
Genetic variation within Africa (and the world)
Last year a paper came out in Science which made a rather large splash, The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans by Tishkoff et al. Since it’s more than a year old I recommend that those of you curious about the details of the paper and don’t have academic access go through […]