June 22, 2012

Assessing East Africans of Pagani et al. (2012) using 'weac2'

Thanks to the publication of new data from Pagani et al. (2012), we now have 235 more individuals from East Africa, mainly Ethiopians, but also Somalis and South Sudanese with dense genotype data.

Naturally, I wanted to make sure that everything was in order, so I applied the 'weac2' calculator on the new data. Here are the normalized median admixture proportions:



I have also created population portraits for the 12 different populations, which appear to show rather homogeneous samples.

Here are the descriptions of the data from the original paper:

The populations sampled (numbers) were the Semitic-speaking Amhara (26) and Tigray (21); the Cushitic-speaking Oromo (21), Ethiopian Somali (17), and Afar (12); the Omotic-speaking Ari Cultivators (24), Ari Blacksmiths (17), and Wolayta (8); and the Nilotic-speaking Gumuz (19) and Anuak (23). In addition to these groups, we also generated South Sudanese data from mixed populations (24) and Somali data from Somali populations (23).


Newer versions of the Dodecad tools will of course take into account the new samples, which ought to  help better define the "East_African" component that often arises at higher levels of detail.

And, of course kudos to all researchers who make their data publicly available and hence provide genome bloggers such as myself with much appreciated "fuel" for their inquiries.

5 comments:

Lank said...

Newer versions of the Dodecad tools will of course take into account the new samples, which ought to help better define the "East_African" component that often arises at higher levels of detail.

This is exactly what I would like to see. The ADMIXTURE run from the study had three different East African components (Hadza, Ethiopian-Omotic, generic East African). Personally, I would be more interested in how a single Ancestral East African population would look at lower K values.

Onur Dincer said...
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Onur Dincer said...
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DocG said...

Interesting that the Ari have the strongest paleo-African representation. Their highly idiosyncratic musical style, characterized by closely interwoven independent polyphonic parts, is strikingly similar to that of a great many Pygmy and Bushmen groups.

Onur Dincer said...

Based on these results and the results of the Pagani et al. 2012 study, there is a clear genetic and racial divergence between the Afro-Asiatic speakers and the Nilo-Saharan speakers of East Africa: the former are racially Caucasoid-Negroid hybrids whereas the latter are racially Negroids.