Genomic analyses inform on migration events during the peopling of Eurasia
Introduction In the past two decades, considerable research effort has been made to sequence the human genome and subsequently trying to unveil the demographic history underlying the genetic patterns of diversity we observe today across the globe. Here we discuss a recent research article by Pagani et al. 1 that addresses genomic diversity and historic migration patterns of human populations in Eurasia. The first human genome was sequenced in 2003 by the Human Genome Project2 and larger projects rapidly followed, such as HAPMAP3 and the 1000 Genomes Project4, largely due to the considerable technological improvement of sequencing technologies. Despite being extremely useful tools for a number of studies, these genome databases have some important sampling caveats that limit their use to address some particular topics. Indeed, HAPMAP sampled a reduced number of populations whereas the 1000 Genomes sampled a large number of populations but did not attempt to sample individuals of “pure” ancestry. For instance, the sampling in North America focused considerably on city-based individuals that were found to have a very diverse recent ancestry thus blurring the signal of ancient colonisation history. Importantly, in the studied paper, a considerable effort was made on sampling a broad panel of 447 …
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