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 which is modal in West Africa & Bantu speakers, and a minority component which is identical to the one modal in Mozabite Berbers from Algeria. The Mozabites reside in the far northern Sahara, and their modal component drops off as one goes east toward western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. I suspect that what is showing up in ADMIXTURE is the ancient hybridization of the Fulani, and perhaps their demographic expansion from this core group. We have some glimmers of the prehistory of the Fulani, and no expectation for them to be such a distinctive cluster, so I naturally jump to these inferences. But it does make me reconsider the nature of the “Sandawe,” “Mbuti” or “San” clusters in ADMIXTURE. These populations are culturally distinctive in deep ways from their neighbors, so a reflexive inference one might make is that they’re “pure” ancient substrate groups which have been overlain and marginalized by their Bantu neighbors. But their prehistory is far murkier than the Fulani because of their geographical isolation, so there is far less to go on. These “ancient” isolated groups themselves may have gone through the same sort of distinctive recent ethnogenesis processes which we presume occurred with the Fulani (also, in the plot below the Biaka are pure; but in most of the bar plots they have a minor element which they share with their neighbors, probably due to greater admixture and interaction between western Pygmies and their Bantu neighbors than among the easter ones).