Beyond trees and European trees

Submitted for your approval, a very important post and preprint from Dr. Joseph Pickrell, Identifying targets of natural selection in human and dog evolution. If you read the preprint there's a lot of good stuff. Dienekes highlighted the most relevant aspect: representation of genetic relationships with phylogenetic trees mask the likely reality of gene flow and admixture. In the guts of the paper though Pickrell et al. use their framework to identify some novel patterns. For example, that Cambodians may be descended in small part from some basal Eurasian lineage (~15 percent), perhaps their equivalent of "Ancient South Indians"? Using ADMIXTURE and such it has long been evident that there's something funny there. My own working assumption was that the relatives of "Ancient South Indians" could be found in Southeast Asia, though these results (preliminary as they are) might imply something even more interesting. Second, there is a tidbit which ...