Another paper is out which falls under the category of using genetics to understand human history; Analysis of Genomic Admixture in Uyghur and Its Implication in Mapping Strategy:
The rationale for these sorts of admixture studies is medical; you need to know the genetic background of a population to make sure that you don’t infer spurious assocations due to population substructure. Imagine that you have a study group and allele B on gene 1 is strongly associated with a higher incidence of disease X. This is important information which is going to be relevant for targeting and treatment. But what if you find out later that your study group consisted of two historically distinct populations, and allele B is only found in one of these. Additionally, within this population allele B is not associated with disease X. One can infer then that the original finding was simply due to the ...
