Harappa Ancestry Project

Dienekes has a word of caution about choosing reference populations and admixture results.

Consider a sample of 25 Mexicans from the HapMap and 25 Yoruba from the Hapmap, 25 Iberian Spanish from the 1000 Genomes Project, and 25 Pima from the HGDP as parental populations. We obtain for our Mexican sample:

• 59.7% European
• 36.9% "Native American"
• 3.4% African

Let's run a final experiment with just the Mexicans, Spanish, and Yoruba, i.e., with no Native American samples. At K=3 we obtain:

• 70% "Native American"
• 29.7% European
• 0.4% African

The "Native American" component has increased again! The explanation is simple: as we exclude less admixed Native American groups, Mexicans appear (comparatively) more Native American. The "Native American pole" has shifted, and so has the relative position of populations between them.

In other terms, what is labeled "Native American" in the three experiments is not the same: in the first one it is anchored on the more unadmixed Pima, in the last one in the more admixed Mexicans.

Thus, it seems that unadmixed reference samples are much more useful in getting good results from Admixture.

Then he runs Admixture on the Reich et al dataset for South Asians and tries to estimate the relationship between the Ancestral North Indian percentage computed by Reich et al and his K=2 admixture results on the same data.

Dienekes then included South Asian Dodecad participants in the analysis and ran a K=4 admixture analysis on Reich et al + Dodecad South Asian data, including Yoruba and Beijing Chinese from the HapMap to catch any African or East Asian ancestry.

Here are the admixture results for the reference populations:

The R² correlation between the West Eurasian admixture component and the Reich et al ANI component is 0.98 which is good. His relationship equation comes out to:

ANI = 0.779*WestEurasian + 39.674

Using this relationship, he calculates the ANI and ASI (Ancestral South Indian) components for Dodecad project members. My results (DOD128) are as follows:

I should point out that due to my recent Egyptian ancestry, my ANI result is wrong since it's collecting all of the non-African Egyptian in there too.

Also, in the case of Razib, I don't think his East Asian 14.4% should be separated out from his ANI-ASI like that. At least some of it should form part of his ASI percentage in my opinion.

Otherwise, this seems like a very good exercise by Dienekes.