Abstract
BACKGROUND: Inferring history from genomic sequences is challenging and problematic because chromosomes are mosaics of thousands of small Identicalby-descent (IBD) fragments, each of them having their own unique story. However, the main events in recent evolution might be deciphered from comparative analysis of numerous loci. A paradox of why humans, whose effective population size is only 10(4), have nearly three million frequent SNPs is formulated and examined. RESULTS: We studied 5398 loci evenly covering all human autosomes. Common haplotypes built from frequent SNPs that are present in people from various populations have been examined. We demonstrated highly non-random arrangement of alleles in common haplotypes. Abundance of mutually exclusive pairs of common haplotypes that have different alleles at every polymorphic position (so-called Yin/Yang haplotypes) was found in 56% of loci. A novel widely spread category of common haplotypes named Mosaic has been described. Mosaic consists of numerous pieces of Yin/Yang haplotypes and represents an ancestral stage of one of them. Scenarios of possible appearance of large number of frequent human SNPs and their habitual arrangement in Yin/Yang common haplotypes have been evaluated with an advanced genomic simulation algorithm. CONCLUSIONS: Computer modeling demonstrated that the observed arrangement of 2.9 million frequent SNPs could not originate from a sole stand-alone population. A "Great Admixture" event has been proposed that can explain peculiarities with frequent SNP distributions. This Great Admixture presumably occurred 100-300 thousand years ago between two ancestral populations that had been separated from each other about a million years ago. Our programs and algorithms can be applied to other species to perform evolutionary and comparative genomics.