Based on our haplotype-resolved SV catalogue, we observed that individuals of African ancestry exhibit, on average, 27% more heterozygous deletions than individuals from other populations (mean of 1,705 versus 1,342), consistent with SNPs28 (Extended Data Fig. 5). The relative proportion of deletion- versus SNP-affected sequence, however, showed a 13% excess in non-African compared to African populations (ratio 1.64 versus 1.45). Principal component analyses with different SV classes generally recapitulated continental population structure and admixture (Extended Data Fig. 6 and Supplementary Note). Our analysis further allowed us to identify a catalogue of 6,495 ancestry-informative MEI markers of potential value to population genetics history and forensics research (Extended Data Fig. 5, Supplementary Table 4).
