Due to the shared ancestry of all humans, only a modest number of variants show large frequency differences among populations. We observed 762,000 variants that are rare (defined as having frequency <0.5%) within the global sample but much more common (>5% frequency) in at least one population (Fig. 3a). Several populations have relatively large numbers of these variants, and these are typically genetically or geographically distinct within their continental group (LWK in Africa, PEL in the Americas, JPT in East Asia, FIN in Europe, and GIH in South Asia; see Supplementary Table 5). Drifted variants within such populations may reveal phenotypic associations that would be hard to identify in much larger global samples15.
