When Zack first mooted the idea of the Harappa Ancestry Project I had no idea what was coming down the pipe. I wonder if his daughter and wife are curious as to what’s happened to their computer! Since collecting the first wave of participants he’s been a result generating machine. Today he produced a fascinating three dimensional PCA (modifying Doug McDonald’s Javascript) using his “Reference 1″ data set. He rescaled the dimensions appropriately so that they reflect how much of the genetic variance they explain. The largest principal component of variance is naturally Africa vs. non-Africa, the second is west to east in Eurasia, and the third is a north to south Eurasian axis.

I decided to be a thief and take Zack’s Javascript and resize it a bit to fit the width of my blog, blow up the font size, as well as change the background color and aspects of positioning. All to suit my perverse taste. You see the classic “L” shaped distribution familiar from the two-dimensional plots, but observe the “pucker” in the third dimension of South Asian, and to a lesser extent Southeast Asian, populations.

The the topology of the first three independent dimensions of ...