Overcoming the dichotomy: new insights into the genomic diversity of open and isolated European populations

Human populations are often dichotomized into \"isolated\" and \"open\" using cultural and/or geographical barriers to gene flow as differential criteria. Although widespread, the use of these alternative categories could obscure further heterogeneity due to inter-population differences in effective size, growth rate, and timing or amount of gene flow. We compared intra and interpopulation variation measures combining novel and literature data relative to 87,818 autosomal SNPs in 14 open populations and 10 geographic and/or linguistic European isolates. Patterns of intra-population diversity were found to vary significantly more among isolates, probably due to differential levels of drift an