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The increasing availability of large-scale autosomal genetic variation data sampled from world-wide geographic areas, coupled with advances in the statistical methodology to analyse these data, is showcasing the power of DNA as a major tool to gain insights into the demographic history of humans and other organisms. Here we review statistical techniques that shed light on a specific aspect of demography: the detection and description of admixture events where two or more genetically distinct groups intermixed at one or more times in the past. In particular we give an overview of some of the widely used methods to identify and describe admixture events using autosomal DNA from unrelated individuals, with a particular focus on analysing biallelic Single-Nucleotide-Polymorphsim (SNP) markers., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Patterns of genetic variation in natural populations are shaped by, and hence carry valuable information about, the underlying recombination process. In the past five years, the increasing availability of large-scale population genetic data on dense sets of markers, coupled with advances in statistical methods for extracting information from these data, have led to several important advances in our understanding of the recombination process in humans. These advances include the identification of large numbers of 'hotspots', where recombination appears to take place considerably more frequently than in the surrounding sequence, and the identification of DNA sequence motifs that are associated with the locations of these hotspots.