title: Erratum for the Report "Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture in Eastern Africa" (previously titled "Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture throughout the African continent") by M. Gallego Llorente, E. R. Jones, A. Eriksson, V. Siska, K. W. Arthur, J. W. Arthur, M. C. Curtis, J. T. Stock, M. Coltorti, P. Pieruccini, S. Stretton, F. Brock, T. Higham, Y. Park, M. Hofreiter, D. G. Bradley, J. Bhak, R. Pinhasi, A. Manica.
abstract: In the Report “Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture in Eastern Africa,” the results were affected by a bioinformatics error. A script necessary to convert the input produced by samtools v0.1.19 to be compatible with PLINK was not run when merging the ancient genome, Mota, with the contemporary populations SNP panel, leading to homozygote positions to the human reference genome being dropped as missing data (the analysis of admixture with Neandertals and Denisovans was not affected). When those positions were included, 255,922 SNP out of 256,540 from the contemporary reference panel could be called in Mota. These changes are reflected in the corrected Fig. 2B, fig. S6, and table S5. Tables S6 and S7 have been removed from the corrected Supplementary Material, because there is no detectable Western Eurasian component in Yoruba and Mbuti. The conclusion of a migration into East Africa from Western Eurasia, and more precisely from a source genetically close to the early Neolithic farmers, is not affected. However, the geographic extent of the genetic impact of this migration was overestimated: The Western Eurasian backflow mostly affected East Africa and only a few Sub-Saharan populations; the Yoruba and Mbuti do not show higher levels of Western Eurasian ancestry compared to Mota. Hence, the title and abstract of the published paper did not accurately represent the geographical extent of the admixture, and both have been corrected accordingly. The authors acknowledge Pontus Skoglund and David Reich for detecting these problems.