Really interesting article. Shows a very counterintuitive finding.
Which intuition of yours is it running counter to? Stature is pretty clearly a common target of selection, and there was already good evidence that positive selection was involved directly or indirectly.
What I find surprising is that their headline finding, of selection at TRPS1, wasn’t seen at all in a previous study of the same populations. (And also that they recapitulated a signal of selection in Bantu-speaking agriculturalists at LARGE, since a grad student here is currently looking at that gene.)
The idea of selection for Hunter-gathering runs against the (false) notion that hunter-gatherers are less evolved.
@glipsnort what is the time range of these selection events?
I haven’t studied the paper in any detail, but probably a range of fairly recent time periods. Long haplotype signals of selection don’t last more than 20 or 30 thousand years, so that would be a maximum. Some regions show evidence for selection since admixture with Bantu-speaking agriculturalists, which suggests that the selection has at least continued since the Bantu expansion brought the groups into close contact – so, within the last couple of thousand years.