Coop et al. (2009) found "a selected allele that strongly differentiates the French from both the Yoruba and Han could be strongly clinal across Europe, or at high frequency in Europe and absent elsewhere, or follow any other distribution according to the geographic nature of the selective pressure. However, we see that the global geographic distributions of these putatively selected alleles are largely determined simply by their frequencies in Yoruba, French and Han (Figure 3). The global distributions fall into three major geographic patterns that we interpret as non-African sweeps, west Eurasian sweeps and East Asian sweeps, respectively."