In humans, the pervasiveness of hard sweeps (that is, for strong selection to drive the rapid fixation of new mutations in particular populations) has been strongly argued against. As an alternative, various selective processes categorized as balancing selection could maintain genetic variation in populations. However, the actual impact of balancing selection on the human genome was unknown. Now, DeGiorgio et al. have developed two composite likelihood ratio tests that model the spatial distribution of polymorphism expected near a site under long-term balancing selection. Applied to whole-genome data from unrelated Africans and Europeans, these methods detected several genes at the HLA region, which is a locus well-known to be under balancing selection in humans. In addition to many previously identified loci, the tests detected new sites displaying signatures of balancing selection.