No offence to the fine citizens of the Republic of Botswana, which is one of the nicer countries in the old Old World. But there's hype about humanity coming from that region sooo....
There's an interesting side-note in the Silver Siberian Fox's thread; that the bio-arxiv might be putting Nature (and peer-review generally) out of business, but... ehhh. The mathematicians are already there with the regular arxiv, I'm told. I do think there's a case for forcing authors to get editors. So bioRχiv shouldn't pop the champagne yet.
Anyway, although Europeans will preach at you that mtDNA is only half a population, that counts mainly for Europeans. We're the ones with the taboo against cousin-fracking. Outside Europe, tribes tend not to outmarry; they just move, and bring their women. So I'm not paying too much attention to the naysayers. Okay... maybe a little.
Business Insider, much as I have distrusted them in the past, offers the most cogent critique (or quotes the best, anyway), from Ryan Raaum at Lehman College. He points out that the study did not find the common ancestrix of Botswana "L0" and everyone else. They just found L0. So the ancestrix could have come from elsewhere, sent L0 across the Zambezi (where she stayed), and multiplied at home.
Also by that time there were already humans all over Africa and, indeed, in Eurasia. Not least, the so-called Ghost Populations, like the Neanders. So although the L-crew were the baddest bitches in Africa, such that no other mtDNA survives, they did subsume others. By the time they got to the northeast Horn of Africa, which is what I as a nonblack care about, they'd already absorbed a lot of these populations en route. This bubble-graph is pretty cool.
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