Dienekes mentioned today a new paper, Signatures of the pre-agricultural peopling processes in sub-Saharan Africa as revealed by the phylogeography of early Y chromosome lineages. Because of the recent comments in this space on the genetic history of Africa I was curious, but after reading it I have to say I can’t make much sense of the alphabet soup of haplogroups. Remember, there are different ways to capture and analyze the variation in one’s genes. A common activity is to sweep over the whole genome and focus on single nucleotide polymorphisms, variation at the base pair level. So my own analyses using ADMIXTURE focus on tens or hundreds of thousands of such markers. But there are other types of genomic variation, such as copy number, microsatellites, and minsatellites.
Additionally, much of the older human phylogeographic literature focused on mtDNA and Y chromosomal variance. For mtDNA it was partly a function of how easy it was to extract the genetic material (it’s copious on the cellular level). But perhaps more importantly these two types of variance aren’t subject to recombination. This means they are defined by clean phylogenetic trees which do not exhibit reticulation (recombination chops apart correlated markers and mixes & matches them) and presumably are not subject to natural selection, and so perfect for coalescent theory. So you can posit lineages related to each other by steps of sets of mutations, and also easily calculate the time until the last common ancestor for two different branches of the tree using a “molecular clock” model.
Here’s the abstract: