L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes is a book I reference a great deal. Cavalli-Sforza is the godfather of the field of historical population genetics, the phylogeography of humankind. Though his work was on classical autosomal markers, the huge literature which drew inferences from Y chromosomal and mtDNA variation followed in the wake of the The History and Geography of Human Genes. Spencer Wells, the director of the Genographic Project, alluded to Cavalli-Sforza’s influence in The Journey of Man. But at this point I think we have to be very careful of making inferences about the past from present patterns of genetic variation. This is made most stark by the fact that ancient DNA, which is a snapshot of the past, as opposed to an inference of it, sometimes diverges from our expectations based on present patterns of variation in surprising ways.
This to me is the big lesson to draw from a new paper in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B, The peopling of Europe and the cautionary tale of Y chromosome lineage R-M269. The results focus on two issues. First, the distribution …