The latest edition of The American Journal of Human Genetics has two papers using “old fashioned” uniparental markers to trace human migration out of Africa and Siberia respectively. I say old fashioned because the peak novelty of these techniques was around 10 years ago, before dense autosomal SNP marker analyses, let alone whole genome sequencing. But mtDNA, passed down the maternal line, and Y chromosomes, passed from father to son, are still useful. Prosaically they’re useful because the data sets are now so large for these sets of markers after nearly 20 years of surveying populations. More technically because these two regions of the genome do not recombine they lend themselves to excellent representation as a tree phylogeny. Finally, mtDNA in particular is particularly amenable to estimates via molecular clock methodologies (it has a region with a higher mutational rate, so you can sample a larger range of variation over a given number of base pairs; you can use STRs, which mutate rapidly, for Y chromosomes, but there seems to be a lot of controversy in dating).
The papers are The Arabian Cradle: Mitochondrial Relicts of the First Steps along the Southern Route out of Africa and Mitochondrial DNA and Y Chromosome Variation Provides Evidence for a Recent Common Ancestry between Native Americans and Indigenous Altaians. Dienekes has already commented on the first paper. I am not going to take a detailed position on either, but I have to add that we need to be very careful of extrapolating from maternal or paternal lineages, and, assuming that population turn over is low enough that we can make phylogeographic inferences about the past from the present. For example, if you look at mtDNA South Asians as a whole strongly cluster with East Asians and not Europeans, while if you look at Y chromosomes you see the reverse. The whole genome gives a more mixed picture. Additionally, ancient DNA analyses in Northern Eurasia are showing strong discontinuities between past and present populations. So coalescence back to last common ancestor between two different lineages in two different regions may actually be due to diversity in a common source population more recently, which entered into demographic expansion and replaced other groups.
If you need the papers, email me. Some of you know the alphabet soup of haplogroups better than I do. Below are two figures which I think give the top line results.
