25,000-year-old Russian Cro-Magnons might have been hg H17

[Maciamo]

Two Gravettian-period skeletons from Sunghir (http://www.rc.ru/~ladygin/sungir/dna/index.php) (200 km east of Moscow) were tested for mtDNA.

The only mutation found to differ from the CRS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Reference_Sequence) was 16129A. The adolescent boy and girl shared the same mutation, and were therefore probably siblings.

According to the current PhyloTree (http://www.phylotree.org/tree/subtree_R0.htm), this mutation would correspond to haplogroup pre-H17. This is much more far-reaching and significant than one might think. It means that haplogroup H already existed 25,000 years ago, and not just anywhere, but in the middle of European Russia. If it did exist there, as the chances of it arising in Russia and spreading back to all Iberia and Morocco during the Mesolithic are close to nil, it means that H is older than previously thought. If a subclade had already developed in Russia 25,000 years ago, then haplogroup H* itslef might be 35,000 to 40,000 years old. It might well precede the arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe (from the Middle East).

[LeBrok]

Another interesting snippet of our history. Thanks Maciamo for finding and posting it for us for easier digestion.

[Maciamo]

What I don't understand is why professional population geneticists, university professors and testing companies alike do not notice such blatant inconsistencies.

Family Tree DNA, the Genographic Project and Genebase all write that mtDNA haplogroup H appeared between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago in the Near/Middle East.

Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, estimates that the "Helena clan", as he calls haplogroup H in his book The Seven Daughters of Eve, arose 20,000 years ago.

There are many other examples, and they almost always underestimate the age of haplogroups. This shows how fast genetic genealogy is evolving. Sykes' book was published in 2001 and is now completely outdated. He doesn't even mention mitochondrial haplogroup I and W among the European lineages. I am surprised that he is now doing a similar work on 9 Japanese lineages, although most of them are identical to China, Korea and indeed most of East Asia. What is the point of attributing meaningless "clans" to extremely old mtDNA haplogroups ? If at least he was looking at deep subclades that would be interesting, but it's not the case. In 2001, mtDNA was better studied than Y-DNA, but now the reverse is true.