MtDNA J & T colonised Europe from the Near East in the late Paleolithic & Mesolithic
I came across this very enlightening study by Pela et al. (2012) : Mitochondrial DNA Signals of Late Glacial Recolonization of Europe from Near Eastern Refugia.
Here is the abstract:
"Human populations, along with those of many other species, are thought to have contracted into a number of refuge areas at the height of the last Ice Age. European populations are believed to be, to a large extent, the descendants of the inhabitants of these refugia, and some extant mtDNA lineages can be traced to refugia in Franco-Cantabria (haplogroups H1, H3, V, and U5b1), the Italian Peninsula (U5b3), and the East European Plain (U4 and U5a). Parts of the Near East, such as the Levant, were also continuously inhabited throughout the Last Glacial Maximum, but unlike western and eastern Europe, no archaeological or genetic evidence for Late Glacial expansions into Europe from the Near East has hitherto been discovered. Here we report, on the basis of an enlarged whole-genome mitochondrial database, that a substantial, perhaps predominant, signal from mitochondrial haplogroups J and T, previously thought to have spread primarily from the Near East into Europe with the Neolithic population, may in fact reflect dispersals during the Late Glacial period, ∼19–12 thousand years (ka) ago."
They make a very case, I must say. Their charts show well how whole branches of J and T are geographically restricted to either Europe (J1c, J2a1, J2b1, T2b, T2e, T2f) or the Near East (J1b, J1d, J2a2, J2b2, T1b, T2c, T2d).
There is only one case of a T sample found in Mesolithic Europe at present, but it was in Sweden, far enough from the Near East to assume that the authors are right. The inhabitants of Mesolithic Sweden would have arrived just after the melting of the ice cap (c. 14,000 ybp) and had very little outside immigration since then until the late Neolithic (6,000 ybp).
I came across this very enlightening study by Pela et al. (2012) : Mitochondrial DNA Signals of Late Glacial Recolonization of Europe from Near Eastern Refugia.
Here is the abstract:
"Human populations, along with those of many other species, are thought to have contracted into a number of refuge areas at the height of the last Ice Age. European populations are believed to be, to a large extent, the descendants of the inhabitants of these refugia, and some extant mtDNA lineages can be traced to refugia in Franco-Cantabria (haplogroups H1, H3, V, and U5b1), the Italian Peninsula (U5b3), and the East European Plain (U4 and U5a). Parts of the Near East, such as the Levant, were also continuously inhabited throughout the Last Glacial Maximum, but unlike western and eastern Europe, no archaeological or genetic evidence for Late Glacial expansions into Europe from the Near East has hitherto been discovered. Here we report, on the basis of an enlarged whole-genome mitochondrial database, that a substantial, perhaps predominant, signal from mitochondrial haplogroups J and T, previously thought to have spread primarily from the Near East into Europe with the Neolithic population, may in fact reflect dispersals during the Late Glacial period, ∼19–12 thousand years (ka) ago."
They make a very case, I must say. Their charts show well how whole branches of J and T are geographically restricted to either Europe (J1c, J2a1, J2b1, T2b, T2e, T2f) or the Near East (J1b, J1d, J2a2, J2b2, T1b, T2c, T2d).
There is only one case of a T sample found in Mesolithic Europe at present, but it was in Sweden, far enough from the Near East to assume that the authors are right. The inhabitants of Mesolithic Sweden would have arrived just after the melting of the ice cap (c. 14,000 ybp) and had very little outside immigration since then until the late Neolithic (6,000 ybp).