What I also find strange about that study is how the hell did they manage to create this 19.8% of sephardic, when their same study for haplogroup J is about 9% for al Spain !! And all the EXACT 10.3% of E, ALL attributed to the north african rule. I don't know what the hell is crossing their minds...
I agree that Adams' study is completely off the mark in its "ethnic" attribution of haplogroups. It is a good example of geneticists with very little knowledge of history who jump to conclusions based on their own distorted and partial view of history.
One of the main reason I created a population genetics section on this website is to "set things straight" and denounce the historical aberrations I read in reports by geneticists. I was the first to say that R1b couldn't possibly have spread from the Franco-Cantabrian refuge 12,000 years ago, and the first to link the Maykop culture as the probable "R1b Proto-Indo-European-age/Bronze-age homeland". Many archaeologists, including the popular David Anthony, still think that Maykop was not Indo-European. Ironically Anthony's book
The Horse, The Wheel, and Language provided the archaeological evidence I needed to confirm my hypothesis, which was originally based only on linguistics and by comparing the age and geographic origin of older R1b subclades. The two converged around northern Anatolia and the North Caucasus. It is a shame that Anthony and other specialists of IE matters do not use genetics at all to confirm their own theories. Anthony explains that hardly any archaeologists have a background in linguistics, and vice-versa. He claims that Jim Mallory may be the only specialist of Indo-European studies trained in both fields. Apparently no renowned scientist is trained in archaeology/history, linguistics and population genetics. That is sad. As I was already a trained historian and linguist, I decided to study population genetics to fill that gap.
All this to say that I am not surprised that Susan Adams et al. could make such gross historical misassessments. But it doesn't mean it was intentional either. Almost any well-educated Spaniard would know better Spanish history than Adams, apparently. That doesn't mean that their Y-DNA results are wrong or were made up. I seriously doubt so. It would put her and her colleagues' career in jeopardy if it happened to be completely invalidated by other studies.