There were two papers in Science which came out on the Y chromosome, Sequencing Y Chromosomes Resolves Discrepancy in Time to Common Ancestor of Males Versus Females and Low-Pass DNA Sequencing of 1200 Sardinians Reconstructs European Y-Chromosome Phylogeny. I can recommend what Dienekes had to say, and I wasn’t going to comment until I saw this egregious piece in The New Scientist: Arabian flights: Early humans diverged in 150 years. Because of the title I did not initially think that this had anything to do with the Y chromosome, but it turns out that the piece uses the finding that three primary non-African haplogroups diverged in rapid succession from each other as the hook for the headline. In fact not only does the Y not offer definitive accounts of human history, it doesn’t even necessarily tell us about the history of men. It’s a marker, not a time machine. To repeat: the history of a specific genetic locus is not the history of a population. It has to be said.
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