The Known Knowns and No-no's

Here's a quick review on the new paper "The Known Knowns and Known Unknowns"

Don't misunderstand.  Large parts of the paper are largely agreeable.  Actually, the Brandt crew has smartly navigated some treacherous waters and diplomatically questioned some of the more questionable studies.  However, some of the genetic studies coming out of SW Europe that this paper references are either too old or sucked.  This is hugely problematic for Beaker studies since the phenomenon is mostly accepted as having spread from this region.

From the paper:

If we followed the logic above, then the U haplotypes could likely be interpreted as a Mesolithic legacy.  However, the situation is more difficult to decipher in the case of haplogroup H, which has not been observed in Mesolithic Central Europe and Scandinavia but is present in Iberian huntergatherers (as shown above)

Let me put it succinctly.  Haplogroup H did not expand into Mesolithic Europe from Iberia because it wasn't in Iberia in the first place.  See my last post on the shellmiddens and then take a close look at the contexts of La Chora and La Pasiega.  The nominal typing of any of Hervella's H remains is questionable.  It is a very weak link.

Most of the subgroups in present-day Europe show late glacial or post-glacial coalescence dates, arguing for a re-expansion during the major warming phases after 15 kya (Achilli et al., 2004; Pereira et al., 2005; Soares et al., 2010).Subgroups H1, H3, and H5 are believed to have spread from a Western refugium in Franco-Cantabria based on largely overlapping dates (11.1 kya, 11.5 kya, 13.9 kya, respectively) (Soares et al., 2010) and the fact that these are the most common types in Western Europe.

I'm not sure how the coalescence ages of H1, H3 and H5 help the thin notion that these expanded from a LGM refuge in Iberia.  In fact, when you further break these clades into their subclades, not only are they too young (Loogvali, 2004 & Roostalu et al, 2007) but all three are present within archaeological contexts of the ancient Near East of the early Pottery Neolithic. 

What kind of convoluted logic gets us immediately from the Near East to Iberia where it doesn't expand, but then does expand to its original home via some unknown route, waits, then explodes like a pinata over Russia, Siberia and the rest of Europe?

While haplogroup H has been reported from Iberian Mesolithic individuals, the typing resolution unfortunately does not provide an unambiguous assignment to any of these subgroups (Chandler et al., 2005; Hervella et al., 2012).

Not that this ever mattered to begin with.  Regardless of the typing, the provenance and age of the remains selected by Chandler or Hervella were very tenuous to begin with.  See my last post on the middens.  I haven't got to Hervella yet, that will be another hour long post, but while Hervella's results are often cited, few have taken the time to look at situation surrounding the stuff being shoveled out of La Chora and La Pasiega.

However, all Middle Neolithic individuals from Treilles in Southern France could be assigned to subgroups H1 and H3 via coding region SNP typing (Lacan et al., 2011b).

Firstly, the Treilles individuals were Late Neolithic, not Middle Neolithic, and further came from the very cusp of the Chalcolithic.  With this was a host of technological changes creeping from the Eastern coast of Iberia along the Mediterranean coast of France as far as the Po Valley.  The Los Millares, Treilles and Remedello-I cultural changes reflect significant changes in the material culture of those regions.  Rather than the Treilles mtdna lines being native, it is equally possible that the combination of H1, H3, H5 and Haplogroup I pairings reflect an immigrant population from, say, nearby Sardinia. 

Taken together, this suggests that genetic elements of the ‘Neolithic package’, which had reached Central Europe via the Continental route (event A), also arrived in Southwest Europe through the Mediterranean route (Fig. 3A). However, the huntergatherer legacy is more dominant in the Iberian Neolithic compared with Central Europe, indicating a Neolithic transition with a larger contribution of the indigenous population [in Iberia] combined with a reduced impact of early farmers.

The Iberian Mesolithic almost completely imploded into a period of "archaeological silence", as described by Cortes-Sanchez (2012) while referring to Northeastern Spain.  (The same is true for the Mesetas, and with the exception of the Pyrenees, there's not much hope to believe in the prosperity of La Brana and his ilk in the Northwest of Iberia.

In fact, there isn't much reason to believe that Mesolithic Iberians fared well at all with the onslaught of Neolithic farmer immigration coming from three directions, not that they didn't already have problems with what Cortes-Sanchez called their "subsistence crisis".

My rant here is to draw attention to cards at the bottom of the house of cards.  There have been a lot of assumptions about ancient European DNA over the years that were built off of previous assumptions.  All I'm saying is that we need a solid foundation built on recent, high-resolution studies on remains that are invincibly provenanced.