# Population Genetics > mtDNA Haplogroups >  MtDNA J & T colonised Europe from the Near East in the late Paleolithic & Mesolithic

## Maciamo

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).

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## Anthro-inclined

So These HG's Would Have Migrated Back To Northern Europe In The Post LGM At The Same Time As The Native European Ones Or Later? Or Would All Have Recolonized The North In One Wave Like The Populating Of The Americas?

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## ElHorsto

Intriguing article, thanks!

Some vague interpretations:
Although the HG frequencies probably do not match exactly aDNA Atlantic_med, they probably were just masked by subsequent migrations, in south europe, e.g. neolithic wave. Britain and south scandinavia has still plenty, besides Balkans.

Finland has lowest frequencies which is not surprising due to minimum Atlantic_med, highest North, and possibly more uralic lineages.

But Basque country is again surprising by having the lowest mtDNA J and T in europe (http://www.eupedia.com/europe/europe...requency.shtml). Are Basque mtDNA lineages more neolithic?

Overall, T and J occur everywhere in europe and differing frequencies for such old HGs are certainly not expressive anymore.

And part of T and J still made it to europe in the neolithic.

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## ElHorsto

The article comes up with slightly different figures than eupedia, so my post is probably not quite accurate anymore, sorry.

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## spongetaro

Which Y haplogroups do yo think carried the men who came with J and T females?

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## Maciamo

> Which Y haplogroups do yo think carried the men who came with J and T females?


That's a very good question, and a very hard one to answer. I want to say that both *I2** and *R1a** are good candidates. Here are my arguments :

1) Ken Nordtvedt estimates the age for Y-haplogroup I2 around 21,000 ybp. This matches the time frame of the latter part of the Last Glacial Maximum (24,000 to 19,000 ybp). The migration from the LGM refuge in the Near East (or perhaps even from Greece) back to Europe would have occurred _after_ 19,000 ybp, roughly at the time of the split between I2a1 and I2a2. 

The estimate age for R1a also matches the LGM. R1a is unlikely to have weathered in the LGM in Eastern Europe, which would have been far colder then than today and therefore virtually impossible to live in at the height of the last glaciation. In fact, both I2 and R1a probably lived somewhere between the Balkans and Anatolia during the LGM. Both could have brought mtDNA J and T when they migrated north afterwards. 

2) Although I* and I2* are found in the Middle East, modern subclades of haplogroup I2 almost certainly developed in Europe or in the Caucasus region, given their sparsity elsewhere. The only exception is the high frequency of I2a1 in Kurdistan, but it probably came with R1a invaders originally from Eastern Europe. The presence of the rare I2c (L596) Group C in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus hints that this may have been an early divergent branch soon after I2* re-expanded from its Greco-Anatolian LGM refuge. 

The oldest subclades of R1a are all European, and the Balkans display the greatest genetic diversity. I would therefore imagine that the R1a refuge was in the Balkans (never in the Near East), while the I2 refuge was in Greece or Anatolia. R1a people would have been the first to move north when the weather got warmer, and consequently ended up in Northeast Europe, while I2 made its way to Southeast and Central Europe. I2a2 (P214) would have been the first to migrate north, towards modern Germany and possibly already entering timidly into Scandinavia (hence the T sample in Mesolithic Gotland). I2a1 (P37.2) came behind, taking the Balkans and Carpathians.

3) Nowadays both R1a and I2 are most common in Eastern Europe (Northeast vs Southeast), then between the Alps and Scandinavia. This is also roughly where mt-haplogroups J and T are the most common. It's very difficult to juxtapose mtDNA over Y-DNA because the proportion of Y-DNA haplogroups can change very radically in a relatively short time through wars and polygamy among the dominant elite. It's especially hard to tell what haplogroups were dominant before the Bronze Age in regions that now have over 60% of haplogroup R1b.


Another possible, though less likely candidate is *E1b1b* because of its strong presence both in the Near East and in Southeast Europe, and its pan-European distribution with lower frequencies among the Finns and Basques, who also have little mtDNA J and T. The problem is that the Albanians, who have the highest percentage of E1b1b in Europe, also have one of the lowest percentage of mtDNA J and T (but that may be wrong because of the small sample size).

I would however exclude:

- G2a because it is too young and too associated with Neolithic settlers
- I1 because it is very common in Finland, where mtDNA J and T are the rarest in Europe. Actually I1 didn't exist until about 10,000 to 6,000 years ago, but I* and pre-I1 could have lived in northern Italy or Croatia during the LGM, being the first to re-expand north and the first to lay claim on Scandinavia.
- R1b because it is much too young to have arrived in the late Palaeolithic. Nonetheless I don't exclude that the Bronze Age R1b people carried mtDNA J and T, especially T.
- J1 and J2 because they are too rare in most of Europe compared to mtDNA J and T. Once again, they could have brought _more_ mtDNA J and T when they arrived in Europe later on.
- other extinct lineages are unlikely because of the high frequency of mtDNA J and T throughout Europe.

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## spongetaro

Thank you for the exhaustive answer Maciamo. 
I'm wonderig if haplgroups J and T presence in northern Europe are responsible for the fact that scandinavian are dolycocepahlic like middle east people. 

Furthermore, the mediterranean admixture in Scandinavia despite the fact that Scandinavia lack middle eastern and meditteranean Y haplogroups (E1b, J2, G2a, T ...) might account for the presence of mtdna haplogroups J and T also, and predate therefore the neolithic. 

Which Y haplogroups now do you think the pre R1b basque people and more generally the bearers of mtdna haplogroups U4 and U5 carried? 
Did they carry I*, or maybe I2*?

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## ElHorsto

> Thank you for the exhaustive answer Maciamo. 
> I'm wonderig if haplgroups J and T presence in northern Europe are responsible for the fact that scandinavian are dolycocepahlic like middle east people.


Not sure if contemporary middle east people are really that dolichocephalic. Dolichocephalics are mostly the 'mediterraneans' like Arabs, Portugese, Sardinians and north Africans. By the way, it was Coon himself who repeatedly claimed that Nordids are just depigmented Meds. Maybe he was right in this case. But he explained it with Hallstatt and iron age (EDIT: I was wrong here, Coon actually exactly considered a mesolithic mediterranean population), whereas I personally also consider a maritime and mesolithic diffusion of these archaic mediterraneans, corresponding to the K12b pattern.





> Furthermore, the mediterranean admixture in Scandinavia despite the fact that Scandinavia lack middle eastern and meditteranean Y haplogroups (E1b, J2, G2a, T ...) might account for the presence of mtdna haplogroups J and T also, and predate therefore the neolithic.


Unless HG I is responsible.

Here is a related acticle about hunter-gatherers from Sicily and their HV-1 haplogroup:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:...l.pone.0049802

"In addition, the fact that the mtDNA of Oriente B belongs to the HV-1 haplotype is noteworthy, because it has been suggested that most of the HV haplogroups in Europe expanded from the Near East and Caucasus region before the Last Glacial Maximum, having a coalescence age of 30,000±4,000 BP [54]–[56]. The HV-1 haplogroup, which belongs to the HV-family, is absent in most of Europe and India and it seems to have an epicentre of frequency and diversity in the Trans-Caucasus area. *This suggests that the ancestors of the hunter-gatherers of Favignana might ultimately have originated from the Near East and Caucasus region.*"

However I personally believe that the Atlantic_med admixture was dominant in the Middle east before the neolithic and that the Caucasus component became more important later during the neolithic. But time will tell.

Here is an abstract from a paper analyzing crania from the Sicilian island Favignana with skull pictures:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...47248409000268

"Overall, the San Teodoro cranial sample displays a morphometric pattern *close to Western European groups of similar antiquity*, in particular those from Central and Southern Italy. The morphometric affinities indicate that these people probably came from peninsular Italy* by sea during the Late Epigravettian epoch*. An alternative hypothesis is that they descended from immigrants that arrived by land during a low sea level episode corresponding to the maximum Würmian regression, about 18,000 years B.P, with gene flow accounting for the morphological homogeneity with the populations of peninsular Italy."


1-s2.0-S0047248409000268-gr2.jpg

For comparison, here is a picture of the La Brana skull:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/epa...300781&index=0

Are they similar? I can't tell.




> Which Y haplogroups now do you think the pre R1b basque people and more generally the bearers of mtdna haplogroups U4 and U5 carried? 
> Did they carry I*, or maybe I2*?

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## Grubbe

> Actually I1 didn't exist until about 10,000 to 6,000 years


How do we know that? Wouldn't that be in contrast to what is said here? http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_I1_Y-DNA.shtml that the I1 branch split away 20 000 years ago?

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## Grubbe

Thanks very much for posting this study. Since my father is J1c2, I have a spesial interest in hg J  :Smiling:

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## Fire Haired

[QUOTE=Maciamo;404262]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).


that one Mesolithic T sample in Sweden is from just 4,800-4,000ybp it was from one of the last hunter gather people in Europe. The Pitted ware culture they classify them as Mesolithic because they had a hunter gather lifestyle they defintley had contact with farmers so no way can that count as evidence T was in pre Neolithic Europe u cant use trickey wording like that i like to say the date because most people don't understand what time phase Mesolithic, Paloithic, Neolithic, Chaloithic, brozne age, and iron age are so if someone who does not know reads this and they see mesloithic they look it up and sees it means around 5,000-7,000ybp they will think this is from 5,000-7,000ybp. also Mesolithic Europeans DNA in my opinion are very different from Paloithic DNA because most Mesolithic European DNA is in teh Neolithic period most of them are less than 7,000 years old and come from northern europe but people take that DNA and say it represents all Europeans even one that lived 30,000 years before these Mesolithic people.

these are the results so far from Paloithic Europeans _mtDNA 37,985-12,500ybp number of samples=21
__U=12 57%(U5=6 28.5%(U5b=3 14.2%(U5b1b=2 9.5%, U5b2b1=1 5%), U2=1 5%, U8a=1 5%, U2/3/4/7/8/9=1 5%
H=7 33.3%(almost defintley H=2 9.5%, H17=2 9.5%, H6=1 5%)
HV=1 5%, N probably decendants=1 5%
_

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