Kennewick Man produced a cottage industry of journalism ~10 years ago, thanks to the political controversy around the science. Today the stakes are different. Consider this from John Hawks, "Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation":
I am less sanguine about their results for Europe. They show a gradual period of growth associated in time with the Younger Dryas (around 12,000 years ago), which could make sense in the archaeology. But I am not convinced that the "European" haplogroups here are really European to that time depth. We know that the Neolithic and post-Neolithic saw some large-scale shifts in the frequencies of mtDNA haplogroups in Central and Western Europe. Some Upper Paleolithic Europeans probably contributed mtDNA to this later population, but I have no confidence that the proportion was great enough to accurately infer the demography of that pre-Neolithic population. (This is also a problem with the current paper in Current ...
