Out of Africa and out of Siberia

The latest edition of The American Journal of Human Genetics has two papers using "old fashioned" uniparental markers to trace human migration out of Africa and Siberia respectively. I say old fashioned because the peak novelty of these techniques was around 10 years ago, before dense autosomal SNP marker analyses, let alone whole genome sequencing. But mtDNA, passed down the maternal line, and Y chromosomes, passed from father to son, are still useful. Prosaically they're useful because the data sets are now so large for these sets of markers after nearly 20 years of surveying populations. More technically because these two regions of the genome do not recombine they lend themselves to excellent representation as a tree phylogeny. Finally, mtDNA in particular is particularly amenable to estimates via molecular clock methodologies (it has a region with a higher mutational rate, so you can sample a larger range of variation over ...