Basque maternal heritage & continuity

There's a new paper in AJHG which caught my eye, The Basque Paradigm: Genetic Evidence of a Maternal Continuity in the Franco-Cantabrian Region since Pre-Neolithic Times (ungated). The first thing you need to know about this paper is that it focuses on only the direct maternal lineage of Basques via the mtDNA. In some ways this is weak tea, since it doesn't give us a total genome estimate. But there are major upsides to mtDNA and Y. First, because of the lack of recombination it is relatively easy to generate a nice phylogenetic tree using a coalescent model. And second, for mtDNA the molecular clock is considered relatively reliable. In this specific paper they also expanded the scope of their analysis to the whole mtDNA sequence, instead of just the hypervariable region. Not only did they look at whole sequences, but they also had an enormous sample size. They sequenced ...