As I’ve been harping on and on for the past few years that the patterns of contemporary genetic variation are probably only weakly tied to past patterns of genetic variation (though Henry Harpending warned me about this as far back as 2004). A major reason that scholars operated under this presupposition is the axiom that most of the variation we see around us crystallized during the Last Glacial Maximum (~20 thousand years before the present).
This may be true in some cases, but I doubt it is true in most cases. I was pointed to a classic case of this problem just today. A reader alerted me to a short paper from this spring which attempts to ascertain the point of origin of the dominant mtDNA haplogroup among the Onge tribe of the Andaman Islanders, M31a1. This is an interesting issue because some researchers proposed, plausibly in the past, that these indigenous people in the Andaman Islands represent the descendants of the first wave “Out of Africa,” who took the rapid “beachcomber” path. Understanding the key to their genetics may then unlock the key to the “Out of Africa” event. Or …