PHYLOGEOGRAPHY OF MITOCHONDRIAL-DNA IN WESTERN-EUROPE

For most of the past century, prehistorians have had to rely on the fo ssil and archaeological records in order to reconstruct the past. In t he last few decades, this evidence has been substantially supplemented from classical human genetics, More recently, phylogenetic analyses o f DNA sequences that incorporate geographical information have provide d a high-resolution tool for the investigation of prehistoric demograp hic events, such as founder effects and population expansions. These e vents can be dated using a molecular clock when the mutation rate and founder haplotypes are known. We have previously applied such methods to sequence data from the mitochondrial DNA control region, to suggest that most extant mitochondrial sequences in western Europe have a loc al ancestry in the Early Upper Palaeolithic, with a smaller proportion arriving from the Near East in the Neolithic. Here, we describe a cla distic notation for mitochondrial variation and expand upon our earlie r analysis to present a more detailed portrait of the European mitocho ndrial record.