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Haplogroup E-V13 is paleolithic european (Eupedia claims)
The main points from the updated article about Haplogroup E1b1b
This alternate hypothesis is that E-V13 migrated directly from North Africa to southern Europe, crossing the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Sicily, then to Italy and to the southern Balkans. This scenario would explain why E-V13 reaches its peak frequency just on the opposite side of the Strait of Otranto from Italy, i.e. in Albania (+ Kosovo) and Thessaly.
During the Ice Age, Malta, Sicily and mainland Italy formed a single land mass and the coast of North Africa was approximately half the distance it was today, making Sicily visible from Tunisia. Considering that Homo sapiens managed to get all the way to Australia by boat between 70,000 and 40,000 years ago, crossing the Strait of Sicily, perhaps via the small island of Pantelleria halfway, would have posed no major problem. In fact, it is almost certain that humans crossed that strait numerous times during the Stone Age.
Other subclades of E-M78 also present in North Africa and Europe today, like V12, V22 and V65, could also have crossed alongside V13. It is perhaps only due to a founder effect that V13 became considerably more common than other subclades in Europe, especially in the Balkans and eastern Europe. The greatest diversity of E-M78 subclades in Europe is actually found in Iberia, Italy and France, and not in the Balkans (where nearly all E1b1b are V13).
E-V13 is more common in Lybia today than anywhere in the Near East, which concords with central North Africa as being a potential source for the European E-V13 (and other subclades of M78). In fact, the small presence of E-V13 in the Near East could be better explained by the extremely long Greek presence in the eastern Mediterranean from the time of Alexander the Great until the end of the Byzantine domination over the region during the Middle Ages.
A strong argument in favour of E1b1b crossing directly from North Africa to southern Italy is that South Italians have more African admixture than people in the Balkans, Greece or Anatolia. This is true of the Northwest African admixture and the East African (Red sea) admixture. Another argument is that E1b1b has never been found among the dozens of Neolithic Y-DNA samples in the Balkans or Central Europe.
The Neoltihic farmers who migrated from the Levant to the Balkans would have brought mostly Southwest Asian admixture and apparently exclusively Y-haplogroup G2a. Many Neolithic sites yielded an occasional "outsider" to the G2a majority, but these were lineages (C1a2, F, I1, I2) that are thought to belong to assimilated (or enslaved) Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. That was very probably the case with E-V13 in Catalonia too.
In the Balkans, I2a1b lineages only came between the Bronze Age (Thracians, Illyrians) and the Middle Ages (Slavs). If haplogroups C, F and I were the only Paleolithic European lineages, why would indigenous Paleolithic lineages be wiped out from the Balkans and most of Italy with the arrival of Near Eastern farmers, but survive and remain the dominant lineage in Sardinia, which was an important Neolithic centre belonging to the same Cardium Pottery culture as the rest of Italy ? The best explanation is that E1b1b was already the dominant Paleolithic lineage in the Balkans and Italy, apart from Sardinia, and therefore Paleolithic lineages weren't wiped out, but assimilated by Neolithic farmers, which assured their survival.
Nowadays E1b1b is the only Mediterranean haplogroup consistently found throughout Europe, even in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Baltic countries, which are conspicuous by the absence of other Neolithic haplogroups like G2a (bar the Indo-European G2a3b1), J1 and T (except in Estonia). However, since G2a is the only lineage that was consistently found in all Neolithic sites tested to date in Europe, the absence of Neolithic G2a lineages from Scandinavia and the Baltic implies that no Neolithic lineage survives there, and consequently E1b1b (mostly E-V13) does not date from the Neolithic in the region. It could easily have been brought by the Indo-European invasions during the Bronze Age, as a minority lineage picked up in Southeast Europe by the R1b tribes before they made their way to Central Europe and eventually Scandinavia. At present the most consistent explanation is that E-M78 was indigenous to southern Europe in the Mesolithic, and was assimilated by G2a farmers, then by R1b Indo-Europeans. There is in fact a very low diversity among E-V13 in central and north-east Europe, which is consistent with a relatively recent (Bronze to Iron Age) dispersal from a common source.
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Originally Posted by Thrax
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