Haplogroups and the history of human evolution through mtDNA

In the last 40 years, despite its small size, mtDNA has provided an immense amount of valuable information concerning the origin of human populations. This success is due to a number of particular features that have allowed mtDNA data to be much more readily acquired and assessed relative to its nuclear counterpart. As examples, the mtDNA perspectives on three temporally and geographically distant migratory events are reviewed: the “Out of Africa Exit, " the first peopling of the Americas, and the settlement of Sardinia. Even though we have entered the era of genomics and archeogenomics, mtDNA analyses are going to remain a major complement to nuclear genome studies, which still lack the genealogical resolution provided by nonrecombining mtDNA and face difficulties in making full use of the information present in haplotypes, something that instead large-scale surveys of entire mitogenomes do extremely well.