A mitochondrial DNA based computational model of the spread of human populations
This paper presents a mitochondrial DNA based computational model of the spread of human populations. The computation model is based on a new measure of the relatedness of two populations that may be both heterogeneous in terms of their set of mtDNA haplogroups. The measure gives an exponentially increasing weight for the similarity of two haplogroups with the number of levels shared in the mtDNA classification tree. In an experiment, the computational model is applied to the study of the relatedness of seven human populations ranging from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age to the present. The human populations included in the computational study are the Andronovo, the Bell Beaker, the medieval Hungarian, the Khanty, the Minoan, the Rossen and the Unetice populations. Keywords Evolution, Mitochondrial DNA, Population Genetics, Similarity Measure, Phylogenetic Tree.