Just for the avoidance of doubt, is there anywhere in the ancient world where those 16 haplotypes may have co-existed?
I'm battling to think of any circumstances in which that could have happened, especially because of the native American haplotypes, but was there ever a melting-pot of people of mixed descent gathered in roughly the same place at roughly the same time?
Now, of course, I appreciate that for MK's theory to hold water, those disparate groups of people don't have to have lived proximately, nor even at the same time. Hybridisation could have been going on continuously in varied locations and over a long period of time, but we're then talking about a proto-sasquatch, a progenitor species (Homo heidlebergensis or some-such), not only surviving into the post-glacial era, but doing so in numbers large enough to breed with at least 16 distinct groups of humans, have their off-spring then gather together and migrate, whilst the progenitors then conveniently die off themselves.....and all without leaving anything in the fossil record, or any artefacts, or burials.
Since I first heard about this hybridisation theory, I have been far more interested in the assumed progenitor species than in its mongrel offspring. Is there a cave out there (presumably in Northern Europe) with Homo-something-or-other-but-not-sapiens bones which are only 10,000 to 15,000 years old, lying waiting to be discovered? Now THAT would be something to get excited about.......but I suspect it is highly unlikely.
Mike