The paper, to its credit acknowledges that the "effective
mutation rate" depends on population growth history as I have
argued a year and a half ago. The authors write: Owing to the
uncertainties associated with the estimate of the evolutionary
effective microsatellite mutationrates, depending on the
haplogroup demographic history,37 we considered two different
population models: (1) a constant size population and (2) a
single rate of m=0.01 for exponential population growth. After
calibration for the specificmicrosatellites used in this
study,13 we found evolutionary effective mutationrates of
7.9x10-4 and 1.3x10-3, respectively.and: As I noted in
haplogroup sizes and observation selection effects haplogroup
sizes provide a sanity check to assumptions about population
growth history: As an upper limit, we used the coalescence time
of the R-M343/P25 haplogroup (12.9 ky, 95% CI=11.6–14.3 ky,
under a conservative scenario of constant population size),
which, on the basis of the accumulated nucleotide and micros