Whether or not the mtDNA represents the only true human woman (with some leakage from the males) alive or simply the tiny minority of women whose genes survive to the present day is purely a matter of faith. How can we ever know which is the case?
I am more concerned that they get the dates right. There is a lot of pressure to keep dates old enough so that they seem "respectable" to the evos. What is instead of "the first (surviving?") woman " being around 150 years ago it was only 50,000? The article assumes the Quazfeh finds are modern humans, but they don't look modern to me, and there is no way to check them by DNA analysis.
The whole dating thing is based on mutation rates. How do we know mutation rates today have been constant for the last 150,000 years? The Vela Super Nova sent cosmic rays at highly elevated levels about 30,000 years ago. That should have raised mutation rates for many thousands of years. If the male DNA can enter the mitochondria, wouldn
't that cause more "changes" than the chance mutation rate? The more changes it has, the older they assume it is.