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From: "David Ewing" <>
Subject: Re: [DNA-R1B1C7] Dubious Paternity descriptions
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 07:33:25 -0600


John McLaughlin asks, "Would you accept the idea of [the Ui Neill] being a
"majority" of R1b1c7?" I think he means to ask whether I would accept that a
majority of the Ui Neill were R1b1c7, but I suppose it is also a reasonable
question to ask whether a majority of R1b1c7 folks today have paternal line
descent from the Ui Neill.

The short answer to the first parsing of the question is, "sure, probably
so." A longer answer would require some caveats; for example, it is at least
theoretically possible that at some point all of the Ui Neill except one guy
were NOT R1b1c7, and that all (or almost all) the lines except the R1b1c7
line daughtered out. And it is possible that there is some genetic trace of
the Ui Neill in NW Ireland, but that we have not found it and it is not
R1b1c7. Consider that I grew up in NW New Mexico in the town of Farmington.
This area was once occupied by Ancestral Puebloans, who were supplanted by
the Dine (Navajo) in the 15th century or so. Later, there were some few
Hispanic settlers, but the modern day population of the town is
overwhelmingly European-Americans (who are called "Anglos" in New Mexico,
presumably to the horror of my Celtic ancestors), who settled the area in
small numbers in the late 19th century, but did not become the large
majority until near the middle of the 20th century. If we did a Trinity-like
Y-DNA survey of the town, we would find an overwhelming majority of R1b
Y-DNA. Should we reason that the Ancestral Puebloans or Dine were R1b on
that basis? Of course not. I recognize that these are both reductio ad
absurdum arguments, and that the Trinity folks adduced other evidence than
Y-DNA haplogroup percentages, including surname distribution. This might
help some in Farmington, but though some of the Dine have what might be
called "Navajo" names, most of them have garden variety European-American
names.

The short answer to the second parsing of the question is, "I don't know for
sure, but I don't think so." I am sure John knows better than I. My
impression is that there are a whole bunch of "non-Niell" surnames in
R1b1c7, but I do not know if they constitute a majority, and regardless of
whether they do or not, if the sampling is unbiased enough for us to make
anything of the relative proportions.

I am not criticizing the efforts of the Trinity Study, John or other members
of the list to use Y-DNA data to try to understand the history of population
migrations. I enjoy this and find it very interesting. The reason I am on my
high horse is that I think that chauvinism of all kinds and especially
notions of racial, ethnic or tribal purity are pernicious and that we must
be vigilant against them.

David Ewing

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