From: acornish@imm.cnrs.fr   
      
   On 2019-04-21 16:09:47 +0000, Ian Goddard said:   
      
   > On 20/04/19 17:24, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:   
   >> With possible exception of people who've immigrated from Africa or Asia   
   >> in the last generation or so we're all descended from William the   
   >> Conqueror.   
   >   
   > This keeps coming up from time to time.  There seems to be an   
   > assumption that because we have 1024, 2048 etc ancestors in a given   
   > generation this means 1024, 2048 or whatever different people and that   
   > at some point this proliferating number of different people meets the   
   > proliferating number of descendants of William the Conqueror (or Edward   
   > III, another popular alleged ancestor).   
   >   
   > The problem with this is that the assumption doesn't hold up.   
      
   It holds up just fine. According to Brian Sykes, approximately 50% of   
   men with the surname Sykes have a Y chromosome that seems to have   
   originated from somewhere near Pontefract. That means that 50% do not.   
   So where did they get theirs from? Some no doubt, from local farmers,   
   ploughmen etc., but you only need a small proportion to come from the   
   nobility for their descendants to spread all over the place. It's   
   vastly more likely for a noble to impregnate a farmer's wife than it is   
   for a farmer to impregnate a nobleman's wife.   
      
   >  A good many of the same surnames in both may parents' families crop up   
   > again and again.  What's more, although they came from villages only a   
   > few miles apart there isn't much overlap between them.  On my father's   
   > side there are better medieval records and I can find a couple of   
   > surnames going back into the late C13th; they derive from local place   
   > names.   
   >   
   > Where there are comers-in to the area they're largely from relatively   
   > local areas and seem to be from the same sort of background.  We seem   
   > to be largely looking at limited interchange between areas with a   
   > medieval populations of a few hundred in various locations within a few   
   > tens of miles..  The largest geographical moves seem to be those where   
   > a medieval magnate was able to transplant a tenant or servant.   
   >   
   > This pattern seems to account for Pennine communities prior to the   
   > Industrial Revolution which finally brought in former Ag Labs.  There   
   > simply isn't the large fan out of ancestors that the William I   
   > hypothesis requires.   
   >   
   > OTOH those claiming descent from this or that royal or aristocratic   
   > line usually seem to be able to count several lines of descent.  That   
   > should be a warning: William's descendants married other descendants -   
   > the fan-out of descendants wasn't a large as required.   
   >   
   > The one DNA result which is of some significance here is the Nature   
   > paper of a few years ago.  What that showed was what I call the big red   
   > splodge where one of their groups (colour-coded red) covered most of   
   > lowland England.  The West country, the Pennines, Wales and Scotland   
   > fell into a number of much more local, distinct groups.  It seems to   
   > point to relatively free movement within the splodge but less soe   
   > elsewhere so that the William I hypothesis probably looks reasonable to   
   > the splodgians and quite ridiculous to the rest of us.   
   >   
   > Ian   
      
      
   --   
   athel   
      
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