Paul & Bernard, First, Bernard, since I am not up on all of the language, would you explain in layman's terms this: STR variance is going to be masked by tribal culture. The further you are away from the ruling derbfine the more likely your line is going to end. The descendants of the ruling derbfine (low variance) are going to multiple and replacing lower status lines. I am inclined to go with Paul on his assessment. I just went through a lengthy exercise just on genetic distances of the M222 bank of the project I'm researching. In fact I innocently believed after a lot of analysis and time consumed that I had identified perhaps a member of that entire group who quite possibly could have been the smoking gun of connecting all descending from the one progenitor calculated about 650 CE. This result was the only result which had genetic distance between 1 & 9 while sharing some off modal values and being unambiguous with 82% of the entire group and thus seemed to tie all the smaller clusters together. Fortunately I got to several extra eyes to look at my tentative conclusion, one being this lists original founder who very kindly looked at the data for me and educated me a tad for which I am very grateful and thankful. The one draw back to my assessment is that the result of the "tie them all" was too close to the modal in signature and thus the commonality likely was due to that despite the off modal matches rather than them all descending from either 1 CP or a few very closely related CP. Had that result been say at 10 away from the modal rather than 1--2 and still maintained connections to the rest, then, quite possibly the assessment may have held up. The point in short is that genetic distance from the modal very well may be an indicator the age of the lineages. The grater the diversity and genetic distance while maintaining sub-clave identification seems to be indicative of age. Thus one can assume that if the Scottish samples in your group (as it was explained to me) in fact indicate this diversity and distance then I'd have to agree with your assessment based on what I was told in response to the exercise I just went through. John Lochlan & Bill Howard early on when I joined this list had also tutored me on this very point, and although not forgetting, misplaced my memory as I was working through the data of the 88 I was surveying. Despite my momentary embarrassment for doing so, the education I got out of it is priceless. Susan