I highly recommend this publication. It doesn't deal with R-M222 explicitly -- the focus is about social and genetic heritage discussed in summary form. It is not highly technical and should be understandable by most. Do not be misled by the title. Although the title deals with a particular investigation, the messages within this paper are applicable to all investigating their genetic heritage. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807801/ An exerpt: "In summary, population genetics does not offer unambiguous answers to questions of identity and ancestry. It is able to make claims about the distribution of genetic markers over time and is able to engage with socio-historically structured practices, such as the use of surnames, in the production of these claims. However, the selection and analysis of genetic markers is shaped by a number of technical, economic and social factors -- not least the generation of the markers themselves. Moreover, the modelling of this distribution requires the use of analogues (such as Norwegian men for Vikings) and assumptions drawn from contemporary historical analysis of migration patterns. If genetic code is a form of cultural memory, then it is one which needs considerable technical expertise to be cautiously and provisionally interpreted."... "The material we have presented here comes from the very early stages of a project, which we hope will ultimately shed some light on the ways that 'applied genetic history' is fast becoming a key vector in contemporary debates about belonging, migration and national identity. Genetic code is, for many of our participants, a form of archival memory that is just opening up. Our initial findings suggest that participants are already receptive to the promises that are being made by companies such as Ancestry.com <http://Ancestry.com> to 'pick up where the paper trail leaves off'. It is a form of cultural memory which was previously inaccessible and which is felt to offer answers to interpretive puzzles around ancestry. Applied genetic history will, our participants feel, then enable them to push beyond the limits of genealogy into the recesses of the remote past. Yet at the heart of testing, there is a fundamental paradox. Genetic code is literally embodied, as the process of being tested with a 'spit kit' makes clear. The emphasis which our participants place on 'feeling' as the basis of identification makes sense, since the relation is carried within the composition of one's own body. But the code itself only really exists in a highly mediated state, as a trace that is supported by a weave of technical practices, theoretical assumptions and complex analytic techniques, which in turn exist within the wider 'genetic imaginary' (Franklin, 2000 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807801/#bibr9-0038038513493538>; Stacey, 2010 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807801/#bibr30-0038038513493538>). As we have shown, these remediations create a range of implications for how national and local identity is accounted for by participants. The remote past may well persist in the archival memory carried by the body, as our participants hope it does, but surfacing this past in any meaningful form could not be less straightforward. We want to conclude with a final observation suggested by Hoskins' (2009a <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807801/#bibr11-0038038513493538>, 2009b <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807801/#bibr12-0038038513493538>) work on digital memory. To speak of genetic code as archival memory is to focus on how personal narratives of identity and belonging can be fashioned from stored biological information. The techniques for making this information mobile constitute a complex assemblage of formal knowledge, whose assumptions and claims are currently being worked out in a contested zone where academic knowledge and commercial exploitation meet and become difficult to disentangle, as the contributors to this special issue describe in different ways. From our perspective, we would note that quite often what draws participants into genetic ancestry testing are claims made by commercial companies on, for example, the geographical distribution of Y chromosomes, based on existing databases, which are often partial and equivocal and heavily remediated through popular media texts. The results of these tests then become part of developing a rapidly communicative memory that is itself remediated through online genealogy websites, social media and evolving family histories. The concern must then be, following Hoskins, that this 'on the fly' reconstruction of personal family histories will lead to the subsuming of archival memory within communicative memory. We can see this beginning to happen in, for example, the debates about phylogeography (Beaumont et al., 2010 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807801/#bibr3-0038038513493538>; Templeton, 2009 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807801/#bibr31-0038038513493538>), which, as discussed earlier, are beginning to move from the academic to the public sphere. The result may then be a vast increase in the circulation of putative claims about genetic ancestry which become increasingly difficult to evaluate and which feed into narratives of national and local identity that are unmoored from the contents of the archive. Unravelling the applied genetic histories which emerge will require some considerable sociological imagination." Susan