Lawrence Dill writes: I also wonder where R-M222 originated. Do the Ewing have the oldest know haplotypes in our haplogroup? The Ewing are from Scotland. It is obvious that R-M222 first proliferated in Ireland. I don't know how one could compute relative ages of haplotypes. To understand Lawrence's question, I have to translate it into something like, "Do the Ewing's appear to have diverged from the rest of R:M222+ longer ago than any other known family group?" I would like to know the answer to that question myself. The phylogeny Bill Howard calculated, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/431003/M222Phylogeny.RCC.pdf shows Ewings diverging from all other R:M222 in his chart at RCC = about 31, or if you lump with the Ewings their closest relatives on that chart (one Guinn, one Ferguson, a couple of McLaughlins and one Daugherty), at RCC = about 36. That is pretty far back, but the deepest nodes in this phylogeny look to be closer to RCC = 50. I am not sure what Bill's latest iteration of an estimate for years/RCC is, but I think it is on the order of 50, give or take 10. This suggests that these Ewings diverged from most of the rest of R:M222 on the order of 1500 years ago but the very most distant R:M222 haplotypes diverged more like 2500 years ago. These numbers are wildly approximate, and even so, I am not sure I believe the approach to calculating them, but I thought it might be helpful to offer them as a concrete target for criticism and comment. One historical context that would be consistent with Ewing diverging from the rest of R:M222 in this time frame is that there was apparently a lot of raiding by Irish--maybe even by Niall himself--into the western Lowlands in the few hundred years between the time the Romans left Britain and the Anglo-Saxons got a good foothold. The name Ewing, spelled as such, didn't appear until the 16th century, but this was in Lennox, around the lower end of Loch Lomond, and it is entirely possible that the ancestors of the Ewings had been there for over a thousand years before that. It is commonly thought that the Ewings came to Lennox in 1500 or so from the Cowal peninsula in Argyle, survivors of the broken Clan Ewen of Otter, but I have lately come to wonder whether the folks establishing Clan Ewen of Otter a couple of hundred years before that may not have come from Strathclyde rather than from Ireland as partisans of the Anradan kindred believe. David Ewing