taf wrote: "Sorry - that should have been that the 'steppe' ancestry is lower - that something must have diluted it in England." Or perhaps the steppe component has been arriving more quickly on the continent in recent millenia, than on the western edge such as the Isles. That makes some sense because of fairly common movements of people thought to have come from the "steppes". Will be interesting to compare Iberia to Britain on this point, and also to look at East-West spectra in general. I am not sure what samples are being used to represent the Celts and Old Saxons but even in Britain itself, as these Indo European groups arrived, the first generations will have been more continental in the first generations, and then "diluted" - just putting forward a scenario that could maybe explain it. By the way, now that I am writing I basically agree with you in this discussion. There ARE "profit promoters" who have a less-than-perfect impact on all sorts of genealogy and certainly in genetic genealogy. (Medieval genealogy may well be the worst type!) But this should not be seen as a reason why genetic genealogy is failing overall. To have a quick rant: I think think profit promotion has been part of the reason customers have had autosomal testing so heavily promoted, much to the detriment of Y DNA. Autosomal testing is more useful for ethnic ancestry approximation, but Y DNA (STR testing) has achieved the most for normal genealogy. And here is a quick prediction: very detailed Y DNA SNP testing is probably the next big thing for genealogy as such (based on male lines of course). The prices continue to drop but none of the big testing companies are good at it yet, and to use it well will require clever web interfaces. Once someone gets it right it would no longer be a matter of saying that two people are just in the same male line (which is what the main commercial Y DNA testing, both STR and SNP can do now). Actual tree drawing connecting all male lines down to today will become possible. Best Regards Andrew