On Thursday, August 24, 2017 at 2:31:36 PM UTC-7, Michael OHearn wrote: > Again you seem to be missing the point of what I discussed earlier. > > The Plantagenet Y-DNA is going back to Richard is uniquely type G. Not unique, but uncommon for Western Europe. > This is also common in Alania (modern day Ossetia) from which the Alan's > settled in Gaul as mercenaries to the Romans about the 4th or 5th century. Picking one favorite group and deciding they must represent the avenue by which the haplotype turned up 1000 years later, an entire continent away, may make for a pleasing game of connect-the-dots what-if hypothesizing, but in this case it has little validity. When you brought this up before I showed that the prevalence of G in western Europe does not correspond well at all with where the Alans are thought to have settled - there can be no presumption of correlation between G haplogroup and Alans. That doesn't mean that there weren't Alans in Eastern Europe and the Eurasian steppe who were G, but it looks like most G in Western Europe has no link to them. > The location of the Plantagenet in Gaul corresponds with Alan settlement in > Roman times. They are also likely to be the upstart kings for historical > reasons which I will not delve into here. The location of Plantagenet in Gaul also corresponds to that of the Celts, the Bell Beaker culture, the first farmers spreading out of Anatolia, and the Western European hunter-gatherers, just to name a few. > Of course, it is also possible that the Type G DNA *just happened* to pre- > exist in pre-Roman times, and that this *just happened* to be passed down > to the Plantagenet kings, or alternatively, that Richard's uncharacteristic > DNA was actually the product of an out of wedlock union. Neat rhetorical trick, begging the question by presenting the pet theory as an obvious historical progression, and every alternative as something that 'just happened'. taf