The story in the Daily Telegraph was somewhat creative with the truth. The official press release from the Sanger Institute makes much more sense: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/news/view/modern-dna-reveals-ancient-male-population -explosions-linked-migration-and-technology In case the above long link breaks here is a short URL: http://tinyurl.com/hzuvtam The scientific study on which the article is based can be found here: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.3559.html The paper itself is behind a paywall but most of the meat from the research is in this massive 119-page supplementary note which is freely available and includes the new Y-tree: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/ng.3559-S1.pdf This research essentially confirms what we already know - that the Y-chromosomes of all living men share a common ancestor about 200,000+ years ago who probably lived in Africa. We can divide the branches of the Y-tree into haplogroups. Some of these haplogroups are now found at very high frequency today. Haplogroup R1b, for example, is found in about 70% of British men. The frequency of the haplogroups today has no bearing on the frequency of the haplogroups in the past as these haplogroups only represent the lineages that have survived to the present-day. Haplogroup R1b is very rare in the ancient Y-DNA samples that have turned up so far. The booklet that looked at the extinction of surnames is "The Inheritance of English Surnames" by Christopher Sturges and Brian Haggett. This is now out of print but you can find some information on the subject here: http://www.surnamestudies.org.uk/statistics/macro.htm This subject is covered in Professor Mark Thomas's lecture given last year at Who Do You Think You Are? Live which you can watch online here and is highly recommended: https://youtu.be/8Sr31Ke66tU It is indeed true that all Europeans are descended from Charlemagne (though not on our Y-DNA and mtDNA lines) and that we all share a recent common ancestor in a surprisingly recent timeframe as a result of the effects of pedigree collapse. You can find lots of further reading on this subject here: http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse Best wishes Debbie Kennett http://cruwys.blogspot.com http://one-name.org/name_profile/cruwys http://www.familytreedna.com/public/CruwysDNA