I had to chuckle on reading Marg's post about the gentleman whose tree went back 200 generations to Adam and Eve. Now, genetic scientists have determined that there really were a paternal and maternal most recent common ancestor to everyone in the world today. They're known as "Y-DNA Adam" and "mitochondrial DNA Eve". But these people lived many more than 200 generations ago and not at the same time. Y-Adam is estimated to have lived about 338,000 years ago and mt-Eve about 140,000. Assuming an average of 35 years between generations, Y-Adam is nearly 10,000 generations back. (35 may be an over-estimate on this time scale, putting the number of generations at more than 10,000.) If mothers were younger than fathers (say, 30 years per generation) that's 4,500+ generations back to mt-Eve. Descent from Noah, BTW, is part of one Irish origin myth, though usually it's the sons who get the credit. In this 11th-century myth, the Gaels defeated the tribe of the goddess Dannu, who had previously conquered the Fir Bolg and Formorian peoples. Fir Bolg ancestry traced through Agnoman. a king of Scythia, to Noah. (It seems that hijacking ancestors isn't a new phenomenon.) As a further aside, the Dannans seem to resemble fairies, living half in the mundane world and half in the supernatural. The Formorians resemble trolls or Vikings, coming either from the sea or underground. . Has ANYONE made a credible tree going back thousands of generations? -rt_/) ==================================== From: "marg o'leary" <[email protected]> I did have a gentleman send me a family tree back to Adam and eve, before computer email. Beautifully typed, came through the post, it takes the Irish McCauley family back abt 200 generations to Adam and Eve, so if anyone has any McCauleys out there..... (somewhere the daughters of Noah find their way to Ireland and marry Irish chieftains.) Marg ====================================