Tim Radford, science editor
Guardian

Friday November 10, 2000

Nearly all men in Europe and the Middle East have descended from only 10 male ancestors, research today shows.

And the biggest influence in the European male genes is from the hunter-gathering palaeolithic, the old stone age, 40,000 to 20,000 years ago. Only one male in five in Europe comes from the more settled farming stock of the new stone age.

The news that New Lad is mostly very old lad is published in Science. A team from Pavia University in Italy examined the Y chromosomes, passed only from father to son, of 1,007 volunteers. It found that almost all the volunteers could be linked to 10 ancestral strains.

Two of these lineages - thought to represent 80% of European manhood - turned up during the ice age clutching stone axes and wooden spears, and sat it out until times got very tough. The first appeared between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago, probably from Siberia. The second arrived from the Middle East 25,000 to 20,000 years ago.

The other eight clans arrived either from the Middle East or the Urals 9,000 to 6,000 years ago and fathered perhaps a fifth of European males between them.