A recent study was conducted at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, which found that a striking % of men in Ireland (and quite a few in Scotland) share the same Y chromosome, suggesting that the 5th-century warlord known as "Niall of the Nine Hostages" may be the ancestor of one in 12 Irishmen. Niall established a dynasty of powerful chieftains that dominated the island for six centuries.

In the study scientists found an area in northwest Ireland where they claim 21.5% carry Niall´s genetic fingerprint, says Brian McEvoy, one of the team at Trinity. The same area of Ireland has previously been the subject of Anthropological writings…and has shown a strikingly high % of men from Haplogroup R1b (98%) versus 90% in S.E. Ireland. According to McVoy this area was the main powerbase of the Ui Neills, which literally translated means "descendants of Niall".

McEvoy says the Y chromosome appeared to trace back to one person. Following the genealogists trail, McVoy comments: "There are certain surnames that seem to have come from Ui Neill. We studied if there was any association between those surnames and the genetic profile. It is his (Niall´s) family."

Of note to Family Tree DNA customers, this signature is found in .6 of 1% of the entire Family Tree DNA database.

McVoy states: "As in other polygynous societies, the siring of offspring was related to power and prestige." The study mentions that just one of the O'Neill dynasty chieftains who died in 1423 had 18 sons with nearly a dozen women and claimed 59 grandsons.

Niall of the Nine Hostages received his name from the taking of hostages as a strategy for playing mental havoc upon his opponent chieftains. He is known in folklore as a raider of the British and French coasts. Supposedly slain in the English Channel or in Scotland, his descendants were the most powerful rulers of Ireland until the 11th century.

Modern surnames tracing their ancestry to Niall include (O´)Neill, (O´)Gallagher, (O´)Boyle, (O´)Doherty, O´Donnell, Connor, Cannon, Bradley, O'Reilly, Flynn, (Mc)Kee, Campbell, Devlin, Donnelly, Egan, Gormley, Hynes, McCaul, McGovern, McLoughlin, McManus, McMenamin, Molloy, O´Kane, O´Rourke and Quinn.

The Western Atlantic Modal Haplotype is the most common Y-DNA signature of Europe´s most common Haplogroup, R-M269. Simply put these ancestors have experienced a dramatic population explosion over the past 10,000 years, probably since the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM-that´s Anthropology-speak for the last Ice Age) that covered most of Europe beginning 20,000 years ago and lasting for 10,000 long cold winters.

R1b, and its most common Haplotype, exists in high or very high frequencies in all of Western Europe from Spain in the south to the British Isles and western Scandinavia in the north. It appears that approximately 2.62% in Western European males share this most common genetic 12 marker signature.

Anthropologists have been describing for many years that only a select % of all the males in past societies did the vast majority of fathering, while other males lost the opportunity to pass on their Y-Chromosomal genes.

On a lighter note it´s clear that R1b´s Western Atlantic Modal Haplotype has contributed much more than its ´fair share´ in populating Western Europe.