I've just received the results of my basic DNA test carried out by the Family Tree DNA company, whose headquarters are in Texas. In the following table, the references of the twelve markers are in blue, and my values appear after the equal signs:
In the terminology of this field, I appear to belong to a so-called haplogroup whose reference is R1b1b2, often designated as R-M269. Among the half a million or so people tested by this company since the year 2000, there are already 558 individuals in this same category. For the moment, in this group, there's nobody with a surname like Skyvington. Among them, though, I was delighted to discover the name of a man of whom I'm proud to be a "genetic cousin": Richard Dawkins. In other words, Dawkins and I had a common paternal ancestor—let's call him Fred—in the not-too-remote past, but nevertheless before the time at which people started to use surnames. This Fred had at least two sons, known, say, as Dick and Bill. Dick's descendants finally got around to calling themselves the Dawkins clan, whereas Bill's descendants preferred to call themselves the Skyvington clan. Be that as it may, what's in a name? In spite of their having different family names, they still remained, to a large extent, members of a common tribe... designated as R-M269.