[Verginius Rufus]

In theory you should have exactly equal proportions of male and female ancestors, but if some of your ancestors married people related to them, then you start getting some of the same individuals on more than one ancestral line. This obviously happened a lot when most people lived in small villages and usually married someone from the same village or a nearby village.

This study would indicate that 8000 years ago, your family tree would show the same male ancestor many more times than it would show a given female ancestor.

[SunkenCiv]

As the old folks around here used to say, a mother can always claim her own, a father takes his by faith alone. Also, in prehistoric times, I’d make the wild guess that the men had more to say about mating that even the most rabid feminazi says prevails today.

Change in Ph has an impact on which (X or Y) wins that first race, so that probably had an impact. A relatively small skew over a pretty long period of time (and short onset of next generations) could easily put a lot of men into the local pool, and additional women had to be found.