The literature

This page exists so that nobody has to take the article on trust.  Every source it rests on is listed here with what it actually measured, who wrote it, and which way it cuts.

It is deliberately not a reading list of things that agree with this site.  The source that does the most damage to the young-earth Y clock is Helgason 2015, and the damage is done by a supplementary table the young-earth authors themselves downloaded and cited.  The source that treats the question most honestly on either side is Carter 2024, a creationist article that concludes the three-sons prediction cannot be tested.  Both are tagged by what their data show, not by what their authors believe.

How to read an entry

Measurement or model.  A count of father-son differences at a stated filter setting is an observation.  A TMRCA is a model, and it inherits every assumption in the clock that produced it.  Both are useful and they are not the same kind of thing.

Direction.  Assigned by what the source shows, not by what its author believes.

Verified.  Whether this project read the text directly (full), only its abstract or supplement (abstract), or only through another source that quotes it (via).  Nothing is quoted in the main article unless it is marked full or abstract, and every quotation was read out of downloaded bytes.

Field definitions

Coverage and its limits, stated plainly.  This catalogue covers the Y mutation-rate literature from Thomson 2000 to Swiel 2025, the two 2019 Answers Research Journal papers that carry the young-earth Y clock, and the three Carter pieces that are the movement's more cautious position.  Five items could not be obtained and are listed at the bottom.  One of them, the raw Maretty 2017 Y sequences, is the single most valuable missing piece of evidence in the whole question, and it is missing for both sides.

The mutation rate

Human Y Chromosome Base-Substitution Mutation Rate Measured by Direct Sequencing in a Deep-Rooting Pedigree

Xue, Yali, et al.  Current Biology 19(17):1453–1457, 2009.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.07.032

camp: mainstream topic: pedigree-rate method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full

Key figures: two men thirteen generations apart;  10.15 Mb mappable;  twelve confirmed mutations, of which eight arose in cell lines and four in vivo;  3.0 × 10⁻⁸ per base per generation, 1.0 × 10⁻⁹ per base per year, 95% CI a factor of 7.9 wide;  false-negative rate measured at under 2%.

The first direct measurement of the Y rate, and thin:  four events.  Its importance is not its precision but its direction.  Orthogonal capillary sequencing removed two thirds of the candidates and added none, which is the opposite of the premise the young-earth argument runs on.  Its Discussion states in five words that no pedigree-versus-evolutionary discrepancy was found, and the surrounding sentences show the authors knew exactly which controversy they were addressing.  Even the top of its interval is 12 to 17 times too slow for a 4,500-year tree.  Cited in the article.

The Y-chromosome point mutation rate in humans

Helgason, Agnar, et al.  Nature Genetics 47(5):453–457, 2015.  https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3171

camp: mainstream topic: pedigree-rate method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: abstract

Key figures: 753 Icelandic men, 274 patrilines, 1,365 meioses, 47,123 transmitted years, 21.3 Mb;  8.71 × 10⁻¹⁰ per base per year for 15.2 Mb, exact 95% interval 8.03 to 9.43 × 10⁻¹⁰ by this project's recomputation;  7.37 × 10⁻¹⁰ for palindromes, indistinguishable from the 7.2 × 10⁻¹⁰ paternal-autosome rate;  1 genuine false positive in 75 Sanger assays, 0 of 43 on the branches used;  0 of 15 by resequencing;  2 mismatches in 8,956 SNP-chip genotypes.

By far the largest direct measurement of the Y rate.  The body is paywalled and the entire supplementary package is free, which is the fact that decides this article:  Supplementary Table 9 reproduces every headline number to three significant figures and supplies the confidence interval the abstract omits, and Supplementary Table 2 lists 739 branches with their sequencing depth, which is what makes the coverage hypothesis testable within one study.  Its three validation experiments bound false positives, not false negatives, so Jeanson's objection is not empty;  but no creationist treatment engages them.  Cited heavily.

Sequencing Y Chromosomes Resolves Discrepancy in Time to Common Ancestor of Males Versus Females

Poznik, G. David, et al.  Science 341(6145):562–565, 2013.  https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1237619

camp: mainstream topic: calibration method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full

Key figures: 69 male genomes, 9.99 Mb callable, 11,640 SNVs;  Y TMRCA 138 ky (120–156), mtDNA TMRCA 124 ky (99–148);  rate 0.82 × 10⁻⁹ from entry to the Americas, 0.79 × 10⁻⁹ from the Out of Africa expansion.

The only study to apply deliberately identical methods to the Y and to mitochondrial DNA in the same individuals, which makes it the cleanest test of the Flood's direction-only prediction that the Y tree must be shallower.  The ratio comes out 0.90, on the wrong side of one, though the extreme corner of both intervals is still inside the Flood's range.  It also concedes in print that the pedigree rate rests on four mutations, which is worth quoting on both sides.  Its title's claim that the discrepancy is "resolved" omits A00, published the same year.  Cited.  Its own ratio interval, 0.90 (0.68–1.11), includes one, and the paper notes the ratio does not depend on the calibration time;  the article now says this test neither meets nor excludes the Flood's prediction.

Recent common ancestry of human Y chromosomes: Evidence from DNA sequence data

Thomson, Russell, et al.  PNAS 97(13):7360–7365, 2000.  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.97.13.7360

camp: mainstream topic: calibration method: model direction: complicates verified: full

Key figures: 64,120 bp across three Y genes in 53–70 chromosomes;  TMRCA about 59,000 years;  calibrated on an assumed human-chimpanzee split of 5 million years.

Considered and not used in the article.  This is the 59,000-year figure creationists quoted for a decade, and its own field has since moved it by a factor of two to six.  It illustrates a real point, that the field's older rates were set by an assumed ape divergence, but it does not carry any number the article needs, and its lowest figure is still thirteen times the Flood.  Cutting it kept the article inside its word budget.  The rate-selection point is made instead from Cruciani 2011 and Mendez 2013, which are more recent and say it more explicitly.

A calibrated human Y-chromosomal phylogeny based on resequencing

Wei, Wei, et al.  Genome Research 23(2):388–395, 2013.  https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.143198.112

camp: mainstream topic: calibration method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: citation

Considered and not used.  Present in the source library and listed in index.tsv, but not worked up in the research dossier and not read in full for this article.  Its TMRCA sits inside the range already covered by Poznik 2013, Hallast 2015 and Karmin 2015, so nothing in the article depends on it.  It should be read before any future revision that argues about calibration in detail.

Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father's age to disease risk

Kong, Augustine, et al.  Nature 488(7412):471–475, 2012.  https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11396

camp: mainstream topic: mutation-rate method: pedigree direction: complicates verified: full

Key figures: 78 Icelandic trios, 4,933 de novo mutations, effective genome coverage "estimated to be 2.63 billion basepairs", germline rate 1.20 × 10⁻⁸ per nucleotide per generation, and the paternal-age slope "2.01 mutations per year (standard error (SE) = 0.17)".

Obtained during verification (author-manuscript PDF was already on disk under an orphan key with no index row; re-fetched from PMC3548427 as a second route and consolidated).  It is the primary source for the paternal-age slope that Part 4's patriarchal-drive computation and Carter's own Model 2 both run on.  Two things it settles:  the 2.01 slope is Kong's, and the 2.68 Gb divisor is not — that is Mendez 2013's, against Kong's own 2.63 Gb.  And the regression pools paternal and maternal counts "as they could not be reliably separated without data from a grandchild," so 2.01 is an upper bound on the paternal-only slope.  Cited.

Human de novo mutation rates from a four-generation pedigree reference

Porubsky, David;  Dashnow, Harriet;  Sasani, Thomas A.;  Logsdon, Glennis A.;  Hallast, Pille;  et al.  Nature 643:427–436, 2025.  doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08922-2.  Library key porubsky-2025, with Supplementary Table 13 saved beside it.

camp: mainstream topic: pedigree-rate method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full

Key figures: CEPH family 1463, four generations, five sequencing technologies, near-complete assemblies;  48 new single-base Y mutations on five father-to-son transmissions, 45 of them in Yq12 satellite repeats, 1 pericentromeric, 2 euchromatic;  whole-Y rate 1.99 × 10⁻⁷ per base per generation, "an order of magnitude higher than that previously reported for Y euchromatic regions";  euchromatic Y rate not significantly different from the autosomal, P = 0.59 (Fig. 2 legend, p. 430).

The direct test of the young-earth coverage claim, and the strongest new datum a creationist could quote.  Its whole-Y number is within 1.5 times of Jeanson's filter-c rate, but the excess is in satellite DNA that no tree uses.  Computed for the article from Table 13:  X-degenerate 2 mutations over 43.0 Mb-transmissions, 4.65 × 10⁻⁸ per generation (exact upper bound 1.68 × 10⁻⁷);  Jeanson's rate predicts 13.0 (P of 2 or fewer = 0.0002).  Limits:  one family, two euchromatic events, strict filters.  Cited in Part 2, the Summary and the objections.

The tree

Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences

Poznik, G. David, et al.  Nature Genetics 48(6):593–599, 2016.  https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3559

camp: mainstream topic: tree-topology method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full

Key figures: 1,244 Y chromosomes, 26 populations, 60,555 SNVs, 10.3 Mb accessible, maximum-likelihood tree with 100 bootstraps;  root TMRCA about 190 ky on the ancient-DNA rate and 163 ky on Helgason's pedigree rate;  CF stem four SNPs;  no confidence interval given for the root anywhere.

The most important single source in the article, for two separate reasons.  Its Supplementary Table 10 prints every backbone split twice, once on each rate, which is what lets the article show that a purely pedigree-calibrated Y tree is still 163,000 years old and 36 times the Flood.  And its Supplementary Data 5 branch files are what let this project rebuild the topology and test the three-way-root prediction directly.  Its demographic result, independent male-specific expansion bursts in five continental superpopulations, is the most Flood-shaped thing in the mainstream Y literature and simultaneously the reason the bottleneck cannot be one global event.  Cited heavily.  Supplementary Note p. 59, cited for Jeanson's coverage argument:  at 4.3x, 3,834 of 17,194 sites (22%) went uncalled, mostly singletons, a factor of 1.29 and not 10.

The Y-Chromosome Tree Bursts into Leaf: 13,000 High-Confidence SNPs Covering the Majority of Known Clades

Hallast, Pille, et al.  Molecular Biology and Evolution 32(3):661–673, 2015.  https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msu327

camp: mainstream topic: tree-topology method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full

Key figures: 3.7 Mb of male-specific Y in 448 men at a mean coverage of 51x;  13,261 high-confidence SNPs;  root-to-tip means of 471 in cell lines, 468 in blood, 466 in saliva;  root TMRCA about 126 ka on the Xue rate.

Provides the calibration-free number the article leans on:  how many mutations actually separate the root from a living man.  468 over 3.7 Mb scales to 1,311 over 10.3 Mb, against 1,339 counted directly off Poznik's branch files.  That agreement across three laboratories is a measurement, not a model, and any young-earth account has to fit it into 4,500 years.  Its 126 ka root is the shallowest modern estimate and therefore the young-earth side's best mainstream figure;  it is still twenty-eight times the Flood.  Cited.

An African American Paternal Lineage Adds an Extremely Ancient Root to the Human Y Chromosome Phylogenetic Tree

Mendez, Fernando L., et al.  American Journal of Human Genetics 92(3):454–459, 2013.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.02.002

camp: mainstream topic: tree-topology method: model direction: complicates verified: full

Key figures: A00 TMRCA 338 kya (95% CI 237–581);  Y rate not measured on the Y but transferred from Kong's autosomal trios, 4.39 to 7.07 × 10⁻¹⁰, point estimate 6.17 × 10⁻¹⁰ at a 30-year generation.

Two things make it essential and neither is its headline.  It states in print that the faster rate is rejected because the resulting date is hard to square with the fossil record and the out-of-Africa dispersal, which is the clearest published instance of rate selection by expectation and is fair for a creationist to quote.  And it prints the Kong paternal-age slope that this article uses to price patriarchal drive.  Its own caution about single-locus inference is the source of the article's point that Y-Adam and mitochondrial Eve need not be a couple.  The 338 kya figure is disputed;  see the next entry.  Cited.

An extended reply to Mendez et al.: The "extremely ancient" chromosome that still isn't

Elhaik, Eran, Tatiana V. Tatarinova, Anatole A. Klyosov & Dan Graur.  arXiv:1410.3972, 2014.  https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3972

camp: critic topic: tree-topology method: commentary direction: complicates verified: full

Key figures: A00 carries 43 derived differences in 240,000 bp;  A0 carries 45 in 180,000 bp;  their re-estimate of the root is 209,500 years (95% CI 168,000–257,400).

Supplies the raw counts that let the article build a fourth independent anchor for the root-to-tip mutation budget without relying on anyone's clock.  It also records that Thomas Krahn, who discovered A00, objected in writing to the dating method used on his own find.  Useful to both sides and decisive for neither:  every figure in the dispute lies between 200,000 and 580,000 years.  Cited inside the Mendez footnote rather than in the running text.

A Revised Root for the Human Y Chromosomal Phylogenetic Tree

Cruciani, Fulvio, et al.  American Journal of Human Genetics 88(6):814–818, 2011.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.05.002

camp: mainstream topic: calibration method: model direction: complicates verified: full

Key figures: revised MSY coalescence about 142 ky, described twice as "easier to reconcile with plausible scenarios of modern human origin."

Cited for the phrasing, not the date.  A mainstream paper saying in print, twice, that a deeper root was welcome because it fitted expectations better is fair to quote and the article quotes it.  The honest gloss, which the article also gives, is that what drove the change was the discovery of previously unsampled basal African lineages rather than a re-fitting of the clock, and that the whole effect is a factor of about two.  Cited.

Resolving the source of branch length variation in the Y chromosome phylogeny

Swiel, Yasmin, Janet Kelso & Stéphane Peyrégne.  Genome Biology 26:4, 2025.  https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-024-03468-4

camp: mainstream topic: tree-topology method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full

Key figures: 35 present-day, four radiocarbon-dated ancient and two Neandertal Y chromosomes over 4.6 Mb, aligned to three references including a telomere-to-telomere and a basal A0b assembly;  about 52 mutations missed per additional pairwise difference from the reference per 10,000 bp;  divergent branches 30–46% shorter than expected;  generation time can explain at most 10%;  no significant haplogroup-specific variation after correction.

The newest primary source in the article and the one that closes the escape route.  Both Jeanson and Carter need real rate variation between lineages;  this paper tests it against better references, finds the variation is an alignment artifact, and shows the artifact runs the wrong way for a young tree, since correcting it lengthens A00's branch.  No creationist response to it could be found.  Cited.

The bottleneck

A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture

Karmin, Monika, et al.  Genome Research 25(4):459–466, 2015.  https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.186684.114

camp: mainstream topic: bottleneck method: measurement direction: complicates verified: full

Key figures: 456 Y chromosomes, 8.8 Mb filtered, 35,700 SNPs, sequenced at over 40x;  MRCA 254 kya (192–307);  rate 0.74 × 10⁻⁹ (0.63–0.95) from the Anzick and Saqqaq ancient genomes;  male effective size collapsing 8–4 kya with female effective size up to 17-fold higher;  Supplementary Table S2 giving father-son differences at twelve filter settings from 180.26 to 0.52.

The paper both sides need.  Its Holocene male bottleneck is the most Flood-shaped observation in the mainstream literature.  Its Table S2 is where Jeanson and Holland's headline rate comes from, and it is also what shows that the same table yields Y-tree ages from 1,857 to 89,658 years depending on where one stops filtering.  Its own authors never use the column as a rate;  they use it as a false-positive check, and their Sanger test of six candidates at a permissive filter found all six were false positives.  Cited heavily.  Two further uses, added in the October 2026 review:  Table S2's SNP column shows the tree's SNP density flat across filters (3,887 to 4,045 per Mb from filter b down) while father-son density varies fourteenfold, so the filter-c excess is not inherited;  and the Supplemental Text, pp. 9–10, gives the Saqqaq-Koryak calibration, four living Koryak men 19.5 transversions from the ancestor they share with Saqqaq, which caps the Y rate at about twice Helgason's on a 4,000-year radiocarbon date alone.

Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck

Zeng, Tian Chen, Alan J. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman.  Nature Communications 9:2077, 2018.  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04375-6

camp: mainstream topic: bottleneck method: model direction: complicates verified: full

Key figures: bottleneck window 5,000–7,000 BP;  modelled severity about 20-fold.

The paper a Flood argument most wants and the paper that most cleanly explains the observation away without a Flood.  It is a model, not a measurement, and the article says so.  Its severity figure is what shows the bottleneck is far more extreme than a Flood needs, which is why a separate social explanation was required in the first place.  Cited.

Large-scale recent expansion of European patrilineages shown by population resequencing

Batini, Chiara, et al.  Nature Communications 6:7152, 2015.  https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms8152

camp: mainstream topic: bottleneck method: measurement direction: supports verified: full

Key figures: 3.7 Mb in 334 men from 17 populations, 5,996 SNPs;  I1, R1a and R1b account for 64% of the sample and coalesce 3.5–7.3 kya;  expansion begins 2.1–4.2 kya.

Genuinely useful to the young-earth side and the article says so at full strength.  Two thirds of European men descend patrilineally from three Bronze Age men, on a mainstream calibration, in a date range that brackets traditional Flood and Babel dates.  What it is not is a coalescence of the whole tree:  those three lineages are twigs inside a tree whose root is 126,000 to 190,000 years old on the same calibration and the same 3.7 Mb.  Cited.  CC BY 4.0.

The archaic Y

The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes

Mendez, Fernando L., G. David Poznik, Sergi Castellano & Carlos D. Bustamante.  American Journal of Human Genetics 98(4):728–734, 2016.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2016.02.023

camp: mainstream topic: archaic-y method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full

Key figures: about 120 kb of exome-captured Neandertal Y from El Sidrón;  Neandertal-modern TMRCA 588 kya (447–806);  modern human Y root 275 kya (241–305) calibrated on Ust'-Ishim.

Cited for the 275 kya root, which is an independent confirmation from a laboratory that used neither Karmin's nor Poznik's data.  Its headline 588 kya figure is not cited, because Petr 2020 shows it was inflated by permissive filtering of a low-coverage archaic branch, a hazard the authors themselves flagged.

The evolutionary history of Neandertal and Denisovan Y chromosomes

Petr, Martin, et al.  bioRxiv 2020.03.09.983445;  published Science 369(6511):1653–1656, 2020.  https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.09.983445

camp: mainstream topic: archaic-y method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full

Key figures: 6.9 Mb capture regions;  rate 7.34 × 10⁻¹⁰ (bootstrap 6.27–8.46);  A00 root about 249 kya (213–293);  Denisovan Y split about 700 kya;  Neandertal-modern split about 370 kya.

A third laboratory, different sequence, its own rate computed from scratch, landing within 10% of Karmin and Poznik.  That is the answer to "the age is an artifact of one pipeline."  It is also where the mainstream account is most obviously patched:  the archaic Y and mitochondrial trees contradict the archaic autosomal tree, and the fix is a complete replacement of the Neandertal Y gene pool that the authors themselves call unlikely under neutrality.  The article reports both.  The published Science version is closed;  everything quoted is from the preprint and must be cited that way.

Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo

Rasmussen, Morten, et al.  Nature 463(7282):757–762, 2010.  https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08835

camp: mainstream topic: calibration method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full

Key figures: Saqqaq hair radiocarbon-dated to 4,044 ± 31 ¹⁴C yr BP, 4,170–3,600 cal yr BP;  over two hundred Y SNPs assign him to haplogroup Q1a.

The single cleanest test in the article, because it needs no date older than the Flood.  A man dated by radiocarbon to about 4,000 years ago, inside the window nearly every young-earth writer accepts, carries a Y chromosome deep in the crown of one of the youngest major clades.  On a 4,500-year tree his Y should be within a few dozen mutations of the root.  No published young-earth source addresses him.  Cited.

The young-earth literature

Evidence for a Human Y Chromosome Molecular Clock

Jeanson, Nathaniel T. & Ashley D. Holland.  Answers Research Journal 12:393–404, 2019.  https://answersresearchjournal.org/evidence-y-chromosome-molecular-clock/

camp: creationist topic: yec-argument method: model direction: supports verified: full

Key figures: Table 1 gives coverages of 15.5x, 12.4x, 35.5x and 40x with per-generation rates of 3.0 × 10⁻⁸, 3.00 × 10⁻⁸, 3.02 × 10⁻⁷ and 5.0 × 10⁻⁷;  the claim is a rate 10 to 17 times faster;  the conclusion is 4,500 years.

The flagship, and nothing in it is fabricated.  Every number traces to a real published table, and a reader who checks Karmin's Table S2 will find 3.26 and 10,793,302 exactly where they say.  Its weight rests on two judgements:  that a father-son difference column its own authors call a quality metric is a mutation rate, and that branch lengths measured by eye off a raster screenshot are a mutation rate.  Four defects found and reported in the article:  "Xu et al. 2009" in the Table 1 head;  a "17-generation pedigree" where Xue says thirteen;  a Helgason confidence interval with no source in Helgason's abstract, which turns out to be a correct normal approximation;  and no engagement with Helgason's three validation experiments.  Cited heavily.

Testing the Predictions of the Young-Earth Y Chromosome Molecular Clock

Jeanson, Nathaniel T.  Answers Research Journal 12:405–423, 2019.  https://answersresearchjournal.org/human-y-chromosome-molecular-clock/

camp: creationist topic: yec-argument method: model direction: supports verified: full

Key figures: five candidate roots scored against population-growth curves;  the evolutionary root captures 27%, a Neanderthal root 14%, Gamma about 90%, Epsilon about 94%, Alpha about 95%;  tree built as a midpoint-rooted neighbour-joining tree in MEGA7 with branch lengths extracted manually.

The paper that states the three-sons prediction and then does not use it.  Its identification of a triad-like structure at Poznik's node 72 is correct, verified here against the branch files:  node 72 is the CF-P143 branch and its stem is four SNPs.  But the triad criterion and the population-growth criterion are stated to be "largely mutually exclusive," and the 4,500-year headline is computed at the Alpha root, which is a two-way split.  The midpoint-rooted neighbour-joining construction is the same one that produced the phantom three-way root in his mitochondrial work, though the criticism is weaker here because he also ran the analysis against Karmin's published Bayesian tree.  Cited.

An Overview of the Independent Histories of the Human Y Chromosome and the Human Mitochondrial Chromosome

Carter, Robert W., Stephen S. Lee & John C. Sanford.  Proceedings of the Eighth ICC, pp. 133–151, 2018.  https://doi.org/10.15385/jpicc.2018.8.1.15

camp: creationist topic: yec-argument method: model direction: supports verified: full

Key figures: accepts Helgason's 8.71 × 10⁻¹⁰;  rejects all phylogenetic rates;  Table 4 gives haplogroup founder ages from a minimum of 3,110 to a maximum of 52,900 years on average;  defines patriarchal drive.  Table 4 was re-read cell by cell from the PDF during verification and every value in the article's footnote matches.

The strongest and most defensible young-earth statement available on this question, and markedly more cautious than Jeanson.  It does not claim a hidden tenfold rate.  Its "less than 10,000 years" abstract rests on the minimum column of a table whose maximum column, computed from Xue's published rate, averages 52,900 years, and a critic should engage the whole table rather than the abstract.  Its patriarchal-drive mechanism is real, and Carter priced it himself in 2019 (see the entry below);  this article prices it independently from Kong's slope, lands on the same number as Carter's own linear model, and finds even his convex model 24 to 30 times too small.  Cited.

Patriarchal drive in the early post-Flood population

Carter, Robert W.  Journal of Creation 33(1):110–118, April 2019.  https://creation.com/patriarchal-drive

camp: creationist topic: yec-argument method: simulation direction: complicates verified: full

Key figures: a Perl population model seeded with three couples aged 100 and living 500 more years, run under three paternal-age mutation curves.  Model 1, y = 1 + age − 20.  Model 2, Kong's slope with 1% of all mutations placed on the Y, y = 1 + (age − 20) × 0.02.  Model 3, the convex best guess, y = 1 + (age − 20)/10 + ((age − 20)/100)³.  Headline result:  "The initial generation (Noah to Shem, Ham, and Japheth), would have created three massive new branches 160 mutations long (using mutation model 3)."  His Y length is "approximately 30 million bases," giving "just under 1 mutation (0.942) per person per generation" at Helgason's rate.

Obtained during verification on 6 September 2026, after the research pass had recorded it as unretrieved.  It is the quantitative version of patriarchal drive that nobody was thought to have published, and it changes the article's Part 4 in both directions.  Model 2 at age 500 gives 10.6 mutations, which rescaled from his ~30 Mb to the 10.3 Mb the phylogeny scores is 3.6 — matching the 3.86 this article computes independently from Kong.  Model 3 gives about 55 on the same scale, 3 to 4% of a 1,303-to-1,654 root-to-tip budget, so convexity buys a factor of fifteen and still leaves the tree 24 to 30 times too shallow.  Carter claims no more than that drive "has been shown to be a real possibility," and says the curve above modern ages is untestable.  Cited.

The promises and pitfalls of correlating Y chromosome genetics to human history

Carter, Robert W.  Journal of Creation 36(2):34–39, 2022.  https://creation.com/en/articles/traced-nathaniel-jeanson-review

camp: creationist topic: critique method: review direction: undercuts verified: full

Key claims: Jeanson's book assumes three Y mutations per generation, seven for the first generation after Noah;  his root choice implies some lineages mutate faster and the discordant ones are African;  his Amerindian conclusion requires 100% replacement of Native American Y lineages within a few centuries, which is "statistically indefensible."

The most damaging published criticism of the young-earth Y clock, written by the other leading young-earth geneticist in a young-earth journal.  It targets the mutation rate, the root choice, the constant-rate assumption and the Amerindian conclusion.  Two citation defects were verified from the stored bytes and are reported in the article's footnotes:  reference 2 gives the Y-clock paper the volume, pages and year of Jeanson's 2020 Amerindian paper, and the header and reference 1 disagree about the year of Traced.  Cited.

Can we place the sons of Noah on the Y chromosome tree?

Carter, Robert W.  Creation Ministries International, 29 October 2024.  https://creation.com/en/articles/sons-of-noah-y-chromosome-tree

camp: creationist topic: yec-argument method: hypothesis direction: complicates verified: full

Key claim: nine mutually compatible hypotheses about how Noah's three sons map onto the Y tree, permitting one, two or three founding branches, nested or not, and a refusal to choose among them.

The most intellectually honest document on the young-earth side, and read plainly a concession that the three-sons prediction is not a prediction.  A model that permits every branching pattern cannot be tested by counting branches.  It also concedes that "there is no real way to really know the sequence of 'Y chromosome Noah'" and that different branch lengths near the middle of the tree may represent chance rather than time.  Its Flood-year irradiation suggestion is raised and half-withdrawn.  Cited.

Response to: The Promises and Pitfalls of Correlating Y Chromosome Genetics to Human History, Review of Traced

Jeanson, Nathaniel T.  Answers Research Journal 18:153–168, 26 March 2025.  https://answersresearchjournal.org/genetics/response-to-review-of-traced/  Library key jeanson-2025b.

camp: creationist topic: yec-argument method: commentary direction: complicates verified: full

Key claims: high-coverage studies give "about three mutations per generation";  the field "filtered out results that disagreed with their expectations";  ancient DNA is omitted from his analyses after a Neandertal-Y population-growth test;  Native American Y lineages arrived "roughly 1,500 years ago (that is, the A.D. 300s to 600s)";  new deep branches in commercial databases confirm Traced.

The latest statement of the young-earth Y clock by its author, and the best available access to Traced, which it quotes at length (chapter 13, pp. 176–180, on the three-per-generation rule).  Read from the stored HTML, cited by section heading.  It never mentions Saqqaq, Helgason's validation experiments, Swiel 2025 or Porubsky 2025.  Its prediction claims are qualitative:  the examples of new deep branches are real but the mainstream predicts them too.  Cited throughout.

How carbon dating works

Carter, Robert.  Creation Ministries International, 2021.  https://creation.com/how-carbon-dating-works  Library key carter-2021b.

camp: creationist topic: calibration method: commentary direction: complicates verified: full

Key claim: post-Flood radiocarbon reads too old, by "a few centuries" for samples from ancient Egypt or Jericho, and far more for samples from just after the Flood;  no young-earth calibration curve exists.

Cited in Part 6 for how much a careful young-earth writer moves a 4,000-year radiocarbon date, which sets the terms of the Saqqaq test.  The quotation sits under the h3 "Carbon dating is affected by the strength of Earth's magnetic field".

Correlation of C-14 Age with Real Time

Brown, Robert H.  Creation Research Society Quarterly 29(1):45–47, June 1992.  Library key brown-1992.

camp: creationist topic: calibration method: model direction: complicates verified: full

Key figures: Flood at 5,350 years before present;  Table I, p. 46, real age 3,700 at radiocarbon 3,920 and 3,800 at 4,070.

The only published young-earth radiocarbon conversion with a table.  Interpolated, Saqqaq's 4,044 radiocarbon years become about 3,780 calendar years, so even this model moves him by only about 260 years.  Cited in Part 6.

Considered and not used

• Thomson et al. 2000. Read in full. Not cited; see its entry above. Its point about rates set by an assumed ape divergence is made instead from Cruciani 2011 and Mendez 2013.
• Wei et al. 2013. In the library, not worked up. See its entry above.
• Peaceful Science forum thread, "Testing Jeanson's Model: Y Chromosome Mutation Rates," 2020, 106 posts. Fetched as Discourse JSON and stored, so the post text is the stored text. Not cited. A forum post is not a citable result, and the substance of S. Joshua Swamidass's objection is established in the article by this project's own computations instead. Held in quarantine with the reason.
• Joel Duff, "How Dr. Jeanson's Rhetoric Substitutes Mockery for Methodology," 2026. Read in full and stored. Not cited, and deliberately so. Duff's central objection is the mutation-rate-versus-substitution-rate distinction, which is decisive against Jeanson's mitochondrial clock and does not transfer to the Y, because the Y is haploid, non-recombining and has no heteroplasmy. Importing it would have been a real error. Held in quarantine with that reasoning.
• Fu et al. 2014, the Ust'-Ishim rate of 0.76 × 10⁻⁹. Cited through Karmin 2015 and Mendez 2016 rather than fetched directly. Two independent sources quote the figure identically.
• Hallast et al. 2023, Nature 621:355–364, hallast-2023, 43 assembled Y chromosomes. Shows Yq12 ranging from 17.6 to 37.2 Mb between men, which supports the point that Yq12 cannot be aligned for a tree. Not cited: Porubsky 2025's own statement that 82% of its Y mutations lie where short reads cannot map makes the same point with a source the article already cites.

Could not be obtained

• Helgason et al. 2015, the article body. Closed at Nature Genetics: Unpaywall closed, no repository copy, no PMC record, no preprint. A headful-Chrome render returns the abstract, figure legends and reference list and stops at "This is a preview of subscription content." It matters less than it looks: all eleven supplementary tables and the supplementary figure PDF are free, and every number this article needed was recovered from them. What is still missing is the Methods prose and whatever the body says about false negatives. Institutional access would open it.
• Petr et al. 2020, the published Science version. Still closed, re-checked 6 September 2026 by five routes: Unpaywall (is_oa false, oa_status closed, no OA locations), Europe PMC (no PMCID), OpenAlex (four locations, none open), the Max Planck PuRe repository, and the two repository landing pages OpenAlex lists (DIGITAL.CSIC serves a bot wall, USF has no attached file). Obtained instead as the authors' bioRxiv preprint, 104 pages including full supplementary information, and every quotation is cited as preprint wording. The published abstract was obtained separately from the NCBI eutils efetch endpoint for PMID 32973032, which is the publisher-supplied abstract of record; it shows that the preprint's concession "Although unlikely under neutrality" was cut in review, and the article now says so. AAAS institutional access would open the rest.
• Maretty et al. 2017, Nature 548:87–91, the raw Y sequences. Jeanson and Holland's second rate is derived from a figure in this paper because, in their words, the raw Y sequence data are restricted access. That is still true; the Danish pan-genome data sit behind a data-access committee. Nobody has published the pairwise-alignment recount that Jeanson and Holland themselves asked for, and a search of works citing Maretty found none. This is the single most valuable missing piece of evidence in the whole question, and it is missing for both sides.
• Jeanson, Traced (Master Books, 2022). Not on disk and not borrowable at archive.org under a search made in September 2026. Its claims are reached through Carter's 2022 review and through the passages Jeanson quotes from it in his 2025 reply (jeanson-2025b), which gives the three-per-generation rule in the book's own words. Any printdisabled copy that appears should be checked with search-inside before it is recorded as unobtainable again.
• Jeanson's Supplemental Tables 1–11, including the generation-time range behind the 4,500-year figure. The ARJ article references them; the supplemental file was not retrieved. The generation times used in the article were inferred from his published rates and the tree depth, which is adequate for the ranges printed but is not the same as reading his own range.
• A peer-reviewed mainstream critique of either 2019 paper. Searched Europe PMC, OpenAlex and the open web. None exists. Recorded as a finding rather than a gap: the central empirical claim is testable in ten lines of code against a free supplementary table, and nobody in the mainstream has published the test.