the great statistician and evolutionary geneticist Sir Ronald Fisher anticipated these startlingly recent dates. He wrote the following, in a letter dated 15 January 1929 to Major Leonard Darwin (Charles’s second youngest son): ‘King Solomon lived 100 generations ago, and his line may be extinct; if not, I wager he is in the ancestry of all of us, and in nearly equal proportions, however unequally his wisdom is distributed.’
