Building on Sand: Jeanson’s Uncritical Reliance on a Nineteenth-Century Forgery

Recently, Answers in Genesis published “Genesis on Offense,” a new article by Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson making the confident claim that science grounded in Genesis is rewriting Native American history. The framing is triumphalist. In previous articles Jeanson reports that unbelievers have been contacting him, that he was invited in 2023 to present his research to the Lakota Treaty Council in Rapid City, and that something about his work has, in his own words, “struck a nerve.” For a conservative Christian audience that has always confessed that all truth is God’s truth, and that the book of nature must finally cohere with the book of scripture, the proposition is not unattractive. We should take it seriously as a theological commitment before asking whether the case Jeanson is making actually delivers on its promises.

To that end, I want to spend some time in this post looking at one specific source that is doing an enormous amount of work in Jeanson’s reconstruction of pre-Columbian North America and larger effort to write Native American history within a young-earth post-Noahic Flood context. It is a document called the Walam Olum, or Red Record. It appears in his 2020 Answers Research Journal paper, in his 2022 book Traced, in his 2025 book They Had Names, in his January 2025 AiG article “I Wasn’t Supposed to Be There,” in a multi-part YouTube series with Ken Ham, and now again in “Genesis on Offense,” where it is invoked as historical corroboration of his genetic chronology. Many of the readers consuming that material are almost certainly unaware of a rather important fact about the Red Record: it appears, with very high probability, to be a nineteenth-century fabrication. That is a problem worth taking some time to explore which is what we will do here.

What Jeanson Is Actually Claiming, and Why It Matters

Let me begin by attempting to relay Jeanson’s argument in his own terms. His argumentative structure is consistent across the publications listed above. Jeanson analyzes Y-chromosome variation in modern Native American populations, applies a mutation rate he derives from a 2017 paper by Maretty and colleagues, and concludes that the entry of the founding Native American male lineages into the continent took place somewhere in the A.D. 200s to 900s. He then turns to the Walam Olum, which describes a Lenape migration account featuring ninety-five named chiefs whose generations, when tallied at roughly twenty-five years apiece, generate an arrival window that falls comfortably within that same range. Two lines of evidence, Jeanson argues — one genetic, one textual — independently converge and mutually corroborate. That convergence is what gives the framework its rhetorical and apologetic weight.

It is worth noticing how Jeanson’s language about the document has shifted over the course of his publications. In the 2020 ARJ paper he describes the Walam Olum as “previously discredited,” but suggests that his genetic results indicate it “may, in fact, be authentic.” By “Genesis on Offense” in May 2026, and recent interviews almost all of the hedging has disappeared. The document is invoked simply as “the Delaware record,” which “described a migration from Asia around AD 900,” and DNA, we are told, “showed the same.” The reader is given no indication that the source in question has a contested status in the scholarly literature. A footnote points to They Had Names for further reading. Nothing in the body text signals to the reader that this is anything other than a reasonably reliable historical document.

The reason the Walam Olum is appealing to Jeanson and to his audience is not difficult to identify, and Jeanson himself states it openly. In his YouTube series with Ken Ham, he reads aloud from the opening of the document: “At the beginning, the sea everywhere covered the earth. Above it extended a swirling cloud, and within it the Great Spirit moved.” If you have read Genesis 1:1–2, as Jeanson observes, this sounds familiar. The document then proceeds to describe a creation, the formation of the first men and women, the entrance of an evil snake, and, in Book 2, a destructive flood. Creation, fall, flood — the structural parallel with Genesis 1 through 9 is unmistakable, and Jeanson presents the parallel as remarkable evidence of a preserved cultural memory of biblical events.

It is, of course, precisely that structural parallel that should give us pause rather than confidence. The attractiveness of a source to our prior theological commitments is not, by itself, evidence of that source’s reliability. That is not how responsible historical reasoning works, and it is not how responsible theological reasoning works either. The question we have to ask is not whether the Walam Olum sounds Genesis-friendly. Clearly it does. The question is whether it is what it claims to be: an authentic indigenous record of Lenape origin and migration, preserved across many centuries and finally transcribed in the early 1800s. On that question the evidence is not ambiguous, and the rest of this post is concerned with showing why and the consequences that result from that.

Who Was Rafinesque, and What Is the Actual Manuscript Evidence?

Let me introduce the document for which I, until recently, and most of my readers would have been previously unaware of, much less the past controversy around that document.

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783–1840) was a genuine polymath. He was a French-born naturalist who spent much of his adult life in the United States and contributed real and lasting work to early American natural history. He catalogued hundreds of species of plants and fish. He surveyed and mapped ancient earthworks in the Ohio and Kentucky river valleys before almost anyone else was doing that work systematically. By all accounts he was a brilliant and eccentric man, institutionally marginal, often resentful of his exclusion from establishment science, and powerfully motivated to make a great discovery that would secure his reputation. None of this is offered as a complete explanation of what follows. It is offered as context, because the man matters to the story.

The Walam Olum first appears in the published record in Rafinesque’s two-volume work The American Nations, printed in Philadelphia in 1836. His account of how he obtained it runs as follows. In 1820, an otherwise unattested Delaware historian named “Olumpees” passed a set of painted wooden sticks bearing red-ochre pictographs to a “Dr. Ward of Indiana,” who then transmitted them to Rafinesque. There is no contemporary documentation of any such transaction. No correspondence. No witness. No independent attestation from any Lenape, missionary, colonial, or Moravian source predating Rafinesque’s 1836 publication. The original sticks, conveniently, were lost after publication. The “Dr. Ward” identification has resisted nearly two centuries of scholarly attempts at confirmation.

Here is what does survive. Rafinesque’s own 1833 manuscript is preserved at the University of Pennsylvania as Ms. Coll. 700 Item 217. The University of Pennsylvania’s OPenn online catalog describes this manuscript plainly. It is, in their own words, “a manuscript written probably in Philadelphia in 1833, in English and purported Delaware, in the hand of C. S. Rafinesque,” and it is “now challenged as a hoax manufactured by Rafinesque.” That is what the institutional custodian of the surviving document says about it. Not a militant secularist. Not a New Atheist polemicist. The archivist.

In 1995, David Oestreicher completed a Ph.D. dissertation at Rutgers titled “The Anatomy of the Walam Olum: The Dissection of a 19th-Century Anthropological Hoax.” His findings, drawn from a minute physical examination of Rafinesque’s surviving drafts, are not difficult to summarize for a lay audience. In the manuscript, Rafinesque repeatedly crossed out Lenape words and replaced them with others that better matched the English text. The English was written first; the Lenape was derived from it, not the other way around. This is not a matter of interpretation or theoretical framework. It is a matter of looking at the physical pages and watching Rafinesque revise his way toward a better match. The Lenape vocabulary itself was assembled from David Zeisberger’s 1806 Moravian missionary dictionary. Rafinesque even copied Zeisberger’s typographical errors into his text, which is rather difficult to explain if one is working from genuine oral tradition. The pictographs, examined against the actual corpus of attested Eastern Woodlands petroglyphs, bear no resemblance to the latter. They are instead a hybrid drawn from Egyptian, Chinese, and Mayan symbols available to Rafinesque in books he had recently acquired.

On February 11, 1997, the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma — which had previously lent some endorsement to David McCutchen’s 1993 popular translation of the text — formally withdrew that endorsement after reviewing Oestreicher’s evidence. They stated, in essence, that the Walam Olum distorted and displaced authentic Delaware oral history. The people whose history this document claims to record have formally rejected it as a fabrication. That is, one would think, a meaningful data point.

At present, there is no active academic debate about the authenticity of the Walam Olum. The Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology, the Archaeological Society of New Jersey, the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology, and specialists in Algonquian linguistics — including Ives Goddard, the preeminent Algonquianist of the twentieth century — all regard it as a nineteenth-century fabrication. The document’s remaining defenders are confined to popular works and to young-earth creationist ministry materials. This is the current state of the evidence, and it is the evidence Jeanson’s readers deserve to know about before being asked to accept the Red Record as historical testimony.

Table 1: History of the acceptance of Walum Olum

Historical Period	Key Event / Academic Milestone	Primary Scholars / Organizations involved	Epistemological Standing
1820–1836	Purported acquisition and decoding of painted wooden tablets	Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, “Dr. Ward,” Olumpees	Unpublished manuscript of unverified provenance
1836	First public translation and commentary published in Philadelphia	Constantine Samuel Rafinesque	Generally ignored or viewed with skepticism by contemporaries
1885	Publication of The Lenâpé and Their Legends	Daniel Garrison Brinton, Anthony of the Delaware	Highly regarded; accepted into early Americanist ethnology
1954	Publication of the definitive interdisciplinary volume on the migration legend	Eli Lilly, Glenn A. Black, Charles F. and Erminie Voegelin, Indiana Historical Society	Peak academic consensus; treated as a scientifically verified historical chronicle
1995	Exposure of the hoax and formal retraction of tribal endorsement	David M. Oestreicher, Herbert C. Kraft, Ives Goddard, Delaware Nation of Oklahoma	Universally recognized as a nineteenth-century fabrication

How Jeanson Handles This Evidence, and What He Leaves Out

Let me give Jeanson credit for what he does acknowledge. In “I Wasn’t Supposed to Be There” (January 2025) and in the YouTube series with Ken Ham, he does inform his audience that David Oestreicher wrote a 1995 thesis concluding the document was a hoax, and he does mention that the Delaware Nation withdrew its endorsement. He does not pretend this scholarship does not exist. Many YEC popularizers would simply not mention it. He does.

But it is also worth looking carefully at what he does with the information once he has acknowledged it. His engagement with Oestreicher’s case in the YouTube transcript is, to put it gently, not what I would call substantive. His first objection is to the tone of Oestreicher’s thesis. He finds that parts of it read “like a tabloid,” and he suggests that Oestreicher appears biased against the religious attitudes characteristic of Rafinesque’s era. His second objection is a logical one. Oestreicher’s argument against the document depends in part on the claim that its migration timeline does not match the archaeological record, and since Jeanson rejects the mainstream archaeological timeline on prior biblical grounds, he treats this as a reason to question the archaeologist rather than the document.

Let us consider that second argument seriously. Jeanson draws an analogy to Beowulf. We would not reject Beowulf as a forgery simply because its language does not match modern English, and we would not expect a genuinely old Delaware document to look exactly like modern Delaware. As a general principle about historical documents, this is actually fair. Languages change. Pictographic traditions shift. A genuinely old document should be expected to look unlike modern productions of the same culture. I do not want to caricature his point.

The problem is that this argument applies to the content of the text, not to the physical manuscript evidence. What Oestreicher demonstrated was not that the Walam Olum’s language is too archaic, or that the pictographs do not match modern petroglyphs. He demonstrated that the English text preceded the Lenape text in the surviving drafts. He demonstrated that Rafinesque was composing in English and then back-translating, using a Moravian missionary dictionary as his source of Lenape vocabulary, errors included. That is not an argument from content. It is physical manuscript evidence. The drafts have been examined. The crossings-out have been documented. The dictionary dependence has been traced word by word.

Jeanson does not address this evidence anywhere. Not in the 2020 ARJ paper. Not in “I Wasn’t Supposed to Be There.” Not in the YouTube series. Not in “Genesis on Offense.” The Beowulf analogy, however reasonable in the abstract, simply does not engage what Oestreicher actually showed. The reader who hears only Jeanson’s rebuttal will come away with the impression that Oestreicher’s case rests on a circular preference for mainstream timescales, when in fact the heart of Oestreicher’s case is a stack of physical drafts in Rafinesque’s own handwriting.

What Jeanson also does not address is the absence of any pre-1836 independent attestation of the document. No missionary record. No colonial record. No Lenape source. No contemporary account of any kind. The entire evidential base for the Walam Olum is the word of the man who published it — a man whose other work includes documented fabrications, and who had powerful personal and professional motivations to find evidence for exactly the kind of migration narrative his document happens to provide. That is a remarkably thin reed on which to hang a historical reconstruction of an entire continent.

An analogy may help, and I offer it because I think it will resonate with my academic Christian audience that has thought carefully about how to evaluate religious texts. Consider the early-nineteenth-century origin of the Book of Mormon. We have a single human channel of transmission — Joseph Smith — who claims to have received an ancient document, who declines to make the original artifacts available for independent inspection, and whose translation is the only access anyone has to the alleged source. Faithful Christians have for nearly two centuries pointed out, with both charity and clarity, that this is not how reliable historical transmission works. The mere fact that a text contains religiously resonant material is not evidence that the text is what its author claims it to be. I am suggesting, gently, that we apply the same evidentiary standards to the Walam Olum that we have long applied to comparable claims. The principle does not change because the conclusion happens to be congenial to our reading of Genesis.

And here, I believe, is where we come to the heart of the matter. The Walam Olum contains a creation narrative. It contains a fall account with a serpent. It contains a flood. For a YEC reader, this is deeply, almost overwhelmingly, attractive. But the presence of these elements in a document is not, by itself, evidence that the document is an authentic ancient record. Flood traditions appear in many cultures around the world; that has been known since the nineteenth century, and Christian scholars have long discussed how to interpret the pattern. The question is whether this particular document is what it claims to be, and on that question the evidence is damning. The theological attractiveness of a source is not a substitute for source-critical rigor. The mirror image of what Jeanson accuses Oestreicher of doing — allowing a prior commitment to determine the evidentiary weight given to a document — is, I am sorry to say, what is happening here. This is just a tad inconvenient.

Table 2: Problems identified with the Walum Olum manuscript

Linguistic / Iconographic Category	Fabrications Identified in the Walam Olum Manuscript	Source Material Utilized by Rafinesque	Linguistic & Ethnological Reality
Grammatical Structure	Ungrammatical, linear word-for-word English-to-Lenape translation	David Zeisberger’s 1806 Moravian Dictionary, John Heckewelder’s papers	Genuine Lenape is a highly complex, polysynthetic language with non-linear verb structures
Lexical Errors	Incorporation of typographical errors and idiosyncratic missionary translations	Zeisberger’s bilingual Delaware-English vocabulary lists	Native speakers do not replicate modern European printing press and transcription errors
Mnemonic Pictographs	Stylized symbols representing cosmological concepts and historical migrations	Hybridized Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, and Mayan glyphs	Entirely alien to traditional Eastern Woodlands bark art, rock petroglyphs, and tribal beadwork
Authorial Attributions	Attribution of the final historical section to a post-contact scribe named “Lekhibit”	John Burns’ fictitious “translation” of post-1600 Delaware history	An artificial character constructed to explain the lack of original pictographic support

The Deeper Problem: Confirmation Bias Wearing Historical Clothing

The Walam Olum is not an isolated case. Throughout his work on Native American origins, Jeanson uses indigenous oral traditions and quasi-textual sources — Natchez migration accounts, Osage oral histories, Delaware records, Aztec and Inca origin chronologies — as historical corroboration for his compressed genetic chronology. He is, however, quite selective about which traditions receive serious scrutiny. Those that appear to corroborate his framework tend to be treated as plausible historical memory; those that create difficulties tend to be set aside or explained away. Oral traditions that point to deep-time occupation of the Americas — and there are many — receive less attention.

There is an honest observation that needs to be made here, and I want to make it carefully because I do not want to attribute motives I cannot verify. A researcher who approaches evidence with a strong prior commitment to a particular conclusion, who applies minimal scrutiny to supporting evidence while applying heavy scrutiny to contrary evidence, is not doing science in any meaningful sense of the word. He is doing something else, something that has the appearance of evidential reasoning while functioning, in practice, as post-hoc rationalization. I have raised these concerns before in connection with Jeanson’s genetic methodology, and I do not believe it is unfair to raise them again here in connection with his use of historical sources.

I will not relitigate the full genetic methodology in this post, because I and others have written and talked about it at length elsewhere. But it is worth noting briefly that the pattern is the same. The Y-chromosome mutation rate Jeanson derives from the Maretty et al. (2017) data — a rate that underpins the entire compressed chronological framework — was derived, as Herman Mays Jr. has documented, from a screenshot of a published genetic tree, with branch lengths measured using a ruler held against a computer monitor. One of the Maretty et al. paper’s own co-authors, Laurits Skov, has stated in direct correspondence that the differences between father-son pairs in that study “are errors” and that he “would not use it for inferring mutation rates.” The Neanderthal Y-chromosome data, which would push the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor far beyond any YEC-compatible timeline, is excluded from analysis without methodological justification.

The pattern is consistent across the work. Evidence that fits is used, often with minimal scrutiny. Evidence that does not fit is not engaged. When the same researcher demonstrates that pattern in both his historical sources and his genetic methodology, we should not be surprised that the resulting framework appears to deliver remarkable, convergent confirmation of the YEC chronology. The convergence is being produced, in significant part, by the selection. We should, however, be concerned — both for the integrity of the science and for the witness of the church.

A Question of Christian Witness

I want to close by raising a question that I think matters more than the scholarly details, important as those details are. It is a question about what it means to reason well as a Christian, and about what is at stake for the church when believers make confident truth claims on the basis of evidence they have not examined with care.

The Christian tradition that I and Jeanson are part of has always confessed that the God who inspired scripture is also the God who made and sustains the natural world, and that these two books — scripture and creation — cannot ultimately contradict each other, because they have the same Author. That commitment gives us every reason to investigate the natural world with confidence and without fear. But it also gives us every reason to investigate carefully, because misreading either book dishonors the Author of both. Article 2 of the Belgic Confession, the Westminster Confession’s treatment of providence and general revelation, the long Reformed line of natural theology that runs from Calvin through Owen and Vos and Bavinck — none of these traditions instructs us to read only the book of nature, or of history, that appears to support our current interpretation of scripture. They instruct us to read it honestly, to follow the evidence where it leads, and to hold our interpretive conclusions with appropriate tentativeness, because semper reformanda applies to interpretation as well as to practice.

What I see in Jeanson’s use of the Walam Olum is, I would argue, the opposite of this posture. A document that was almost certainly fabricated by a nineteenth-century eccentric. A document for which no original artifacts survive. A document with no independent pre-publication attestation in any missionary, colonial, or Lenape source. A document whose surviving manuscript drafts show the Lenape text being constructed out of English rather than the other way around. A document that has been formally rejected by the people whose history it claims to record. This document is being cited, repeatedly, across multiple publications and a popular video series, as historical corroboration of a Genesis-based chronology — because it contains a creation narrative and a flood account that sound encouraging to a YEC reader.

This is not how we honor scripture. When we uncritically accept any source that appears to support our presuppositions, regardless of its evidential quality, we do not strengthen the case for Genesis. We weaken our own credibility, and by extension we weaken the credibility of the claims we are trying to defend. The watching world will eventually find the Oestreicher dissertation, the OPenn catalog entry, the Delaware Nation’s formal withdrawal of endorsement. These things are not hidden. More importantly, our brothers and sisters in the pew, who are trying to think carefully about science, history, and faith, deserve better than a confident historical reconstruction built on a fabricated source.

I want to be careful here, because I am not in a position to read Jeanson’s heart, and I do not think he is being dishonest in any simple sense. I would argue, more charitably, that he has allowed his confidence in his framework to outrun his critical examination of the sources that framework depends on. That is a very human failure, and a very understandable one. But when it happens in a public ministry that presents itself as defending the truth of God’s word, it matters. And someone needs to say so, because the alternative is to let it stand.

If you are encountering Jeanson’s work on Native American history in your church, your small group, or your homeschool curriculum, here is what I would encourage you to do. Read the OPenn catalog entry for Ms. Coll. 700 Item 217 — it is one paragraph long and freely available online. Read the December 2009 Archaeology magazine summary of Oestreicher’s findings, which is written for a general audience. Read the Delaware Tribe of Indians’ 1997 statement of withdrawal. And then ask yourself, with the patience and seriousness that Reformed Christians have always brought to questions of evidence and interpretation, whether this is the foundation on which we want to be building our defense of Genesis. I would suggest, with all due humility, that it is not.

References

Primary Sources Examined

Jeanson, Nathaniel T. 2020. “On the Origin of Human Mitochondrial DNA Differences, New Generation Time Data Both Suggest a Unified Young-Earth Creation Model and Challenge the Evolutionary Out-of-Africa Model.” Answers Research Journal 13: 23–33.

Jeanson, Nathaniel T. 2022. Traced: Human DNA’s Big Surprise. Green Forest, AR: Master Books.

Jeanson, Nathaniel T. 2025a. “I Wasn’t Supposed to Be There.” Answers in Genesis, January 2025. https://answersingenesis.org/genetics/i-wasnt-supposed-to-be-there/

Jeanson, Nathaniel T. 2025b. They Had Names: Tracing the History of the North American Indigenous People. Green Forest, AR: Master Books.

Jeanson, Nathaniel T. 2026. “Genesis on Offense.” Nathaniel Jeanson Blog, Answers in Genesis, May 16, 2026. https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/nathaniel-jeanson/2026/05/16/genesis-on-offense/

Jeanson, Nathaniel T., and Ken Ham. 2025–2026. “No, Native Americans Were Not the First Americans.” Multi-part YouTube series, Answers in Genesis channel.

Rafinesque, Constantine Samuel. 1836. The American Nations; or, Outlines of a National History of the Ancient and Modern Nations of North and South America. 2 vols. Philadelphia: published by the author. (Walam Olum text appears in vol. 1, pp. 121–161.)

Scholarship on the Walam Olum

Brinton, Daniel G. 1885. The Lenâpé and Their Legends; with the Complete Text and Symbols of the Walam Olum. Philadelphia: D. G. Brinton.

Delaware Tribe of Indians. 1997. Formal withdrawal of endorsement of the Walam Olum, February 11, 1997.

Goddard, Ives. 2005. Linguistic verdict on the Walam Olum. In Brian Swann, ed., Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America, 4. Lincoln: Bison Books / University of Nebraska Press.

Jackson, Brittany, and Mark Rose. 2009. “Walam Olum Hokum.” Archaeology, December 4, 2009. https://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/hoaxes/walam_olum.html

Kraft, Herbert C. 2001. The Lenape-Delaware Indian Heritage: 10,000 BC to AD 2000. Stanhope, NJ: Lenape Books.

Lilly, Eli, C. F. Voegelin, Erminie W. Voegelin, Paul Weer, Glenn A. Black, Joe E. Pierce, and Georg K. Neumann. 1954. Walam Olum, or Red Score: The Migration Legend of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society.

McCutchen, David. 1993. The Red Record: The Wallam Olum, the Oldest Native North American History. Garden City Park, NY: Avery Publishing.

Oestreicher, David M. 1994. “Unmasking the Walam Olum: A 19th-Century Hoax.” Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey 49: 10–44.

Oestreicher, David M. 1995. “The Anatomy of the Walam Olum: The Dissection of a 19th-Century Anthropological Hoax.” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Oestreicher, David M. 1996. “Unraveling the Walam Olum.” Natural History 105 (10): 14–21.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries. n.d. “Walam Olum, by C. S. Rafinesque, 1833.” Ms. Coll. 700, Item 217. OPenn: Primary Resources Available to Everyone. https://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0002/html/mscoll700_item217.html

Warren, Leonard. 2004. Constantine Samuel Rafinesque: A Voice in the American Wilderness. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Williams, Stephen. 1991. Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Zeisberger, David. [1806] 1887. Zeisberger’s Indian Dictionary: English, German, Iroquois — the Onondaga, and Algonquin — the Delaware. Edited by Eben Norton Horsford. Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son.

Genetic Methodology and Critiques

Karmin, Monika, et al. 2015. “A Recent Bottleneck of Y Chromosome Diversity Coincides with a Global Change in Culture.” Genome Research 25 (4): 459–466.

Maretty, Lasse, et al. 2017. “Sequencing and De Novo Assembly of 150 Genomes from Denmark as a Population Reference.” Nature 548: 87–91.

Mays, Herman Jr. Ongoing critique of Jeanson’s Y-chromosome methodology. Monofilia. https://www.monofilia.org

Mendez, Fernando L., G. David Poznik, Sergi Castellano, and Carlos D. Bustamante. 2016. “The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes.” The American Journal of Human Genetics 98 (4): 728–734.

Skov, Laurits. Personal correspondence on the Maretty et al. (2017) father-son pair data, as reported in critiques by Mays and others.