Re: English, Irish, Scots: They're All One, Genes Suggest



On Mar 5, 3:16 pm, "Jack Linthicum" <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Many geneticsts are struck by the overall genetic similarities,
leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been
inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained
in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like
Celts, Romans, Angles , Saxons, Vikings and Normans.

The implication that the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh have a
great deal in common with each other, at least from the geneticist's
point of view, seems likely to please no one.

The Celtic cultural myth "is very entrenched and has a lot to do with
the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity; their main identifying feature
is that they are not English," said Dr. Sykes, an Englishman who has
traced his Y chromosome and surname to an ancestor who lived in the
village of Flockton in Yorkshire in 1286.

March 5, 2007
English, Irish, Scots: They're All One, Genes Suggest
By NICHOLAS WADE

Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that
there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands.
Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different
peoples: the Irish from the Celts, and the English from the Anglo-
Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the
country's western and northern fringes.

But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are
edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall
genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and
Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people
that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from
later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles , Saxons, Vikings and
Normans.

The implication that the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh have a
great deal in common with each other, at least from the geneticist's
point of view, seems likely to please no one.

The genetic evidence is still under development, however, and because
only very rough dates can be derived from it, it is hard to weave
evidence from DNA, archaeology, history and linguistics into a
coherent picture of British and Irish origins.

That has not stopped the attempt. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical
geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians' account
is wrong in almost every detail. In Dr. Oppenheimer's reconstruction
of events, the principal ancestors of today's British and Irish
populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a
language related to Basque.

The British Isles were unpopulated then, wiped clean of people by
glaciers that had smothered northern Europe for about 4,000 years and
forced the former inhabitants into southern refuges in Spain and
Italy. When the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated, people
moved back north.

The new arrivals in the British Isles would have found an empty
territory, which they could have reached just by walking along the
Atlantic coastline, since there were still land bridges then across
what are now English Channel and the Irish Sea.

This new population, who lived by hunting and gathering, survived a
sharp cold spell called the Younger Dryas that lasted from 12,300 to
11,000 years ago. Much later, some 6,000 years ago, agriculture
finally reached the British Isles from its birthplace in the Near
East.

Agriculture may have been introduced by people speaking Celtic, in Dr.
Oppenheimer's view. Although the Celtic immigrants may have been few
in number, they spread their farming techniques and their language
throughout Ireland and the western coast of Britain. Later immigrants
arrived from northern Europe had more influence on the eastern and
southern coasts. They too spread their language, a branch of German,
but these invaders' numbers were also small compared with the local
population.

In all, about three-quarters of the ancestors of today's British and
Irish populations arrived between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, when
rising sea levels finally divided Britain and Ireland from the
Continent and from one another, Dr. Oppenheimer calculates in a new
book, "The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story" (Carroll
& Graf, 2006).

As for subsequent invaders, Ireland received the fewest; the invaders'
DNA makes up about 12 percent of the Irish gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer
estimates, but it accounts for 20 percent of the gene pool in Wales,
30 percent in Scotland, and about one-third in eastern and southern
England.

Still, no single group of invaders is responsible for more than 5
percent of the current gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer says on the basis of
genetic data.

He cites figures from the archaeologist Heinrich Haerke that the Anglo-
Saxon invasions that began in the fourth century A.D. added about
250,000 people to a British population of one to two million, an
estimate Dr. Oppenheimer notes is larger than his but considerably
less than the substantial replacement of the English population
assumed by others. The Norman invasion of 1066 A.D. brought not many
more than 10,000 people, according to Dr. Haerke.

Other geneticists say Dr. Oppenheimer's reconstruction is plausible,
though some disagree with details. Several said that genetic methods
did not give precise enough dates to be confident of certain aspects,
like when the first settlers arrived.

"Once you have an established population, it is quite difficult to
change it very radically," said Daniel G. Bradley, a geneticist at
Trinity College, Dublin. But he said he was "quite agnostic" as to
whether the original population became established in Britain and
Ireland immediately after the glaciers retreated 16,000 years ago, as
Dr. Oppenheimer argues, or more recently, in the Neolithic Age, which
began 10,000 years ago.

<more>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/science/05cnd-brits.html?hp=&pagewa...

Interesting but not at all surprising.

KW


.

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