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From: "Paul Conroy" <>
Subject: [DNA-R1B1C7] British and Irish - One common people?
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:39:50 -0400

Excerpt from here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/science/06brits.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/geneticsandheredity/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>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
the English Channel and the Irish Sea were still land.

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 split Britain and Ireland from the Continent and from each other, Dr.
Oppenheimer calculates in a new book, "The Origins of the British: A Genetic
Detective Story" (Carroll & Graf, 2006).

Ireland received the fewest of the subsequent invaders; their DNA makes up
about 12 percent of the Irish gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer estimates. DNA from
invaders accounts for 20 percent of the gene pool in Wales, 30 percent in
Scotland, and about a third in eastern and southern England.
But 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 that 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 brought not many more than 10,000 people, according
to Dr. Haerke.

Later in the article:
Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia
Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than
supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of
agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr.
Forster's argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that
English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was
spoken in England before the Roman invasion.

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• [DNA-R1B1C7] British and Irish - One common people? by "Paul Conroy" <>