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Subject: Re: [DNA-R1B1C7] r1b1c7 on the Continent?
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 16:04:00 +0000


Hi All,
>There were also reports that r1b1c7 appears in Europe.
Of course. How could it not be otherwise? People evolved legs some time ago and used them as well as boats and horses to move about. Sometimes they were aided by historical events. The word 'historical' here limits us severely. Most of human history is prehistorical! Most human migration is prehistorical.
However, historically speaking, in the early 1600s after the Flight of the Earls and the O'Cahan Rebellion, the English rounded up as many warriors as they could. This class of Irishmen were not interested in farming. Farming traditionally was what the lower class did. It's a problem with a 'professional' class of warriors, as opposed to warriors who are farmers most of the time. There are eye-witness accounts of boatloads of men being sent off from Derry. See your copy of Hanna "The Scotch-IRish". They were being shipped off to Sweden but it is believed most defected to the other side, which was the Catholic side. Europe was engaged in one of its last religious wars at the time.
I would suspect more than 20% of these men would have been R1b1c7 since more of them would have been clansmen. Back then, there would have been fewer Scots and English genes in Ulster anyway, and no doubt the percentage of R1b1c7 was even higher.
Some of these men lived to breed. As mercenaries, they went where they could get paid to fight, ideally with people of the same religion as themselves. The few I have read about settled in Holland and Flanders, marrying local gals. You can sometimes find traces of them in church records. Of course you must be aware of how the religious geography of Europe changed in the 15 and 1600s. Otherwise, you are mystified as to why certain DNA and names appear in certain places.
In addition the newspapers reported an influx of "Irish beggars" at the time into England. Some of these unfortunates were r1b1c7 and a few survived to deposit r1b1c7 in England.
Moving forward, the so-called Williamite Wars at the end of the 1600s tend to be viewed in Ireland as a local event. Ditto for England where they are hailed as a 'bloodless coup'. Right, bloodless in England but as usual not in Ireland. Actually if you read some European history, it was a small part of a large European war. In one account that I have read, in Ireland both sides tended to ship Irish recruits off to Europe because the Irish defected very quickly. And spied when they were not defecting. Consequently you had lots of Irish, both foot soldiers and officers, in Germany and Holland. They shipped foreign soldiers into Ireland. If you check it out, you will see many of the generals on both sides are not Irish. Ditto for the foot soldiers.
Some of the Irish in Europe at this time undoubtedly remained. They'd contain less R1b1c7 since the Williamite Wars drew men from all over Ireland, not just Ulster. The men brought to Ireland often remained. You find many Dutch and German surnames in Ireland from this time, as these men were then naturalized by King WIlliam. Irishmen fighting on the losing side were sure to be less welcomed back in Ireland -- more would have stayed in Europe. Again, probably fewer of these were R1b1c7 since the war drew men from all over Ireland. There were far more Irish in Europe by 1700 than just the Wild Geese.
But in at least one case in historical times, large numbers of north west Irish males of breeding age were deported from Ireland for the continent. No one knows how many. Most survivers of the war who would not become farmers, basically.
A small amount of R1b1c7 in Eastern and central Europe could have come from Scots. Again in I think it was the 1500s, the king of Poland convinced a large number of Scots with trades to settle in Poland. I think the number was 40,000 or so. He needed a middle class. At that time large portions of Poland were Protestant and it seemed Poland would remain so. There are still many Scots surnames and even placenames in Poland. I got wind of this in two places: the occurance of Polish first names in Scottish parish records and secondly a Polish genealogy book.
Before the Union of the Crowns, Scotland traded independently from England. She traded with the Hanseatic league cities, each of whom had a small Scots colony, later absorbed, Russia, Poland. If you look at a map you'll see that these places are 'close' to Scotland. England favored other countries. In the process of trading, a small amount of R1b1c7 would have been deposited, but given the low amounts in Scotland, probably far less than the deportation of Irish soldiers from Ulster in the early 1600s.
If these are the standard explanations:
>The standard explanation offered for the presence of R1b1c7 in Germany
>(or really anywhere but Ireland and Scotland) are:

>1. The Wild geese
>2. Wandering Irish monks/Irish monasteries on the continent

They suggest who ever made them doesn't have a very good understanding of history. Wandering and corrupt monks in particular is a mighty poor source of breeding stock <grin>! Unfortuntely even when reading history you must 'read between the lines' since 'history' generally is a retelling of political events. Migration can be a political event, but is rarely historically significant so it isn't discussed. Huge amounts of migration can occur in response to a political event, like World Wars One and Two, without historicans paying much attention to it except when it becomes political.
It's hard to get details on how many Irishmen (largely from Ulster and thus disproportionately R1b1c7) left with or after the Earls, never to return, who lived their lives as mercenaries, settling down with local women in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany. There simply were no records kept by men who were escaping repression and death in Ireland and governments never have records of potential victims who escaped their clutches -- or even of victims they caught. No one even knows what percentage of mercinaries were killed in battle and what percentage lived to retire and marry. Presumedly the latter ones produced more offspring than the former. No one knows how many children drunken mercinaries fathered on prostitutes and rape victims in the Hundred Years War! Yet this is kinda germane to determining if our understanding of DNA distribution in Europe is accounted for or if we're still missing significant scenarios of infusions of DNA.....
Real historians could probably provide a few more scenarios within historical times. We'd have to rely on statistics to tell us if these account for the distribution or if there were significant pre-historic migrations -- because there are no records, although we know these folk had legs and boats and so could have moved to Europe at any time.
Over and over I see on this and other lists geneticists, people doing family history, and others trying to make sense of data with only a very populist understanding of history. You need to partner with very good historians. The populist versions of our histories are generally wrong. They may be 'right' on a 'big picture', but when you need details, they are inaccurate or simply missing the data we need. So you need to ask questions about wars and famines, two events that cause migrations. The excellent historians might not have thought about this stuff at all.
There are a lot of really good histories out there. One of the better ones for our purposes here (figuring out where our ancestors were and who they were) is Elliott's "Catholics of Ulster". She exposes a lot of info on migration to and from Ulster as well as inside it, as well as cultural realities that frankly debunk many popularly held notions of Ulster.
Lastly, serious genealogists that I've conversed with, at the luncheon tables of genealogy conferences, for example, often comment on how the study of individuals and families is a check and balance with history. Although we're getting better at writing history based on primary evidence (records) most history before the 20th century was simply the winning side's story of how it was. Often when genealogists consult primary records they find it conflicts with the standard story. One example is the argument over whether Cromwell actually murdered everyone in Drogheda, etc, or not. One person (an Irishman) has written a book claiming he did not. In fact, Cromwell is being re-written, not as a monster as the Royalists claime he was but as a moderate. I can supply some books for any one interested in this to read and decide.
The point is, the historians are not always right. Often they are wrong. In any case their version of the past may not address the issues the geneticists need to know to reconstruct the history of a gene. However standard or populist history is usually wrong. It reflects the political agendas of someone, who? We usually don't even know!
So we're stuck with either becoming better consumers of history ourselves or enlisting a good historians on our teams -- always. Because standard history has no answers. It views the past with a very bad, very dirty lense with very low magnification. Genetics views the past with an electron microscope! Of course the two views don't match up. Of course genetics can learn little from 'standard history' or populist history. It requires reading between the lines of even the best history -- history constructed from primary evidence because our interests were hardly ever part of history.
Happy Holidays!

Linda Merle

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