I've just discovered my Spanish heritage!
Sep. 20th, 2006 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annwfynI'm currently being quietly amused by this. It turns out that we're actually all Spanish - the orignal 'celtic' people of the British Isles are apparently genetically indistinguishable from the indigenous people of the Iberian Peninsula.
Celts descended from Spanish fishermen, study finds
By Guy Adams
Published: 20 September 2006
Don't tell the locals, but the hordes of British holidaymakers who visited Spain this summer were, in fact, returning to their ancestral home.
A team from Oxford University has discovered that the Celts, Britain's indigenous people, are descended from a tribe of Iberian fishermen who crossed the Bay of Biscay 6,000 years ago. DNA analysis reveals they have an almost identical genetic "fingerprint" to the inhabitants of coastal regions of Spain, whose own ancestors migrated north between 4,000 and 5,000BC.
The discovery, by Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, will herald a change in scientific understanding of Britishness.
People of Celtic ancestry were thought to have descended from tribes of central Europe. Professor Sykes, who is soon to publish the first DNA map of the British Isles, said: "About 6,000 years ago Iberians developed ocean-going boats that enabled them to push up the Channel. Before they arrived, there were some human inhabitants of Britain but only a few thousand in number. These people were later subsumed into a larger Celtic tribe... The majority of people in the British Isles are actually descended from the Spanish."
Professor Sykes spent five years taking DNA samples from 10,000 volunteers in Britain and Ireland, in an effort to produce a map of our genetic roots.
Research on their "Y" chromosome, which subjects inherit from their fathers, revealed that all but a tiny percentage of the volunteers were originally descended from one of six clans who arrived in the UK in several waves of immigration prior to the Norman conquest.
The most common genetic fingerprint belongs to the Celtic clan, which Professor Sykes has called "Oisin". After that, the next most widespread originally belonged to tribes of Danish and Norse Vikings. Small numbers of today's Britons are also descended from north African, Middle Eastern and Roman clans.
These DNA "fingerprints" have enabled Professor Sykes to create the first genetic maps of the British Isles, which are analysed in Blood of the Isles, a book published this week. The maps show that Celts are most dominant in areas of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. But, contrary to popular myth, the Celtic clan is also strongly represented elsewhere in the British Isles.
"Although Celtic countries have previously thought of themselves as being genetically different from the English, this is emphatically not the case," Professor Sykes said.
"This is significant, because the idea of a separate Celtic race is deeply ingrained in our political structure, and has historically been very divisive. Culturally, the view of a separate race holds water. But from a genetic point of view, Britain is emphatically not a divided nation."
Origins of Britons
Oisin
Descended from Iberian fishermen who migrated to Britain between 4,000 and 5,000BC and now considered the UK's indigenous inhabitants.
Wodan
Second most common clan arrived from Denmark during Viking invasions in the 9th century.
Sigurd
Descended from Viking invaders who settled in the British Isles from AD 793. One of the most common clans in the Shetland Isles, and areas of north and west Scotland.
Eshu
The wave of Oisin immigration was joined by the Eshu clan, which has roots in Africa. Eshu descendants are primarily found in coastal areas.
Re
A second wave of arrivals which came from the Middle East. The Re were farmers who spread westwards across Europe.
Roman
Although the Romans ruled from AD 43 until 410, they left a tiny genetic footprint. For the first 200 years occupying forces were forbidden from marrying locally.
Celts descended from Spanish fishermen, study finds
By Guy Adams
Published: 20 September 2006
Don't tell the locals, but the hordes of British holidaymakers who visited Spain this summer were, in fact, returning to their ancestral home.
A team from Oxford University has discovered that the Celts, Britain's indigenous people, are descended from a tribe of Iberian fishermen who crossed the Bay of Biscay 6,000 years ago. DNA analysis reveals they have an almost identical genetic "fingerprint" to the inhabitants of coastal regions of Spain, whose own ancestors migrated north between 4,000 and 5,000BC.
The discovery, by Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, will herald a change in scientific understanding of Britishness.
People of Celtic ancestry were thought to have descended from tribes of central Europe. Professor Sykes, who is soon to publish the first DNA map of the British Isles, said: "About 6,000 years ago Iberians developed ocean-going boats that enabled them to push up the Channel. Before they arrived, there were some human inhabitants of Britain but only a few thousand in number. These people were later subsumed into a larger Celtic tribe... The majority of people in the British Isles are actually descended from the Spanish."
Professor Sykes spent five years taking DNA samples from 10,000 volunteers in Britain and Ireland, in an effort to produce a map of our genetic roots.
Research on their "Y" chromosome, which subjects inherit from their fathers, revealed that all but a tiny percentage of the volunteers were originally descended from one of six clans who arrived in the UK in several waves of immigration prior to the Norman conquest.
The most common genetic fingerprint belongs to the Celtic clan, which Professor Sykes has called "Oisin". After that, the next most widespread originally belonged to tribes of Danish and Norse Vikings. Small numbers of today's Britons are also descended from north African, Middle Eastern and Roman clans.
These DNA "fingerprints" have enabled Professor Sykes to create the first genetic maps of the British Isles, which are analysed in Blood of the Isles, a book published this week. The maps show that Celts are most dominant in areas of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. But, contrary to popular myth, the Celtic clan is also strongly represented elsewhere in the British Isles.
"Although Celtic countries have previously thought of themselves as being genetically different from the English, this is emphatically not the case," Professor Sykes said.
"This is significant, because the idea of a separate Celtic race is deeply ingrained in our political structure, and has historically been very divisive. Culturally, the view of a separate race holds water. But from a genetic point of view, Britain is emphatically not a divided nation."
Origins of Britons
Oisin
Descended from Iberian fishermen who migrated to Britain between 4,000 and 5,000BC and now considered the UK's indigenous inhabitants.
Wodan
Second most common clan arrived from Denmark during Viking invasions in the 9th century.
Sigurd
Descended from Viking invaders who settled in the British Isles from AD 793. One of the most common clans in the Shetland Isles, and areas of north and west Scotland.
Eshu
The wave of Oisin immigration was joined by the Eshu clan, which has roots in Africa. Eshu descendants are primarily found in coastal areas.
Re
A second wave of arrivals which came from the Middle East. The Re were farmers who spread westwards across Europe.
Roman
Although the Romans ruled from AD 43 until 410, they left a tiny genetic footprint. For the first 200 years occupying forces were forbidden from marrying locally.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 11:20 am (UTC)Turns out there IS latin spirit in all of us. And now I know this, I'm going to get some high heels on, and starting slapping jez about in public a bit more. I'm sure he won't mind once I explain it's just my latin spirit showing through.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 11:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 11:42 am (UTC)And I must say, Spain seems like a much sunnier place to go searching for roots than Ayrshire. I'm really quite relieved that this has all come up now. It's saved me a lot of time getting cold and wet when my forties hit and I want to find out more about my ancestry.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 11:39 am (UTC)a) the welsh are actually different, as North Wales was the only place these markers didn't show up
b) mass migration probably did occur.
This study doesn't mention those markers at all, which either means that they are disputing those findings, or that they were looking at some completely different DNA markings entirely. As far as I can tell from this article, they are entirely claiming that the notion that the Scots/Welsh are different from the English is complete crap, and we're all genetically Spanish.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 08:28 pm (UTC)With a "conquering" minority ruling over a larger mass, it's suggested that English for quite some time remained an exclusionary language - its users deliberately avoided picking up words from the subject peoples, consciously maintaining a separate identity.
There was more need for the subjects to learn to speak the tongue of the rulers than the reverse, and there were strong cultural (and personal prosperity) incentives to move from being conquered scum to being part of the elite if possible. And if speaking English, not Britonnic, was the mark of that....
Only once English was what might be considered self-confident and was forced to deal with another culture - the Danish / Norse - on an equal (or superior) basis did it begin absorbing large numbers of "foreign" words. That's also proposed as the time period in which it lost much of its inflection and meaning became heavily based on word order - the roots of many words were the same between Danish and English, so the roots became the common key to understanding....
no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 01:08 pm (UTC)oh and i sent a reply to you (re: victor devon)
no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 08:20 pm (UTC)Specifically, some of the origin legends for the Scots that survived into the later medieval period identify an Iberian origin for the tribe.
And the term "Celtiberian" crops up a fair amount in some of the academic literature on the peninsula, to emphasise the fact that it was part of the Celtic world.
However, there have also been studies identifying strong links between Basque oddities in genetics (particularly, propensity towards specific genetic disorders) and what have been surmised to be Pictish / Cruthinic remnants in Scotland and the North of Ireland. These do not seem to be markers of "Celtic" heritage, since they entirely fail to match the areas known to have been heaviest settled by Gaels.
I'm distinctly dubious about the theory that _all_ Celts resident in the British Isles came from Iberia. Given that the Romans recorded those resident in the South as being closely akin (in culture and language) to "Belgic" tribes in the low countries and North-Eastern France, are we to also presume that the Netherlands were colonised by Iberian fishermen? Or is the culture of Iberian fishing just so powerful that all those who came into contact with it began to live like Iberian-origin Celts?
no subject
Date: 2006-09-26 05:40 pm (UTC)