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to Anglo-Norman origins. You will recall that, in his survey of blood groups, Professor Dawson explains the higher frequency of blood group A in Leinster by the Anglo-Norman invasion. The comparison with the mitochondrial results is striking. All of the seven major maternal European clans, and most of the minor ones, were to be found in Ireland and there was not much difference in their proportions in the four provinces. Very obviously, in Ireland anyway, the version of history told by men and women was not the same. To explore this further, I want to look in more detail at the Irish Y-chromosomes, in particular the detail among the members of the clan of Oisin. A Y-chromosome fingerprint, or signature, consists of a set of ten numbers. Each of these is the number of stammering DNA repeats at the ten places on the Y-chromosome that we test. If there are 10 repeats at the first marker and 22 at the second one, the fingerprint starts off as 10–22. If there are 13 repeats at the third marker, the fingerprint continues as 10–22–13 and so on. When I am checking through 10 marker signatures from the DNA analyser, if there are Irish men among the batch it isn’t long before I find this particular signature: 11–24–13–13–12–14–12–12–10–16. It is very familiar indeed. This is the quintessential Oisin Y-chromosome and huge numbers of Irish men carry it. I am not the only person to have noticed this particular Y-chromosome combination. Dan Bradley certainly knows about it, and it has also been spotted by Jim Wilson, who worked for a time at University College London. Jim is a native of the Orkney Islands, just off the north coast of Scotland, and he had noticed this same combination among his fellow Orcadians. It also cropped up, interestingly, in surveys of Y-chromosomes among the Basques of north-eastern Spain and among the people of Galicia in the north-west of Spain. Its oceanic affinities led it to be christened, not Poseidon or Neptune, but the far more prosaic Atlantic Modal Haplotype, or AMH for short. I prefer to call it the ‘Atlantis’ chromosome. In the Isles it is by far the commonest Y-chromosome signature within the clan of Oisin, or any other for that matter. Among the Oisin clan in Ireland, it certainly isn’t the only Y-chromosome fingerprint, but most of the others can be linked to it by one or two mutations. This gives us an opportunity to get an Irish date for the Oisin clan, rather as we did with the Ursulans and other maternal clans. The mutation rate of these Y-chromosome fingerprints is roughly one change per 1,500 years, much faster than the mDNA rate of one for every 20,000 years. By following exactly the same procedure for the Oisin clan as we did for the first Irish Ursulan calculation, we get a date of 4,200 years. This lies well within the time frame of human settlement in Ireland and, since it is still prey to the wide approximations of genetic dates, and thus quite close to the 5–6,000-year estimate for mDNA, it would be tempting to imagine we have solved the origins of the Irish. However, we have done nothing of the sort, because we have overlooked the Martian factor. Remember that the original Irish Ursulan date was 50,000 years ago – older than Ursula herself and far too early to be a plausible date for the settlement of Ireland – assuming that all the mutations among Irish Ursulans had happened after the first ones reached Ireland. To get round this we had to decide which of the mutations happened on Irish soil, and which had already occurred before the clan reached Ireland. When we did this it made a huge difference to the date, bringing it forward to the much more plausible 7,300 years ago. Applying the same correction to the Irish Y-chromosome data brought the date forward to just 1,200 years in the past. This is far too recent to be plausible, even given the approximations involved. Something else must be going on. And it was, but it took me a while to realize the explanation. And it didn’t happen until I had done a lot more work. Not in Ireland, but in Scotland. Only then was I able to make sense of the strange behaviour of the Irish Y-
chromosomes. Nevertheless, we have made a good start. In Ireland, the maternal lineages are diverse and very old, while the Y-chromosomes are unexpectedly homogeneous, and at first glance look comparatively young. We have seen a difference between different regions of the island, a difference that may be an echo of the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland beginning in the twelfth century. We have seen some evidence of a genetic link between Ireland and Spain along the Atlantic fringe of Europe, which archaeologists are now beginning to realize was a much busier seaway than was once thought. What we don’t yet know is how the Irish results will fit with the rest of the Isles, and to begin to do that we shall travel across the shallow sea to Scotland.
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About the Book When the first Roman
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Also by Bryan Sykes THE SEVEN DAUGH
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This eBook is copyright material an
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To my son Richard, companion on ver
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research that
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Bryan Sykes; Gokstad Ship, Viking S
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ook ‘Ireland’ includes Northern
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a miniature vacuum cleaner which I
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Man’. His remains had been excava
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their ranges away from the worsenin
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of descendants whose stories we can
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Plantagenet kings who reigned durin
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whose divine guidance led him to Al
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story - Arthur’s exploits are so
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Bede’s could have failed even to
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Normans were themselves of Germanic
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parallel effort to reinforce their
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Even though Celtishness is today ma
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the land, for the poem goes on to a
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visitors on similar missions to Eng
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across land from central Europe may
Page 46 and 47: Establishment. Men like Lord Lyndhu
Page 48 and 49: months refining his system. He deci
Page 50 and 51: islands, to find they had to sleep
Page 52 and 53: The Index is a measure of hair colo
Page 54 and 55: However, Normans, as we will later
Page 56 and 57: But these slight differences, which
Page 58 and 59: unimportant in transfusion, and the
Page 60 and 61: Or by a mixture of both? The whole
Page 62 and 63: 6 THE SILENT MESSENGERS Whatever th
Page 64 and 65: devastation. But it is these, the s
Page 66 and 67: At about that time, the sex gene on
Page 68 and 69: oth of them. It then struck me, aft
Page 70 and 71: arely travel anywhere without a DNA
Page 72 and 73: Ireland/Wales 0.0726741243702487 Ir
Page 74 and 75: ancient gold coins from Britain. Ma
Page 76 and 77: 8 IRELAND The Irish landscape has o
Page 78 and 79: not forget. So far we have only men
Page 80 and 81: the soldiers of a British chieftain
Page 82 and 83: In their own conquest of Ireland, t
Page 84 and 85: crab apple show that the site was u
Page 86 and 87: Ireland for thousands of years, lea
Page 88 and 89: Iberia to the Isles. That is defini
Page 90 and 91: Fortunately, all the other judges f
Page 92 and 93: My colleague Martin Richards and I
Page 94 and 95: to a paternal clan by the genetic c
Page 98 and 99: 10 SCOTLAND It is barely 12 miles a
Page 100 and 101: on the menu. Curiously shaped imple
Page 102 and 103: may have been, the Mesolithic hunte
Page 104 and 105: 11 THE PICTS On 15 July 1995 the fi
Page 106 and 107: that, along with practically every
Page 108 and 109: 12 THE DNA OF SCOTLAND ‘We have j
Page 110 and 111: was unloading my slides, a lady cam
Page 112 and 113: Norway than in the other clans. We
Page 114 and 115: Westminster Abbey. Why didn’t the
Page 116 and 117: one region. At the risk of being te
Page 118 and 119: espect, the most stable place we vi
Page 120 and 121: last stronghold of the Gaelic langu
Page 122 and 123: Britain and specialized in capturin
Page 124 and 125: 13 WALES The smallest in land area
Page 126 and 127: Wales defined the boundary between
Page 128 and 129: a campaign of murder and usurpation
Page 130 and 131: 14 THE DNA OF WALES Wales is the on
Page 132 and 133: still hope one day to find just one
Page 134 and 135: that far from Plynlimmon where H. J
Page 136 and 137: food: fish and shellfish in winter,
Page 138 and 139: parts of Gaul. Britain was exportin
Page 140 and 141: even more so. Tacitus reckons 70,00
Page 142 and 143: 16 SAXONS, DANES, VIKINGS AND NORMA
Page 144 and 145: accepting a payment, the wergild, i
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the Great Army completely and force
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17 THE DNA OF ENGLAND Our strategy
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years previously to a service stati
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female immigration into the east fr
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the way home? But if you really tho
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the north - substantial in terms of
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other, we are genetically rooted in
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