Posted on 06/24/2003 10:33:30 AM PDT by blam
Y chromosomes rewrite British history
Anglo-Saxons' genetic stamp weaker than historians suspected
19 June 2003
HANNAH HOAG
Some Scottish men's Y's are remarkably similar to those of southern England. © GettyImages
A new survey of Y chromosomes in the British Isles suggests that the Anglo-Saxons failed to leave as much of a genetic stamp on the UK as history books imply1.
Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans invaded Britain repeatedly between 50 BC and AD 1050. Many historians ascribe much of the British ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons because their written legacy overshadows that of the Celts.
But the Y chromosomes of the regions tell a different story. "The Celts weren't pushed to the fringes of Scotland and Wales; a lot of them remained in England and central Ireland," says study team member David Goldstein, of University College London. This is surprising: the Anglo-Saxons reputedly colonized southern England heavily.
The Anglo-Saxons and Danes left their mark in central and eastern England, and mainland Scotland, the survey says, and the biological traces of Norwegian invaders show up in the northern British Isles, including Orkney.
Similar studies, including one by the same team, have looked at differences in mitochondrial DNA, which we inherit from our mothers. They found little regional variation because females tended to move to their husbands.
But the Y chromosome shows sharper differences from one geographic region to the next, says geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza, of Stanford University, California. "The Y chromosome has a lower mutation rate than mitrochondrial DNA."
Goldstein's team collected DNA samples from more than 1,700 men living in towns across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They took a further 400 DNA samples from continental Europeans, including Germans and Basques. Only men whose paternal grandfathers had dwelt within 20 miles of their current home were eligible.
The Y chromosomes of men from Wales and Ireland resemble those of the Basques. Some believe that the Basques, from the border of France and Spain, are the original Europeans.
The new survey is an example of how archaeologists, prehistorians and geneticists are beginning to collaborate, comments Chris Tyler-Smith of the University of Oxford, UK, who tracks human evolution using the Y chromosome. "It would be nice to see the whole world surveyed in this kind of detail, but it's expensive and there are other priorities."
References Capelli, C. et al. A Y chromosome census of the British Isles. Current Biology, 13, 979 - 984, (2003). |Article|
© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003
My hunch is that they were African sea people.
Could be; that's what she called the rest of my family...Glad to meet you Cuz...
Very interesting. That means that the Celts originally didn't speak an I-E language, which makes sense. I wonder if that explains Pictish.
**Very interesting. That means that the Celts originally didn't speak an I-E language, which makes sense. I wonder if that explains Pictish.
That's a huge leap, since there is no evidence that the Celts ever spoke anything but an I-E language. All that's being claimed is that there is some similarity between Celt and Basque Y-chromosomes. There are no details as to any hypothesized timeframe of divergence.
Depends which bit of Scotland the men tested came from, I should imagine.
IIRC, the Angles were colonising what is now southern Scotland at exactly the same time as the Scots were arriving from Ireland.
Sloppy writing on my part. Since the Celts are defined, in part, by an I-E language, this is true. What I meant is that the peoples of the British Isles had a pre-Celtic language. The Picts are, by many, considered non-Celtic.
All that's being claimed is that there is some similarity between Celt and Basque Y-chromosomes. There are no details as to any hypothesized timeframe of divergence.
Indo-European like came out of the Caspian Sea region and the Celts first came out of Central Europe and into the British Isles circa 1000BC. Unless the British Isles were unpopulated at that point (very unlikely), there was a pre-Celtic language population there that had to speak something else -- possibly a Basque-like language.
There were a lot of non-IE European languages including Basque, Finnish, Hungarian, Etruscan, and possibly Pictish. Most were replaced by various Indo-European dialects, much as I-E languages took over Anatolia, Persia, and Nothern India. Since Celtic language and culture migrated into British Isles and since the Scots are genetically linked to the Basques, it makes some sense to assume that pre-Celtic Scots spoke a language in the same family as Basque or that the Celts that migrated into Scotland spoke some sort of Basque-related language before becoming Celts.
I've met some Basques. Aside from having hemongously long names, pronounced as if they were all consonents, with lots of q's and k's and such, they seem like any other Europeans. Related to the Welsh? Could be. Does it matter to a Welshman that there was once a Basque in the woodpile?
I've seen some interesting comparsion of the Basque language and at least on of the American Indian languages. The same sound means the same in both languages, etc.
No surprise there. Their ancestors had good horses. (Or to be more precise, they stole good horses!)
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