Genetics of the British Isles and Ireland

Read "A United Kingdom? Maybe" by NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, March 6, 2007.

According to this article, Stephen Oppenheimer suggests that "the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque....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.”

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.

Bryan Sykes is cited as agreeing "that the ancestors of 'by far the majority of people' were present in the British Isles before the Roman conquest of A.D. 43. 'The Saxons, Vikings and Normans had a minor effect, and much less than some of the medieval historical texts would indicate,' he said. His conclusions, based on his own genetic survey and information in his genealogical testing service, Oxford Ancestors, are reported in his new book, Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland."

Comment: The roots of conflict among the Celtic peoples and the Anglo Saxon are, in my opinion, political and economic more than cultural, and cultural more than genetic. Still, knowledge that the peoples of the islands are genetically "brothers under the skin" may help to further in conflict resolution and reduction, if only marginally. JAD