Study: Irish DNA Originated In Middle East & Eastern Europe

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Irish DNA
Excavated near Belfast in 1855, the Ballynahatty woman lay in a Neolithic tomb chamber for 5,000 years

Scientists have discovered that Irish DNA originated in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

The DNA of ancient occupants of Ireland has given researchers a breakthrough clue into the history of the Celtic population.

The study was led by Queens University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin where scientists sequenced the first ancient human genomes from Ireland, shedding light on the genesis of Celtic populations.

Details of the work, by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen’s University Belfast are published in the journal PNAS.

The Guardian reports:

Scientists from Dublin and Belfast have looked deep into Ireland’s early history to discover a still-familiar pattern of migration: of stone age settlers with origins in the Fertile Crescent, and bronze age economic migrants who began a journey somewhere in eastern Europe.

The evidence has lain for more than 5,000 years in the bones of a woman farmer unearthed from a tomb in Ballynahatty, near Belfast, and in the remains of three men who lived between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago and were buried on Rathlin Island in County Antrim.

Scientists at Trinity College Dublin used a technique called whole-genome analysis to “read” not the unique characteristics of each individual, but a wider history of ancestral migration and settlement in the DNA from all four bodies.

A reconstruction of the Ballynahatty Neolithic skull by Elizabeth Black. Her genes tell us she had black hair and brown eyes
A reconstruction of the Ballynahatty Neolithic skull by Elizabeth Black. Her genes tell us she had black hair and brown eyes

They confirm a picture that has been emerging for decades from archaeological studies. Migrant communities did not compete with the original Irish. They became the Irish.

The ancestors of the Stone Age farmers began their journey in the Bible lands, where agriculture first began, and arrived in Ireland perhaps via the southern Mediterranean. They brought with them cattle, cereals, ceramics and a tendency to black hair and brown eyes.

These settlers were followed by people, initially from the Pontic steppe of southern Russia, who knew how to mine for copper and work with gold, and who carried the genetic variant for a blood disorder called haemochromatosis, a hereditary genetic condition so common in Ireland that it is sometimes called Celtic disease.

These people also brought with them the inherited variation that permits the digestion of milk in maturity – much of the world becomes intolerant to the milk sugar lactose after infancy – and they may even have brought the language that became what is now Irish. Some of them, too, had blue eyes.

“There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe from above the Black Sea into Bronze Age Europe and we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island,” said Dan Bradley, professor of population genetics at Trinity College Dublin.

“And this degree of genetic change invites the possibility of other associated changes, perhaps even the introduction of language ancestral to western Celtic tongues.”

The Dublin team and colleagues from Queens University Belfast report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the two great changes in European prehistory – the emergence of agriculture and the advance of metallurgy – were not just culture shifts: they came with new blood. An earlier population of hunter gatherers was successively overwhelmed by new arrivals. And in Ireland, these new settlers began to define a nation.

“These findings,” the authors say, “suggest the establishment of central attributes of the Irish genome 4,000 years ago.”

Working from the principle that any human DNA tells a story not just of individual identity but of ten thousand years of ancestry, researchers have begun to piece together the entire story of Homo sapiens. The story is incomplete, and under constant revision, but the outline of the settlement of Europe and Asia told by DNA confirms and illuminates the archaeological evidence.

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