The Armada was Redundant
This article argues that the UK is just one big happy family. The British isles were populated by Iberians 8,000 or 9,000 years ago, and everyone throughout the isles-- Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English is mainly descended from those post-Ice Age settlers from what is now Spain and Portugal. The Angles and Saxons who came more recently just intermarried with local folks and their haplotypes or DNA patterns are not distinctive by now.
Me, I am suspicious of this whole way of thinking. Are Britons and Irish really all that closer to Iberians than to other Europeans?
And, Homo sapiens sapiens is only about 100,000 years old, so why stop with the Iberians? Brian Sykes showed in The Seven Daughters of Eve that all Europeans' mitochondrial DNA shows one of seven patterns associated with maternal ancestors who lived 16,000 to 25,000 years ago (and this was true of isolated ethnicities such as Basques as well as everyone else). The mix was not remarkably different anywhere in Europe. And even that result is artificial, since sometimes women only have sons and you lose the mitochondrial DNA thread. In fact, we're all Africans, and have been so relatively recently in history.
The problem with DNA history is that it privileges certain minor parts of the genome and is open to manipulation for the purposes of identity politics.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/03/2008 02:14:00 PM
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actually, i don't think DNA history is the problem, identity politics is the problem. who cares if some distant ancestor of the people in britain came over from ibera? does that have anything to do with current issues between those two spots on the globe?
DNA history can be interesting, but it has nothing to do with current politics. or at least it shouldn't. to the extent it does, it's because people misuse history to play games of identity politics. 10k years ago it is likely that the israelis and the palestinians were the same people. but that doesn't mitigate against any of the genuine grievances of the palestinians today, nor does it help one bit to solve the modern problem there.
Excellent post. Especially
"The problem with DNA history is that it privileges certain minor parts of the genome and is open to manipulation for the purposes of identity politics."
"Science", as such, is far from objective.
The author of the article is talking about the origin of the Celts, when he attributes an Iberian origin to the inhabitants of the British Isles.
The origin of the Celts is more commonly attributed to central Europe now (e.g. Wiki). The Iberian peninsula, Bretagne, and Britain, are just the extremities where Celts have survived. Iberian origin is just a kook idea.
The dismissal of much of a Germanic input is somewhat surprising. But it is possible that the numbers of Anglo-Saxons arriving was not that great.
It reminds me that a Lebanese friend told me last week that DNA tests had been done on Lebanese, and these discovered only 20% of Phenician genes, even in Maronites. The rest were Arab or Persian. Little difference between Christian and Muslim. Mortifying for Lebanese anti-Arab purists.
I don't have a source; does anybody?
I think I understand your perspective about identity politics and DNA history but that is "short term" thinking.
Isn't the degenerative case successive mappings that the entire species maps back to a single proto-genome where all the other stuff falls away as decroation?
The Iberian immigrants to the British Isles 9000 years ago were not Celts. Celts speak an Indo-European language, and the Indo-Europeans came into Western Europe much, much later. One of the seven daughters of eve is the Syrian Indo-European woman (the language was widely adopted but they only supplied 1/7 of the genetic inheritance of modern Europe).
I had my y-dna done for the National Geographic project (according to them, cro-magonon, 30,000 years in Western Europe). The most interesting thing though occurred subsequent. It turned out that my pattern was the same as two august British gentlemen who shared my gaelic surname and its current unusual transliterated spelling in english. It turned out we are all descended from a particular individual, one Niall of the Nine Hostages, who lived in northwest Ireland in the 300s AD. He is best known for populating Scotland, Wales and parts of France with Celts from his discarded and very numerous male offspring -- the hostages were part of the colonization strategy. According to the current record, old Niall now has several million male descendants spread around the world, a record surpassed only by Genghis Khan. Niall was also responsible for bringing the man now known as St. Patrick to Ireland, a mixed blessing I think we can all now agree.
I find this stuff fascinating, especially since it validates the oral legendary history to a fault. The old people were not lying. Its very reassuring somehow.
My father had his DNA analyzed in the National Geographic program and received his itinerary from Africa onwards.
His DNA traveled from Africa up around the Mediterranean to the Iberian peninsula. There it "wintered" during the Ice Age, and eventually headed north to what we call Britain.
From there it found its way to the west coast of Norway, where it happily rested.
Ironically, there are quite a few with Armada blood in their veins in that location in Norway.
The entire planet is a mixer.
I live in Spain and have for years. I remember the first time my late father visited me here... like most Americans he instinctively associated Spaniards with South Americans, I still remember the first night he was in Madrid, eating dinner in a restaurant, looking at the waiters and muttering, "Jesus, all these guys look Irish!" Today of course, most of waiters would be from Ecuador, but that is beside the point... of course the Spaniards are Celts, with some Jewish blood mixed into the middle class.
Try watching the BBC documentary History of Scotland by Neil Oliver on BBC Iplayer if you can the first episode had very good coverage of the origins of the Scottish population at least
I have to agree. The biggest problem with mitochondrial DNA studies is that whole families and even whole populations have been wiped out throughout history. Didn't I recently read that the Ice Man, Otzi, is related to no modern humans? I also read that only 300 years ago there was a large black population (slave) in Lisbon, yet today you would never know it by looking at the DNA evidence of modern people living in Lisbon.
DNA history's greatest fault is that much of it has yet to be confirmed by archaelogical evidence. It serves as a good starting point, a good way to focus the field work, but far too often it is used as coequal to hard evidence dug out of the ground.
David Seaton's comment is probably most relative to the idea of Irish coming from Spain (Iberian peninsula). People moved to one place, then another, then another. In America, we could see this in the Manifest Destiny movement, where people moved clear to Washington state or California from the East Coast. There is no reason to think that any peoples have stayed in one place for all time.
Here is a URL that I just learned about since reading this comment. It describes the mythology (as opposed to pure facts) of Celtic settlement.
http://philologos.org/bpr/files/g002.htm
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