Blood of the Isles (29 page)

Plynlimmon is not very far from the market town of Tregaron, where, while staying at the Talbot Inn in the market square one October night on another visit to collect DNA samples, I was told the fantastic story of the Tregaron Neanderthals. The Talbot Inn is an old drovers’ inn dating from the thirteenth century, complete with stone walls, oak beams and open fires. It was a dark night and the rain had not stopped all day. The fire was blazing away and there were a few local men at the bar, staring at their pints of bitter and glad to be out of the rain. We got talking, and before long I was telling them about what I was doing in that part of Wales and about the Genetic Atlas Project. We had evidently been overheard by a man sitting alone at a small table. He beckoned me over and I sat down. And then he began to tell me about the elderly twin brothers, both bachelors, who had lived at the end of a long track leading into the Cambrian Mountains behind the ruins of the Cistercian monastery at Strata Florida, further up the Teifi from Tregaron. I knew this track, as once in my youth I had been up it looking for an incredibly rare bird, the Red Kite. Now, thanks to successful reintroductions to the Chilterns, anyone can see these beautiful birds gliding and twisting every time they travel on the motorway between Oxford and London. But, back then, there were only a few pairs left, all of them in mid-Wales. I had heard that a pair was nesting in the woods behind Strata Florida and I remember walking for several miles up into the hills, first through the woods then up on to the grassy uplands. I did not see a Red Kite, but I do remember seeing a cottage, up a side track, which, from the washing on the clothes
line, was clearly inhabited. I think this must have been the place. I don’t remember any other dwellings.

My companion at the Talbot told me that the men who lived in this cottage in the 1950s and 1960s were Neanderthals. This fact was well known. So well known that a visit to the brothers was on the history syllabus at Tregaron school. Every year, in the summer term, the third-form History class would take the school van as far as they could up the track and the children would walk the rest of the way to the cottage. The Neanderthals obviously looked forward to the visits because, on the appointed day, they made sure they had plenty of cakes and lemonade. The children stayed for an hour while the teacher explained about human evolution and where the Neanderthals fitted into the scheme of things. Then they left and walked back down the hill to the van.

Of course I didn’t actually believe these men were Neanderthals any more than I am. But I do still hope one day to find just one person with Neanderthal DNA. It is a vanishing hope as more and more DNA is tested from around the world. But could I recognize it if I found it, whether around Tregaron or Cardiff, or London or California? The answer is definitely yes – so long as it is mitochondrial DNA.

I had once attempted, but failed, to recover Neanderthal DNA from the Tabun skull from the Natural History Museum in London. The Tabun skull was dated to 100,000 years ago and the teeth looked in fairly good shape. But when I tried to drill into a molar tooth, it was rock hard and I was terrified it would fracture. I did get a little
dentine powder from the inside, but I did not smell the reassuring scent of burning flesh, the smell that meant success. However, I did manage to recover a few molecules of DNA from the Tabun tooth. When I put them through the DNA analyser, the mDNA sequences looked distinctly modern, with their closest matches in Israel, where the skull had been excavated. The big debate at the time, in the early 1990s, was whether Neanderthals were an extinct species of human, in which case their DNA should be very different from ours, or whether they were just a phase in the evolution of modern humans, in which case the DNA should be reasonably similar. I never felt confident enough about proclaiming that the modern-looking DNA that I had recovered from the Tabun skull was really from the skull, rather than from the archaeologists and museum curators who had handled it over the fifty years since it was excavated.

I am glad I was cautious, because two years later what did appear to be genuinely ancient DNA was recovered from the Neanderthal-type specimen, the original one that had been found in the Neander Valley in Germany (
Tal
is valley in German) in 1863. This DNA was very different from any modern DNA. It had 27 mutations in comparison to the mitochondrial reference sequence, while even the most distinct modern DNA only varies from the reference by 12 changes. When similar DNA was found in two further Neanderthal remains, from Croatia and the Caucasus mountains, it provided reasonable proof that Neanderthals were indeed an extinct species of human. The last Neanderthal died in southern Spain about 27,000 years ago;
at least that is where the most recently dated remains have been found. But that was before the world knew about the Tregaron twins!

The brothers had passed away in the 1980s, so another trip up the track into the hills would be pointless. Since they were men, and bachelors at that, their mitochondrial DNA could not have been passed on to their children, even if they had any. And neither the man at the Talbot Inn, nor anyone else I spoke to in Tregaron, knew where the brothers had come from, so I could not track down a relative. The only chance was that, among the smiling children at the local school, there was one who, through maternal connections, would carry the tell-tale Neanderthal DNA. There was a lot to look out for in Wales.

Examining first the matrilineal DNA from Wales, the living record of the journeys of women to this part of the Isles, the pattern of maternal clans is very similar to Ireland, and to what we have also seen in the two Pictland regions of Scotland, Tayside and Grampian. The clan of Helena predominates, as always, with 47 per cent of people in both regions belonging to that clan. When Ireland is compared to the whole of Wales, this close similarity extends to the other clans as well. When I divided Wales into three regions, north, mid- and south Wales, a few differences did emerge, mostly ones that showed a closer genetic link between north and mid-Wales than either did to the south of the country. But the overall pattern was one of continuity with Ireland and, to a lesser extent, with the Pictland regions of Scotland. But,
unfortunately, there was no sign of any Neanderthal mDNA.

When I looked at the patrilineal Y-chromosomes in the three regions of Wales, the pattern was extremely interesting. There were two outstanding features. First, there was practically no sign of Norse Viking settlement. If you recall from the Northern Isles and from Norway itself, there is a high concentration of members of Sigurd’s clan; 20 per cent of Shetland men are in this clan. And yet in Wales there are virtually no men from Sigurd’s clan. I interpret this as strong evidence against any substantial Norse Viking settlement in Wales. The only hint of Viking ancestry is in the north, where just three men, Mr Roberts from Bangor, Mr Owen from Llanfair and Mr Davies from Meifod, are in the clan of Sigurd. At such low frequencies we must doubt whether they have inherited their Sigurd chromosomes from Vikings directly or in their transmuted form in the blood of a Norman. Since there were no Sigurds at all in our samples from south Wales, which was far more heavily occupied by Normans than was the north, I tend to think that these three gentlemen are more likely to be of direct Viking than Norman ancestry. You will recall that there were Viking raids on Anglesey which were actively repelled by Rhodri Mawr in 856. Perhaps it was from action around this time that Messrs Roberts, Owen and Davies acquired their Viking ancestors. Their detailed fingerprints are certainly matched in Norway.

There was just one Sigurd in mid-Wales, Mr Jones, from the small village of Garthmyl near Rhyader. And none at all in south Wales, even in Pembrokeshire where the high
level of blood group A was explained by a Viking settlement in the area. There would need to have been a very large influx of Vikings into Pembrokeshire to alter the blood-group proportions of the whole region and we would have been bound to find several Sigurds in the vicinity. But we did not find a single one. I think that has to mean that the Viking explanation of Morgan Watkin for the high frequency of blood group A in ‘Little England beyond Wales’ is wrong.

Turning to the clan of Wodan, this hovers around the 10 per cent mark in all three regions of Wales. However, when I looked at the detailed fingerprints, I found a small cluster in mid-Wales that caught my eye. There were only half a dozen of them, but they were unusual. Mr Rees from New Quay, a picturesque fishing port on Cardigan Bay, Mr Jones from Mynachlog near Tregaron, and finally Mr Davies from Lampeter.

Before I draw any profound conclusions, may I recommend Lampeter as the best place in Wales for ice-cream. At the junction of the High Street and the Tregaron Road stands the ice-cream emporium of Conti’s Café. Going inside, when I was last there, was like returning to the cafés of my youth. No cappuccinos or lattes here, just weak milky coffee in one of those unbreakable glass cups, served by a waitress in a blue tabard. A rare experience indeed these days. Alas, I’ve heard that the interior has been recently revamped, but the ice-cream is still wonderful. Made every day on the premises by the owner, Leno Conti, not brought in ready-made. Perish the thought.

Now for the profound conclusions. I think this Wodan
Y-chromosome has been in mid-Wales for a very long time. There are first-generation derivatives nearby, by which I mean Y-chromosomes that have diverged away by one mutation. And it is only one mutational step removed from a chromosome cluster in Pictland. I have not found this chromosome in Ireland or in England, except in one place. Mr Roach, from Sidmouth in Devon, has it. I could be wrong, but I don’t think this is a Norman chromosome. If it were, I would have expected to find similar chromosomes in other parts of England, which, with the exception of Mr Roach, I have not. I couldn’t help wondering if this is a very ancient Welsh chromosome. After all, Tregaron and Lampeter are not that far from Plynlimmon where H. J. Fleure was convinced from his work on skull shapes that he had found a relic population, and where there was also a very high frequency of blood group B. I wonder, as I write this, whether the great anthropologist ever tasted Conti’s ice-cream on his travels.

Of course, we must not forget the clan of Oisin. This is far and away the most common clan in all the three regions of Wales, which it also is in the whole of the Isles. In fact, at 86 per cent, mid-Wales has the highest proportion of Oisin in the Isles outside Ireland. Interestingly, the Pictland region of Grampian is only just behind, with 84 per cent. Only Munster and Connacht in the west of Ireland have higher proportions of Oisin. The Atlantis chromosome, the prevalent Y-chromosome in the clan, is very frequent in Wales, more so even than in Ireland, as a proportion of Oisins as a whole.

There is one other interesting thing to point out. The
diversity, that is the variety, of different Oisin Y-chromo-somes is lower in Wales, especially mid-Wales, than anywhere else in mainland Britain. Geneticists usually put that down to a recent arrival date, there having been less time for mutations and diversity to have arisen. But to find the lowest diversity in mid-Wales of all places seems very peculiar to me, since all the other historical indicators suggest that mid-Wales has been among the most stable and longest settled of any region in the Isles – even if I did not find any evidence of Neanderthals. The lower than expected amount of accumulated mutations in the Y-chromosomes is beginning to be a recurrent feature of most of the Celtic regions of the Isles. Whether this is also true of England, we are about to discover as we push east over the hills.

As we cross the long-disputed boundary into England, the land spreads out in all directions, undulating certainly but without the mountains that insulated Wales, and Scotland, against the full force of foreign invasion which began with the Romans and continued for more than 1,000 years. Geography, as always, led history by the hand. It was the fertile lowlands of England, not the barren hills of Wales or Scotland, that made the Isles such a tempting target from the Roman invasion of
AD
43 to the Norman Conquest of 1066 and beyond. But the settlement of England and the Isles began thousands of years earlier.

England is home to 49 million people, which is almost 80 per cent of the entire population of the Isles, packed into 50,000 square miles, which is 40 per cent of the space. England has examples of almost every kind of geological structure, from extremely old volcanic rocks in Cornwall and Cumbria to very recent, reclaimed soils in the fenlands of East Anglia. Between these extremes of age and distance
lie successions of sandstones and limestones from different geological eras which cross the country diagonally from the south-west to the north-east. As a rule of thumb, the further east, the younger in geological time the rocks become. These sedimentary bedrocks, built up over hundreds of millions of years when England lay beneath a warm and shallow sea, are mainly alkaline. They erode to very fertile soils, and almost all of England is now intensively farmed. It was always the agricultural wealth of England and the opportunities this provided for taxation and tribute, as well as settlement, that attracted the attention of foreign invaders.

Beyond the fertile plains and rolling downland, England is surrounded by mountains and high hills. Along the centre, the spine of the Pennines in the north of England rises to 893 metres at Cross Fell. Forty miles to the west, among the picturesque mountains of the Lake District, is Scafell Pike (977 metres), England’s highest peak. The garland of mountains and hills which form the boundaries with Wales and Scotland have preoccupied all invaders as they tried, and usually failed, to protect England behind stable frontiers.

The first people to reach England after the Ice Age were the big-game hunters of the Old Stone Age, colonizing the Isles directly over the land bridge from continental Europe. By 12,000 years ago, hunters were living in the caves at Cheddar. After the cold snap of the Younger Dryas forced a temporary retreat, the Mesolithics returned 10,000 years ago. They were confined to the coasts and riverbanks by the dense woodland that soon covered the warming Isles.
Like the occupants of Mount Sandel in Ireland and Oronsay off the coast of Scotland, they were semi-nomadic, with winter and summer camps alternating between woodland and shore to make the most of the wild food: fish and shellfish in winter, birds’ eggs in spring and summer, hazel and other nuts in the autumn – and red deer at any time they could be killed. The Mesolithic life in England was no different from that in the rest of the Isles, and is nowhere more completely documented than at Starr Carr in the Vale of Pickering in North Yorkshire, 5 miles to the west of the seaside resort of Scarborough.