Blood of the Isles (34 page)

I have introduced you to a new art and a new language. An art that is written in the codes of our DNA, those unseen architects of our bodies, even of our souls. It is a new art, not long tested and yet somehow irresistibly correct. How can anyone doubt that we are all our parents’ children, as they also are the children of their parents? That is the simplicity of this art even though the language is new and obscure. I have tested you with talk of ‘DNA sequences’, ‘haplotypes’ and ‘genetic diversity’, of ‘Y-chromosomes’ and ‘mitochondrial DNA’. I have impudently claimed that my art is oblivious to the prejudice of the human mind.

You have read the book, and I congratulate you on persevering through the technical sections. I have tried to make things as simple as I reasonably can, but it is no easy task to walk the tightrope between obsessive detail and arrogant patronage. My subject has been our history, the
history written in our genes. Why, you might reasonably enquire, is this at all important in this day and age? What does it matter to me, you might say, whether my ancestor was a Viking, or a Saxon or a Celt? What difference will this make to my journey to work, what I eat for lunch or what I read on the way home? But if you really thought that, you would not have got this far. I hope you are by now just as fascinated as I am that within each and every one of our cells is something that has witnessed every life we have ever lived. I know that you can see the myriad threads of ancestry falling away beneath you into the abyss of the past.

I have introduced you to the brightest and strongest of these threads, one through which we are joined to our ancestral mother. An infinite umbilical cord which courses smoothly from mother to mother back into the mist of our ancestry. The other, which only men possess, thrusts its way from generation to generation. Erratic, illogical and passionate, it lives a life free from responsibility. But it enslaves its host and drives him to violence, murder and conquest. Follow this thread into the past at your peril. Sooner or later you will spend a generation or two in the testis of a warlord. We could not have any more different conduits into the depths of our ancestry.

The stories that these threads tell are completely individual. They are not composites or averages. I have been at pains to point out, even to the point of repetition, that to squeeze them through the mangle of mathematics risks robbing them of their vitality, silencing their murmurs. What I have tried to do is to listen to the whispered stories of thousand upon thousand of these
threads and to divine patterns from the swirls. Enough of the philosophy – what are these patterns?

The first conclusion, blindingly obvious now I can see it, is that we have in front of us two completely different histories. The maternal and paternal origins of the Isles are different. And that should be no surprise, given the opposing characters of the chroniclers. The matrilineal history of the Isles is both ancient and continuous. I see no reason at all from the results why many of our maternal lineages should not go right back through the millennia to the very first Palaeolithic and Mesolithic settlers who reached our islands around 10,000 years ago. The average settlement dates of 8,000 years ago fit with that. But that cannot be the complete answer. That was well before the arrival of farming, and the presence, particularly in Ireland and the Western Isles, of large numbers of Jasmine’s Oceanic clan, and her companions from the maritime branch of Tara, says to me that there was a very large-scale movement along the Atlantic seaboard north from Iberia, beginning as far back as the early Neolithic and perhaps even before that. The number of exact and close matches between the maternal clans of western and northern Iberia and the western half of the Isles is very impressive, much more so than the much poorer matches with continental Europe.

That is not to say this was a ‘wave’ arriving all at once and swamping the small numbers of Mesolithic inhabitants of Mount Sandel, Starr Carr and the like. They were well established, knew the land inside out and must have been easily able to adapt, gradually, to a less mobile agricultural existence. The change from hunter-gathering to agriculture
may have taken centuries or millennia. There is no archaeological evidence of conflict and no reason to suppose that the arrival of the farmers would have been confrontational, at least not at first. We encountered the peaceful co-existence of Mesolithic and Neolithic communities in Portugal where the new arrivals from the Middle East cleared the woods for their crops well away from the coastal zones favoured by the residents. I think this pattern would have been reproduced all over the Isles. There was plenty of room, with the Mesolithic population only a few thousand strong and with plenty of land available for cultivation after the woods had been cleared. The mere presence of large numbers of Oceanic Jasmines indicates that this was most definitely a family-based settlement rather than the sort of male-led invasions of later millennia. I think the main body of the Neolithics arrived by this western route, since the Oceanic Jasmines reached right round the top of Scotland to the east coast and even inland to the Grampian region. There are far fewer Land Jasmines in the Isles. I found none in Ireland, only one in Wales, just five in Scotland, again in the Grampian region and in Strathclyde. The rest are in England and concentrated there in the Midlands and the east.

After that, the genetic bedrock on the maternal side was in place. By about 6,000 years ago, the pattern was set for the rest of the history of the Isles and very little has disturbed it since. Once here, the matrilineal DNA mutated and diversified, each region developing slightly different local versions, but without losing its ancient structure. Without agonizing over the precise definition, this is our
Celtic/Pictish stock and, except in two places, it has remained undiluted to this day. On our maternal side, almost all of us are Celts.

I can see no evidence at all of a large-scale immigration from central Europe to Ireland and the west of the Isles generally, such as has been used to explain the presence there of the main body of ‘Gaels’ or ‘Celts’. The ‘Celts’ of Ireland and the Western Isles are not, as far as I can see from the genetic evidence, related to the Celts who spread south and east to Italy, Greece and Turkey from the heartlands of Hallstadt and La Tène in the shadows of the Alps during the first millennium
BC
. The people of the Isles who now feel themselves to be Celts have far deeper roots in the Isles than that and, as far as I can see, their ancestors have been here for several thousand years. The Irish myths of the Milesians were right in one respect. The genetic evidence shows that a large proportion of Irish Celts, on both the male and female side, did arrive from Iberia at or about the same time as farming reached the Isles. They joined the Mesolithics who were already here, having reached the Isles either by the same maritime route or overland from Europe before the Isles were cut off by the rising sea.

The connection to Spain is also there in the myth of Brutus, who came to the Isles from the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast to found New Troy in the land of Albion. This too may be the faint echo of the same origin myth as the Milesian Irish and the connection to Iberia is almost as strong in the British regions as it is in Ireland.

One myth that the genetic evidence certainly does not support is the relic status of the Picts. Their ancestors, just
like the rest of the people of the Isles, have been there a very long time, but they are from the same basic stock. They are from the same mixture of Iberian and European Mesolithic ancestry that forms the Pictish/Celtic substructure of the Isles. It is very clear from the genetic evidence that there is no fundamental genetic difference between Pict and Celt.

This ancient matrilineal bedrock has been overlain to any substantial extent in only two places. In Orkney and Shetland there was a large settlement of women from Norway during the Viking period and the ancestors of roughly 40 per cent of today’s Shetlanders and 30 per cent of modern Orcadians first stepped ashore from a Viking ship. But plenty of others in the Northern Isles can trace their ancestry back well before the Viking age to the sophisticated Picts who built the brochs at Mousa in Shetland and Gurness in Orkney.

The second overlay is in eastern and northern England, above the Danelaw line which ran from London to Chester. Above that line, and particularly in the east, there are clear signals of female settlement overlying the Celtic substratum. As we have already touched on, it is very difficult to distinguish Saxon, Dane and Norman on a genetic basis, since they are all from the same Germanic/Scandinavian origins, but the concentration of these signals above rather than below the Danelaw line makes me think they are more likely to be Viking than Saxon or Norman. The approximate extent of this overlay I estimate to be between 10 per cent in the east and 5 per cent in the north – substantial in terms of numbers, but really only denting the Celtic substructure.

Lastly, I have found a tiny number of very unusual clans in the southern part of England. Two of these are from sub-Saharan Africa, three from Syria or Jordan. These exotic sequences are found only in England, with one exception, and among people with no knowledge of, or family connections with, those distant parts of the world. I think they might be the descendants of Roman slaves, whose lines have kept going through unbroken generations of women. If this was the genetic legacy of the Romans, they have left only the slightest traces on the female side. I have not found any in Wales, or in Ireland and only one in Scotland. This is an African sequence from Stornoway in the Western Isles, for which I have absolutely no explanation. These exotic dustings, and the more substantial layers of Viking maternal lines, are the exception. Everything else in the Isles, on the maternal side, is both Celtic and ancient. But what about the men?

Here again, the strongest signal is a Celtic one, in the form of the clan of Oisin, which dominates the scene all over the Isles. The predominance in every part of the Isles of the Atlantis chromosome (the most frequent in the Oisin clan), with its strong affinities to Iberia, along with other matches and the evidence from the maternal side convinces me that it is from this direction that we must look for the origin of Oisin and the great majority of our Y-chromosomes. The sea routes of the Atlantic fringe conveyed both men and women to the Isles. I can find no evidence at all of a large-scale arrival from the heartland of the Celts of central Europe among the paternal genetic ancestry of the Isles, just as there is none on the maternal side.

The pockets of ancient Wodans in mid-Wales and the ‘Pictland’ regions of Grampian and Tayside are, I believe, the echoes of the very first Mesolithic settlers who arrived from continental Europe, perhaps even travelling by foot while there was still a land connection. They look old to me, and for an apparently contradictory reason. That is because they are all very similar. The same applies to the Oisins. And yet the customs of genetics state that the longer a gene has been in a place, the more diversity should have accumulated. That was how I was able to fix the homelands of the seven European clan matriarchs. Using that rule I placed them at the locations where the present-day diversity was highest, and thus where they had had longest to accumulate mutations away from the original.

But this rule does not seem to work with the paternal lines delineated by the Y-chromosome. The very striking thing about the clan of Oisin throughout the Isles is how very similar they all are. Or at least, how there are very large clusters of very similar chromosomes in one location, and not in others. For instance, the Ui Neill chromosome reaches a very high frequency in north-west Ireland but is rare elsewhere, and the Somerled chromosome is common in the Highlands and the Hebrides, but virtually unknown elsewhere – unless carried by a member of Clan Donald or Clan Dugall. This dramatically reduces the genetic diversity, and leads to very recent settlement dates, sometimes obviously incorrect. This has been noticed before with the Y-chromosome but has been attributed to what is called ‘patrilocality’. This is the practice of men staying put, while the women move to marry. However, I don’t think

this works well enough to explain the amazing similarity in the Oisin chromosomes. The explanation is less cosy.

This is the ‘Genghis effect’ and it is not confined to the Mongol Empire. In the Isles very large numbers of men, perhaps all of them in the clan of Oisin, are descended from only a few genetically successful ancestors. All the conditions are here in the Isles. From the Iron Age onwards, and certainly during the first millennium
AD
, which we have covered here in such detail, the past is filled with the continual feuding between rival clans. One of the genetic consequences of the rise of powerful men is that they monopolize the women and have more children. I have even argued in
Adam’s Curse
that therein lies the motivation for their procreative ambition. We can see the evidence in the Isles in the Scottish clans of Macdonald and Macleod and in the Irish Ui Neill. These are very dramatic examples of a process which has percolated throughout the history of the Isles. That is why the diversity has been lost. It is because only comparatively few men have left patrilineal descendants. So, the longer a clan has been in a place like the Isles, the more similar the Y-chromosomes become. That is the reason our Celtic Y-chromosomes are so alike.

It is also the reason why most of the Wodan chromosomes are the opposite. They are usually very diverse indeed in the Isles. Not because they have been here a long time, but because they are comparatively recent. There are pockets of ‘old’ Wodans in Wales and Pictland, but in the east and in the north above the Danelaw line, the Wodans, which reach 31 per cent in East Anglia, are extremely varied. I scarcely found any two the same when I looked at
the detailed fingerprints, unless they had the same surname and were thus related to a common ancestor through that route. The clan of Oisin still predominates in every part of England, but the bedrock is substantially overlaid in the east. Because of the genetic similarity of Saxon, Dane and Norman, I cannot discriminate so easily between them. But I estimate that approximately 10 per cent of men now living in the south of England are the patrilineal descendants of Saxons or Danes, while above the Danelaw line the proportion increases to 15 per cent overall, reaching 20 per cent in East Anglia. Only a few of these men have surnames of Norman origin and, taking this into account, I estimate the Norman Y-chromosome legacy at 2 per cent or below even in the south of England.