DNA Forums: DNA Forums -> The Romantic Atlantic Route

The Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland) has fascinated generations. Compiled in the late 11th century, it tells a stirring story of invaders battling for Ireland. The final conquest of Ireland from Iberia by the Milesians, or sons of Míl Espáine (soldier of Spain), brought Gaelic, the story goes. It was accepted for centuries as an accurate history. Today's more critical academic world has rejected it as myth.

Yet echoes of the myth resound in one corner of academia. Ancient Britain and the Atlantic Zone is a project of the Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies, University of Wales. A conference in December 2008 examined the evidence from linguistics, archaeology and genetics for British Celtic origins in the Atlantic Bronze Age rather than the central European Iron Age.

Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe is a leading light of the project. He has already published acclaimed works proposing the Atlantic as a sea-highway that joined peoples together all the way from Portugal to the Western Isles of Scotland. Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 (2001) was followed by Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC to AD 1000 (2008).

The coming 10 July will see the launch of Celtic from the West: Alternative Perspectives from Archaeology, Genetics, Language and Literature, edited by John T. Koch and Sir Barry Cunliffe. It mainly contains papers presented at the conference. The programme for the launch event takes the topic further:

• J. P. Mallory, The Indo-Europeanization of Atlantic Europe
  
• Andrew FitzPatrick, The Arrival of the Beaker Folk in Britain
  
• Catriona Gibson, Beakers into Bronze: Tracing connections between western Iberia and the British Isles 2800–800 BC
  
• John T. Koch, Out of the flow and ebb of the European Bronze Age: heroes, Tartessos, and Celtic
  
• Dirk Brandherm, Westward Ho? Swordbearers and all the rest of it...
  
• Jacqueline McKinley, Jörn Schuster, Alistair Barclay, Dead sea connections: a Bronze- and Iron Age ritual site on the Isle of Thanet
  
• Dagmar S. Wodtko, Models of language spread and language development in prehistoric Europe
  
• William O’Brien, Celts, Romans and the indigenous Iron Age and Late Bronze Age of south-west Ireland
  
• Colin Renfrew, Thoughts on early Celtic in the west and early Indo-European

I will report back on the event. In the meantime, a just-published paper provides food for thought.

The idea of the Irish having origins in Iberia was boosted by early genetic studies, which found high levels of Y-DNA R1b in both countries. It was later realised that R1b dominates the whole of Western Europe. Worse still for the romantic image of Míl Espáine was the discovery that the subclade of R1b overwhelming common in Ireland (L21) was also common in Britain and France, but extremely rare in Iberia. I recently added to Peopling of Europe: Beaker Folk to Celts and Italics a distribution map of R1b-L21 based on the Family Tree DNA R1b-L21 Project led by Richard Stevens, with the help of Michael Walsh and Bernard Secher. (Image below).

Nor do the Irish cluster close to Iberians in studies of a much wider range of genetic markers. Instead they overlap with their nearest neighbours, the British. That is apparent in a number of previous studies, such as J.Novembre et al. (2008). By coincidence I had just added that fact to my coverage of the Milesian myth in European national origin stories, when a new study* was published online yesterday concentrating on the British Isles. This found that Dubliners had a vanishingly small Iberian element - less than that in people from south-east England. So whatever the Milesian myth is telling us, it is not the true story of the birth of a nation.

Yet for me the worth of the work of Professors John T. Koch and Sir Barry Cunliffe is undiminished. They have been ready to think the once unthinkable - that the Celts of Ireland and Britain are true Celts. That they arrived from the continent and had both genetic and cultural links to the Continental Celts. British archaeology has gone through a long phase of denial, but migration is back on the menu. They have also highlighted an alternative route for Celtic entry. The evidence from both archaeology and genetics points to the major route being via the Rhine corridor from Central Europe. But there are hints that some people did arrive up the Atlantic route, even if they were in the minority.

*C.T O'Dushlaine et al., Population structure and genome-wide patterns of variation in Ireland and Britain, European Journal of Human Genetics, (advance online publication 23 June 2010). Forum discussion and images on the thread: Genome-wide study Ireland and Britain.