DNA Forums: DNA Forums -> The Irish perspective

Continuing my reportage of Saturday's one-day forum and book launch at St Anne's College, Oxford, I'm going to mesh a lecture on the day with a paper in the newly-published volume, to paint an emerging picture of Ireland's Celtic past.

The lecture was from William O’Brien, Professor of Archaeology at University College Cork. He is famous for his work on the earliest copper mine and Bell Beaker site in Ireland - Ross Island, which has connections with Western France and Northern Iberia.

But on Saturday he spread his net to cover the whole of South-West Ireland. Over and over again he stressed the continuity evident in every aspect of human life in the region and indeed in Ireland as a whole from the time of those Bell Beaker arrivals right through the Bronze and Iron Ages. In his view, there is no evidence of inward migration during this whole period. And he felt that the endemic warfare and chiefdoms of the Late Bronze and Iron Ages would scarcely be conducive to the adoption of a new language. Although he did not come right out and say so, this suggests that the Celtic language arrived with the Bell Beaker folk (or even earlier).

Half a century ago, scholars took it for granted that the Celts had arrived in the British Isles in the Iron Age from the Hallstatt and La Tène cultural heartlands of Central Europe, which were late enough to be identifiable as Celtic from commentary on the Celts by Ancient Greek and Roman authors. But as Professor O’Brien pointed out, there are few items of La Tène type in the SW region and only a light distribution of material from the Hallstatt Culture. He did concede that there was more La Tène material in the north.

This makes a perfect match with the paper by Brian McEvoy and Daniel Bradley, Irish Genetics and Celts, Celtic from the West (2010). They feel that the genetic picture does not support the idea of massive Iron Age invasions from mainland Europe. Yet they do suggest that the frequency of Y-DNA haplogroup I2b1a (they call it by the old name I1c) in North-Eastern Ireland could reflect human arrivals along with the La Tène package. This haplogroup is otherwise almost exclusive to those of British origin. In Ireland it is shared by men of several surnames which are Gaelic in origin, and so cannot reflect gene flow from Britain in modern times. It appears in McGuinness and McCartan men - who have a recorded 6th-century AD common ancestor. They date its most recent common ancestor in Ireland to about 300 BC. [My note - the arrival of La Tène Celts from Britain could account for the fact that some people in County Down and Antrim were known as Cruthin, meaning British, in the early medieval period, including the ancestors of the McGuinness and McCartan families.]

They also summarise much interesting material from previous papers by themselves and other authors on the genetic traits which are particularly notable among the Irish, such as cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria and haemochromatosis. About one quarter of the Irish sampled carry one of two variants of the HFE gene locus (C282Y and H63D) that are known, when homozygous, to predispose to haemochromatosis (iron overload). Those of you who are 23andMe customers can check whether you are a carrier for either of these under the American spelling Hemochromatosis. You can also check if you carry any of 31 CFTR mutations for cystic fibrosis, or the major mutations for Phenylketonuria.