Showing posts with label dna. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dna. Show all posts

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Scots - the mongrel "race"

According to recent DNA research, the human species came very close to extinction during the last Ice Age. We know this because there ought to be far greater DNA variations than there actually are and providing evidence to suggest the total population of mankind towards the close of the Ice Age could have been as few as ten thousand people or less. More recently, DNA research from Leicester University and published in 2010, goes further and where eighty per cent of Caucasian males in Europe may have had ancestors who lived in regions known today as Iraq and Syria

Around 1,000 people have been tested in the past four months as part of the Scotland’s DNA project, and the preliminary results reveal the “astonishing” diversity of our genetic origins.

Almost 100 different groups of male ancestry have been found so far from all over Europe, and further afield, and 157 types of female DNA from Europe, Asia and Africa.

One per cent of Scotsmen, around 26,000 individuals, are descended from the Berber and Tuareg tribesmen of the Sahara, with a lineage going back 5,600 years.

 The project has also found a lost tribe, the Maeatae, who fought the Roman legions in 208AD and seemed to disapper from recorded history in the 8th century. The latest DNA techniques re-discovered them – concentrated in their historic homelands around Stirling.

 The Royal Stewart DNA is  found in 15 per cent of men with the "Stewart" surname, which means there are thousands of Scots wandering the streets with a “smidgen of royal blood in their veins”, the genetic marker also suggests that the Stewarts were originally Cornishmen.

  A team from Oxford University has discovered that the Celts are descended from a tribe of Iberian fishermen who crossed the Bay of Biscay 6,000 years ago. DNA analysis reveals they have an almost identical genetic "fingerprint" to the inhabitants of coastal regions of Spain, whose own ancestors migrated north between 4,000 and 5,000BC. "Although Celtic countries have previously thought of themselves as being genetically different from the English, this is emphatically not the case," Professor Sykes said. "...from a genetic point of view, Britain is emphatically not a divided nation."  The Celtic cultural myth “is very entrenched and has a lot to do with the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity; their main identifying feature is that they are not English,” said Dr. Sykes

Dr. Oppenheimer, author of , “The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story”,  said genes “have no bearing on cultural history.” There is no significant genetic difference between the people of Northern Ireland, yet they have been fighting with each other for 400 years, he said.

 "...We all came here after the last ice age and perhaps because it is impossible to go further north-west, Scotland has been the final destination for many journeys over 11,000 years. The basic lineage is the same for Scotland and England, the ice moved north and everybody came from the south. We have a lot more Vikings, and we have more early Irish, but the basic recipe is similar.”explained Alistair Moffat