Is This the Real Root of the Irish? By Patrick O’ Flanagan
Ancient bones discovered under an Irish pub are allegedly casting doubt on whether the Irish are Celtic at all, or so they say. This is all based upon DNA analysis of the three skeletons, plus a third Neolithic woman from Ballynahatty, supposedly indicating a Near East origin. Now that is possible, that a Near Eastern people may have come to Ireland 1,000 years before the Celts, or the skeletons of people that have been discovered could be a small sample of travellers who came to Ireland, then died out. But it is a long bow to pull to say that the Irish are not Celts, as there is a wealth of genetic analysis showing that they are quiet distinct from Near East populations. Anything for a headline.
“The chance discovery of ancient bones under an Irish pub in the mid-2000s has cast doubt over whether Irish people are actually related to the ancient Celts at all.
In 2006, Bertie Currie was clearing land to make a driveway for McCuaig's Bar on Rathlin Island off Antrim when he noticed a large, flat stone buried beneath the surface.
Currie realized that there was a large gap underneath the stone and investigated further.
"I shot the torch in and saw the gentleman, well, his skull and bones," Currie told the Washington Post in March 2016.
He eventually found the remains of three humans and immediately called the police.
The police arrived on the scene and discovered that this was not a crime scene but an ancient burial site.
It turned out to be a hugely significant ancient burial site as well that, with DNA analysis, could completely alter the perception that Irish people are descended from Celts.
A number of prominent professors at esteemed universities in Ireland and Britain analyzed the bones and said that the discovery could rewrite Irish history and ancestry.
DNA researchers found that the three skeletons found under Currie's pub are the ancestors of modern Irish people and predate the Celts' arrival on Irish shores by around 1,000 years.
Essentially, Irish DNA existed in Ireland before the Celts ever set foot on the island.
Instead, Irish ancestors may have come to Ireland from the Bible lands in the Middle East. They might have arrived in Ireland from the South Mediterranean and would have brought cattle, cereal, and ceramics with them.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) said in 2015 that the bones strikingly resembled those of contemporary Irish, Scottish, and Welsh people.
A retired archaeology professor at the highly-renowned University of Oxford said that the discovery could completely change the perception of Irish ancestry.
“The DNA evidence based on those bones completely upends the traditional view,” said Barry Cunliffe, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Oxford.
Radiocarbon dating at Currie's McCuaig's Bar found that the ancient bones date back to at least 2,000 BC, which is hundreds of years older than the oldest known Celtic artifacts anywhere in the world.
Dan Bradley, a genetics professor at Trinity College, said in 2016 that the discovery could challenge the popular belief that Irish people are related to Celts.
“The genomes of the contemporary people in Ireland are older — much older — than we previously thought,” he said.
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/2/368
“The Neolithic and Bronze Age transitions were profound cultural shifts catalyzed in parts of Europe by migrations, first of early farmers from the Near East and then Bronze Age herders from the Pontic Steppe. However, a decades-long, unresolved controversy is whether population change or cultural adoption occurred at the Atlantic edge, within the British Isles. We address this issue by using the first whole genome data from prehistoric Irish individuals. A Neolithic woman (3343–3020 cal BC) from a megalithic burial (10.3× coverage) possessed a genome of predominantly Near Eastern origin. She had some hunter–gatherer ancestry but belonged to a population of large effective size, suggesting a substantial influx of early farmers to the island. Three Bronze Age individuals from Rathlin Island (2026–1534 cal BC), including one high coverage (10.5×) genome, showed substantial Steppe genetic heritage indicating that the European population upheavals of the third millennium manifested all of the way from southern Siberia to the western ocean. This turnover invites the possibility of accompanying introduction of Indo-European, perhaps early Celtic, language. Irish Bronze Age haplotypic similarity is strongest within modern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh populations, and several important genetic variants that today show maximal or very high frequencies in Ireland appear at this horizon. These include those coding for lactase persistence, blue eye color, Y chromosome R1b haplotypes, and the hemochromatosis C282Y allele; to our knowledge, the first detection of a known Mendelian disease variant in prehistory. These findings together suggest the establishment of central attributes of the Irish genome 4,000 y ago.”
No, there would need to be a comprehensive genetic analysis of the present white Irish population to establish such a relationship.
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