British Have Changed Little Since Ice Age, Gene Study Says

[Dover]

British Have Changed Little Since Ice Age, Gene Study Says

James Owen
for National Geographic News

Despite invasions by Saxons, Romans, Vikings, Normans, and others, the genetic makeup of today's white Britons is much the same as it was 12,000 ago, a new book claims.

In The Tribes of Britain, archaeologist David Miles says around 80 percent of the genetic characteristics of most white Britons have been passed down from a few thousand Ice Age hunters.


Miles, research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford, England, says recent genetic and archaeological evidence puts a new perspective on the history of the British people.

"There's been a lot of arguing over the last ten years, but it's now more or less agreed that about 80 percent of Britons' genes come from hunter-gatherers who came in immediately after the Ice Age," Miles said...cont'd

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_britishgene.html

[aquart]

1. Uh huh. and they were...?

Was this daddy or mommy DNA?

[greyl]

2. Red hairing

Just kidding.
Red hair has only been around on humans for 8,000-10,000 years? Wow, that's pretty cool. I never would have imagined that in the 3 million year history of humanity it was such a recent change.
Maybe we can achieve a nice striking blue within the next several millenia. :)

edit: deleted and removed redundancy

[aquart]

3. Well, we've got plaid-wearing graves in the Gobi...

Would someone kindly give me the itinerary? 8,000-10,000 BC in Britain. 2,000 BC in Asia?

I've heard of a slow boat to China. But this is ridiculous.

[Igel]

6. Different groups, probably.

Speculation is that the Uighurs, in part, are descended from Tokharians, a couple groups of Indo-European speakers that presumably migrated eastwards rather late in the course of Proto-Indo-European development.

The plaid-weavers were likely some Indo-European offshoot (keeping in mind that this is a linguistic category, with a sketchy, but likely, relationship to racial characteristicis), and Tokharians are the closest possibility. But it's a bit of speculation.

Indo-Europeans would have moved into Britain some time before the Romans got there, and would have done the same kind of assimilating that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes later did. Even the Romans ran into Picts, probably assimilated non-Celts, although that's a guess ("Celt" being another one of those linguistic units, not cultural, which is a point rather obscured in the article with the line about the creation of a "Celtic" identity for Britain: the Britons were certainly Celtic speaking, and Celtic languages ruled everywhere but the far north).

[aquart]

7. I would agree except for the name: Rus.

Red.

The first article I read on the Gobi burials said they were found near the village of WuShan which meant Scarlet Hill. An asian would easily repeat Rus as Wu and, funnily enough, the meaning is the same: Red.

If the redheads mutated out of the British Isles, not all of them stayed on the island.

[Astarho]

13. disagree about the rus

Rus most likely comes from the Old Norse for "rowers" from the root rods-

In which dialect does wu mean red? I've seen zhu for red (vermillion) and the old chinese would have been to. Old Chinese had an /r/ sound (became /l/ in modern mandarin) and final consonant including a final /s/.

Also the timeframe for the Rus is off by about three thousand years. I think the Tocharians are the most likely hypothesis for the Gobi burials.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. That's not what I heard about red hair

It's supposed to be one of the possiblities when a dark-haired and a light-haired person produce a child.

People who are half-Caucasian and half-East Asian sometimes turn out redheaded. And no, although Japanese people do like to dye their hair red, I've seen that hair color on small children.

The red hair in Xinjiang could have been the result of mixing between Indo-Europeans from farther west (the most prevalent theory is that the original Indo-Europeans spread out in all directions from the present-day Ukraine) and Chinese or Mongolian populations.

The red hair of the British Isles could have been a totally separate phenomenon, an inherited mutation.

[smirkymonkey]

4. That would explain their cooking...

:evilgrin:

[benburch]

5. I was thinking that exact thing.

Damn, there is NO British Cuisine. Why do you think they needed to colonize everywhere else? They could NOT stand the food at home!

[theHandpuppet]

11. You guys beat me to it

Little wonder the Brits were so intent on exploring and colonizing the globe -- they were looking anywhere for a decent meal!

[bemildred]

8. Human genetic diversity in general is very low, I thought. nt

[SteppingRazor]

9. No wonder they all have bad teeth!

:evilgrin:

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. It's interesting how different messages are read into this book

As this review in The Scotsman points out:

What does the story of Britain tell us about today's debate about identity?

For Miles, Britain's history demonstrates the viability of a multicultural society and the importance of continued mass immigration. For Nick Griffin, of the British National (racist: ed.) Party , on the other hand, Miles's research demonstrates that Britain is "not a nation of immigrants", but "a nation of indigenous peoples descended from only a few hundred people who have lived on our homeland for tens of thousands of years" and that "multiculturalism and mass immigration are genocidal crimes against our people and our land".

It's not the facts of history that shape our sense of identity but the politics of identity that all too often shape our view of history.

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/critique.cfm?id=1635532005

And the trouble with that "80%" figure is that it obscures the differences inside Britain:

This is where the new techniques of genetic analysis come into their own. When researchers recovered DNA from the tooth of an Ice Age huntsman buried in a cave in Cheddar Gorge, they found that it matched the DNA of the history master, and two of his pupils, at the local school. No doubt those Somerset folk had also acquired, in the intervening 9,000 years, many ancestors whose origins lay elsewhere (Celts, Romans, Saxons, Huguenots, and so on). But the underlying continuity is a striking fact, all the more striking because it was unknowable until a few years ago.

Unfortunately, though, individual findings such as these are much more clear-cut than any overall pattern can be. Miles notes that there is a sort of Celtic-Germanic gradient running west-east across Britain: the further east an English family comes from, the more likely it is to share its DNA with people from the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. But, he suggests, this could be the result of long-term interactions on a small scale; it does not necessarily imply any single episode of mass-migration.

http://arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/07/10/bomil10.xml

(Somerset in on the west coast of England). Which means the "invading hordes from the North Sea, who pushed the Celts into Wales and bits of Scotland and Cornwall" theory (which was standardly taught in school, before DNA analysis) isn't completely wrong, it just paints a picture with sharper dividing lines than reality.