Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  We worked our way through England, region by region, picking out scores of different surnames that, from directories and census distributions, were local to an area. We wrote to ten of each with an explanation of our project, a DNA sampling brush and return envelope. It was an exercise of, for us, military proportions. We sent out over 15,000 DNA brushes and got just over 3,000 back, a return of a little over 20 per cent, which proved to be a remarkably consistent average whichever region we tried. We also sent out 5,000 brushes to addresses in Wales, with a similar 20 per cent return rate. The DNA from our earlier blood spots from Wales had proved difficult to extract for Y-chromosomes. Plan B was no substitute for collecting in person, but we were left with little alternative if we were to complete the project on time. We did eventually manage to fill in all the gaps in our coverage of England. Fortunately, the DNA brushes kept their precious cargo in good condition, even after several days in the post, and we had barely a failure when we set out to recover it in the lab. What did we find?

  We were expecting, as you would too knowing its turbulent history, that England would be the most mixed of all the regions of the Isles. That is largely how it turned out, with the exception of Orkney and Shetland. In these Northern Isles, the settlement of so many Vikings had an enormous influence on what, from the Pictland results, we might imagine the genetic make-up of the indigenous islanders to have been. In the Northern Isles, the great surprise had been that the proportion of Norse women who settled was on a par with the men. That unexpected result came from the comparison of maternal and paternal lineages. Would we see the same sort of family-based settlement in England? Or would the genetics parallel the more lurid histories in seeing a massive replacement on the male side and very little on the female? Let’s take a look.

  I first divided England into the rural districts shown on the map (page 15). The maternal clan pattern is stubbornly familiar wherever you are, but it does show a definite trend from the east and north to the south and west. It is literally as if the separation followed the line of the Danelaw. The Helena fraction is high, as usual, varying from 43 per cent in East Anglia to 47 per cent in the north of England. Below the Danelaw line it is only fractionally higher, rising to 49 per cent in the far south of England. There is really nothing in it. But it is in the other clans that the differences stand out, particularly when you get down to the detail, from which I will spare you. The most striking are the differences within the Jasmine clan and the presence of some very unusual sequences in East Anglia and the north of England.

  Taking the Jasmines, the ‘farming clan’, to begin with, there are two different branches, which arrived in northern Europe by separate routes, as we saw in an earlier chapter. Let’s call one the Ocean branch. They travelled around the coast of the Mediterranean from the Balkans, round Italy, to Iberia and then up the coast of France. The other, which we will call the Land branch, made their way overland to the Baltic and North Sea coasts. In Wales, Ireland and Scotland, the only branch is the Ocean branch. Only on the eastern side of Britain do I find much of the Land branch, and that is not a great deal. The great majority of Jasmines are from the Ocean branch and they pepper the map of the west side of Britain from bottom to top. They also occur in Norway.

  The other difference in the matrilineal DNA is the occurrence of the minor clans of Wanda, Xenia and Ulrike. Wanda, along with Isha and Xenia, was originally subsumed in the clan of Xenia, and Ulrike is, as we saw, the ‘eighth’ daughter of Eve. All three are found in East Anglia and the north of England, but hardly anywhere else. Mrs Archer from Great Dunmow and Mrs Peachey from Coggeshall, both in Essex, are descendants of Ulrike. Ulrike’s clan is particularly frequent in Scandinavia, so the hint is there that perhaps these two ladies are descended from that rare commodity, Viking women. Rare, that is, outside the Northern Isles. Xenia’s clan originated in the steppes of Russia 25,000 years ago and travelled to Britain from the east. Wanda’s clan is usually coupled with Xenia’s, but has a more recent origin, 18,000 years ago, though she too came from the same vicinity. Mrs Lewis from Braintree in Essex and Mr Simmonds from Toft’s Monk near Bury St Edmunds are both in Wanda’s clan. They have certainly come a long way from the Ukraine.

  In England there is a definite suggestion through detailed matches in most maternal clans of female immigration into the east from continental Europe, something which is undetectable in the west and north. How about the men? Here we do see a huge difference, even in the distribution of the clans, the crudest of indicators. Oisin’s clan is down to only 51 per cent in East Anglia. The proportions increase as you travel west to Wales and north to Scotland. Where Oisin declines, Wodan increases and it reaches its highest proportions in the whole of the Isles in East Anglia, where Oisin is lowest. But there are virtually no Sigurds in East Anglia. However, there are plenty of Sigurds in the north of England, where they amount to 7 per cent of the total, which is a third of the Shetland total. In the south of England and in the Mercian territory of central England there are plenty of Wodans, and Sigurds too. The Appendix gives the figures.

  The difference between the eastern regions and the rest intensifies when we look at the Y-chromosome diversity, which is much higher in the east, indicating a longer settlement if you follow the traditional way of interpreting genetic diversity. Diversity is much higher in the Wodan clan than in Oisin wherever you care to look.

  By now there are so many threads in the air, so many facts to digest. And I have only been able to give you a tiny fraction of the detail. For every fact I have shown you, I have a hundred more in reserve. It has been a long tour, in time as well as in space. We have travelled to every corner of the Isles. At each step we have moved closer to an answer and now the time has arrived to distil the essence of our discoveries and draw our conclusions.

  18

  THE BLOOD OF THE ISLES

  You have read the myths about the origins of the Isles that shimmer in the background, just out of reach; stories of brave kings and treacherous villains, fantastic monsters and invincible warriors. You have heard the ancient tales that have floated down the generations, stories that have been told and retold a thousand times around the campfire or in the flickering flame-light of the Great Hall. You have also heard how they were set down by Christian monks, transcribed from the world of the spoken and the sung to the realm of the written.

  These same monks also wrote their own versions of our origins, histories that were sometimes an earnest attempt to pass on an impartial narrative of events and sometimes a fantastical torrent of loathing and contempt, fantasy and corruption. You have heard how these twisted histories were seized upon by kings, re-cast and put to work to bolster a fading reign or to right an ancient wrong and, in so doing, to inspire and justify a new conquest.

  You have heard the chronicles of historians, from the amiable and conscientious Tacitus to the malignant architects of the Third Reich, each in their own way deriding and denigrating the people of the Isles as degenerate and barbaric. Yet archaeologists, whose account you have also heard, draw a sketch of the ancient Britons as masters of the shore and forest, able to fell the mighty aurochs with the well-directed flight of a flint-tipped arrow. You have heard how a medical man, the epitome of the Victorian amateur scientist, ranged through the Isles with card, tape and calipers searching for clues to our origins. You have heard how the search continued in the blood banks and laboratories of great hospitals.

  I have introduced you to a new art and a new language. An art that is written in the codes of our DNA, those unseen architects of our bodies, even of our souls. It is a new art, not long tested and yet somehow irresistibly correct. How can anyone doubt that we are all our parents’ children, as they also are the children of their parents? That is the simplicity of this art even though the language is new and obscure. I have tested you with talk of ‘DNA sequences’, ‘haplotypes’ and ‘genetic diversity’, of ‘Y-chromosomes’ and ‘mitochondrial DNA’. I have impudently claimed that my art is oblivious to th
e prejudice of the human mind.

  You have read the book, and I congratulate you on persevering through the technical sections. I have tried to make things as simple as I reasonably can, but it is no easy task to walk the tightrope between obsessive detail and arrogant patronage. My subject has been our history, the history written in our genes. Why, you might reasonably enquire, is this at all important in this day and age? What does it matter to me, you might say, whether my ancestor was a Viking, or a Saxon or a Celt? What difference will this make to my journey to work, what I eat for lunch or what I read on the way home? But if you really thought that, you would not have got this far. I hope you are by now just as fascinated as I am that within each and every one of our cells is something that has witnessed every life we have ever lived. I know that you can see the myriad threads of ancestry falling away beneath you into the abyss of the past.

  I have introduced you to the brightest and strongest of these threads, one through which we are joined to our ancestral mother. An infinite umbilical cord which courses smoothly from mother to mother back into the mist of our ancestry. The other, which only men possess, thrusts its way from generation to generation. Erratic, illogical and passionate, it lives a life free from responsibility. But it enslaves its host and drives him to violence, murder and conquest. Follow this thread into the past at your peril. Sooner or later you will spend a generation or two in the testis of a warlord. We could not have any more different conduits into the depths of our ancestry.

  The stories that these threads tell are completely individual. They are not composites or averages. I have been at pains to point out, even to the point of repetition, that to squeeze them through the mangle of mathematics risks robbing them of their vitality, silencing their murmurs. What I have tried to do is to listen to the whispered stories of thousand upon thousand of these threads and to divine patterns from the swirls. Enough of the philosophy – what are these patterns?

  The first conclusion, blindingly obvious now I can see it, is that we have in front of us two completely different histories. The maternal and paternal origins of the Isles are different. And that should be no surprise, given the opposing characters of the chroniclers. The matrilineal history of the Isles is both ancient and continuous. I see no reason at all from the results why many of our maternal lineages should not go right back through the millennia to the very first Palaeolithic and Mesolithic settlers who reached our islands around 10,000 years ago. The average settlement dates of 8,000 years ago fit with that. But that cannot be the complete answer. That was well before the arrival of farming, and the presence, particularly in Ireland and the Western Isles, of large numbers of Jasmine’s Oceanic clan, and her companions from the maritime branch of Tara, says to me that there was a very large-scale movement along the Atlantic seaboard north from Iberia, beginning as far back as the early Neolithic and perhaps even before that. The number of exact and close matches between the maternal clans of western and northern Iberia and the western half of the Isles is very impressive, much more so than the much poorer matches with continental Europe.

  That is not to say this was a ‘wave’ arriving all at once and swamping the small numbers of Mesolithic inhabitants of Mount Sandel, Starr Carr and the like. They were well established, knew the land inside out and must have been easily able to adapt, gradually, to a less mobile agricultural existence. The change from hunter-gathering to agriculture may have taken centuries or millennia. There is no archaeological evidence of conflict and no reason to suppose that the arrival of the farmers would have been confrontational, at least not at first. We encountered the peaceful co-existence of Mesolithic and Neolithic communities in Portugal where the new arrivals from the Middle East cleared the woods for their crops well away from the coastal zones favoured by the residents. I think this pattern would have been reproduced all over the Isles. There was plenty of room, with the Mesolithic population only a few thousand strong and with plenty of land available for cultivation after the woods had been cleared. The mere presence of large numbers of Oceanic Jasmines indicates that this was most definitely a family-based settlement rather than the sort of male-led invasions of later millennia. I think the main body of the Neolithics arrived by this western route, since the Oceanic Jasmines reached right round the top of Scotland to the east coast and even inland to the Grampian region. There are far fewer Land Jasmines in the Isles. I found none in Ireland, only one in Wales, just five in Scotland, again in the Grampian region and in Strathclyde. The rest are in England and concentrated there in the Midlands and the east.

  After that, the genetic bedrock on the maternal side was in place. By about 6,000 years ago, the pattern was set for the rest of the history of the Isles and very little has disturbed it since. Once here, the matrilineal DNA mutated and diversified, each region developing slightly different local versions, but without losing its ancient structure. Without agonizing over the precise definition, this is our Celtic/Pictish stock and, except in two places, it has remained undiluted to this day. On our maternal side, almost all of us are Celts.

  I can see no evidence at all of a large-scale immigration from central Europe to Ireland and the west of the Isles generally, such as has been used to explain the presence there of the main body of ‘Gaels’ or ‘Celts’. The ‘Celts’ of Ireland and the Western Isles are not, as far as I can see from the genetic evidence, related to the Celts who spread south and east to Italy, Greece and Turkey from the heartlands of Hallstadt and La Tène in the shadows of the Alps during the first millennium BC. The people of the Isles who now feel themselves to be Celts have far deeper roots in the Isles than that and, as far as I can see, their ancestors have been here for several thousand years. The Irish myths of the Milesians were right in one respect. The genetic evidence shows that a large proportion of Irish Celts, on both the male and female side, did arrive from Iberia at or about the same time as farming reached the Isles. They joined the Mesolithics who were already here, having reached the Isles either by the same maritime route or overland from Europe before the Isles were cut off by the rising sea.

  The connection to Spain is also there in the myth of Brutus, who came to the Isles from the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast to found New Troy in the land of Albion. This too may be the faint echo of the same origin myth as the Milesian Irish and the connection to Iberia is almost as strong in the British regions as it is in Ireland.

  One myth that the genetic evidence certainly does not support is the relic status of the Picts. Their ancestors, just like the rest of the people of the Isles, have been there a very long time, but they are from the same basic stock. They are from the same mixture of Iberian and European Mesolithic ancestry that forms the Pictish/Celtic substructure of the Isles. It is very clear from the genetic evidence that there is no fundamental genetic difference between Pict and Celt.

  This ancient matrilineal bedrock has been overlain to any substantial extent in only two places. In Orkney and Shetland there was a large settlement of women from Norway during the Viking period and the ancestors of roughly 40 per cent of today’s Shetlanders and 30 per cent of modern Orcadians first stepped ashore from a Viking ship. But plenty of others in the Northern Isles can trace their ancestry back well before the Viking age to the sophisticated Picts who built the brochs at Mousa in Shetland and Gurness in Orkney.

  The second overlay is in eastern and northern England, above the Danelaw line which ran from London to Chester. Above that line, and particularly in the east, there are clear signals of female settlement overlying the Celtic substratum. As we have already touched on, it is very difficult to distinguish Saxon, Dane and Norman on a genetic basis, since they are all from the same Germanic/Scandinavian origins, but the concentration of these signals above rather than below the Danelaw line makes me think they are more likely to be Viking than Saxon or Norman. The approximate extent of this overlay I estimate to be between 10 per cent in the east and 5 per cent in the north – substantial in terms of numbers, but really only denti
ng the Celtic substructure.

  Lastly, I have found a tiny number of very unusual clans in the southern part of England. Two of these are from sub-Saharan Africa, three from Syria or Jordan. These exotic sequences are found only in England, with one exception, and among people with no knowledge of, or family connections with, those distant parts of the world. I think they might be the descendants of Roman slaves, whose lines have kept going through unbroken generations of women. If this was the genetic legacy of the Romans, they have left only the slightest traces on the female side. I have not found any in Wales, or in Ireland and only one in Scotland. This is an African sequence from Stornoway in the Western Isles, for which I have absolutely no explanation. These exotic dustings, and the more substantial layers of Viking maternal lines, are the exception. Everything else in the Isles, on the maternal side, is both Celtic and ancient. But what about the men?

  Here again, the strongest signal is a Celtic one, in the form of the clan of Oisin, which dominates the scene all over the Isles. The predominance in every part of the Isles of the Atlantis chromosome (the most frequent in the Oisin clan), with its strong affinities to Iberia, along with other matches and the evidence from the maternal side convinces me that it is from this direction that we must look for the origin of Oisin and the great majority of our Y-chromosomes. The sea routes of the Atlantic fringe conveyed both men and women to the Isles. I can find no evidence at all of a large-scale arrival from the heartland of the Celts of central Europe among the paternal genetic ancestry of the Isles, just as there is none on the maternal side.