Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  Barry Cunliffe sees a natural progression from these shell-midden graves to the two earliest styles of Neolithic monumental architecture: the long barrow, where soil has taken the place of shells, and the passage graves. And it is the passage graves of the Boyne valley in Ireland that visitors flock to see. Although there are over 230 passage graves in Ireland, it is the tombs at Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange that, deservedly, command the most attention. All three are roughly the same size, 85 metres in diameter and 11 metres high. These dimensions may be similar to the shell middens which provided the archetypal design, but the effort put into their construction was phenomenal. The stone-lined passage and the tomb that lies at its end involved the quarrying, transportation and setting in place of over fifty giant stone slabs, some weighing more than 5 tons. Once the tomb was in place, the whole structure was covered in the gigantic mound, which is made up of more than 200,000 tons of rocks and earth.

  At Newgrange, the narrow passage which leads to the tomb itself is 25 metres long. It was aligned in such a way that the light of the rising sun at the midwinter solstice shone directly along the passage on to an intricately carved triple spiral motif on the opposite wall of the central tomb. The Knowth mound, about a kilometre to the north-west, contains not one but two passage graves, as does the Dowth mound to the east of Newgrange. Around these massive tombs are other smaller tombs and numerous standing stones. Carbon-dates of organic remains found buried within the mound date the construction of Newgrange at about 5,000 years ago, well after the dates for Ireland’s first unambiguously Neolithic site at Ballynagilly in Ulster.

  It is only natural to imagine that these gigantic structures, and the complex and mysterious social rituals which their presence suggests, must have been brought about by a wave of new arrivals to Ireland. Yet the clear link to similar, even if not identical, structures along the entire Atlantic coastline, coupled with the early genesis of these structures in the middens of the Mesolithic, could equally well mean that these impressive megaliths are actually one step along the path of a continuous development of monumental architecture along the entire Atlantic fringe from Iberia to the Isles. That is definitely something to bear in mind when we contemplate the living archaeology of the genes.

  Before we do that, let us pause to examine the archaeological evidence in Ireland of what nearly every popular account refers to as the arrival of the Celts. We have looked at the linguistic evidence elsewhere, but what is there to see among the material remains exposed by the trowels of the excavator? Even supposedly authoritative popular world histories describe ‘the Celts’ as loose mobile units of warriors, on the move and destroying all in their path. The main archaeological evidence comes from the beautifully fashioned and distinctive metalwork associated with, first, the Hallstadt and then the La Tène cultures of central Europe. Certainly these have been found in many parts of Europe, including Ireland. But to take this as proof of a large-scale movement of people into Ireland is surely, in the absence of other compelling evidence, even more of a risky assumption than that the spread of agriculture can only have been accomplished by wave after wave of Middle Eastern farmers.

  The ‘Celtic’ artefacts that have passed the test of survival and discovery are, almost without exception, high-value goods that, like a Rolex watch or a Cartier necklace today, are at least as likely to be given as a gift as to be worn by the original owner. To find a La Tène brooch in an Irish bog is no proof that a central European put it there. And, like a fake Rolex, just because a piece of jewellery looks like the original, it doesn’t stop it being a copy. In fact, artefacts in the La Tène style are rare in Ireland. Many of them have been examined by the Irish archaeologist Barry Raftery, who is convinced that, far from being made in central Europe, they were actually manufactured in Ireland itself. We continually underestimate the skill and capabilities of our ancestors. Why should it come as a surprise that an Irish goldsmith could learn a new, fashionable continental style? It seems to me that the constant tendency to interpret past events in terms of movements is completely the wrong assumption. Surely the correct starting point is to assume that our ancestors were sufficiently resourceful and skilful to pick up virtually any skill. But to find out we need to look at the DNA.

  9

  THE DNA OF IRELAND

  A good reason for choosing Ireland as the starting point of our genetic tour of the Isles is that, unlike in Britain, a concerted research programme into Irish cultural and genetic history has already been running for some years, organized through the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy based in Dublin. In Britain an even more ambitious millennium initiative came to nothing, which was one of the reasons why my research team and I decided to complete the survey of the entire Isles ourselves. You might be surprised, as I was when I first heard of the Academy, that it still retains the Royal prefix, but it is one of the institutions that has survived the 1921 partition of Ireland. It was founded in 1785 and soon became the premier learned society for the study of Irish civilization. It is in many respects the Irish equivalent of the elite academic societies in the rest of Britain, like the Royal Society and the British Academy in London and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and, also in Edinburgh, the Royal Scottish Academy. One of the enjoyable aspects of visiting these places is that they are almost always housed in grand Georgian terraces. It is always a treat for the eyes to attend meetings in such sumptuous surroundings, with the olympians of academe, Newton, Darwin and co., peering down from their portraits high up on the walls.

  Unlike its British counterparts, the Irish Academy is not restricted to particular fields of endeavour. While in England, for example, the Royal Society deals with the sciences and the British Academy covers the humanities: literature, history, philosophy and so on, the Royal Irish Academy does not restrict itself, embracing both the sciences and the arts under one roof. This breadth made the Academy the natural home of a comprehensive survey of Ireland which would integrate all the diverse strands of science, history, language and archaeology. This irresistible combination, together with some fundraising, led to a substantial amount of money being made available to the Academy from the National Millennium Committee of Ireland. Invitations to bid for money from the fund went out to all the Irish universities and I found myself on a plane to Dublin to help to judge the applications.

  In the elegant surroundings of the Academy’s headquarters in Dawson Street, the hopefuls presented their proposals in the form of short talks. Naturally enough, when a new pot of money unexpectedly becomes available, people build their bids around their existing expertise. The aim is to persuade the judges that what they are already doing will, with a bit more money, produce an essential and indispensable contribution to the project. Our job, as judges, was to weigh up these diverse claims and to recommend where we thought the money would best be spent. You’ll not be surprised to hear that I didn’t need much persuading that a survey of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA would be not only relevant but completely essential.

  Fortunately, all the other judges felt the same way. Which is how Dan Bradley and his team from Trinity College Dublin got the green light–and the funds–to take charge of that central aspect of the project. Dan had pioneered the use of DNA to find out how and when farm animals, in particular cattle, had been domesticated. We had worked together a little on this when Jill Bailey, one of the research students in my team, had been working on retrieving DNA from the bones of the extinct ancestor of domesticated cattle, the fearsome aurochs. After getting her degree in Oxford, Jill had spent a year in Dan’s lab in Dublin and I had been over a couple of times to give talks and be an examiner for Dan’s graduate students. All of which is entirely irrelevant, except that it meant that a highly experienced and competent geneticist, whom I knew and liked, would be covering the same genetic ground in Ireland as I was already starting to do in the rest of the Isles. Which in turn meant that I could concentrate on Scotland, Wales and England, knowing that Dan’s lab would produce compatible genetic d
ata from Ireland that could be integrated with the results of our Irish customers at Oxford Ancestors and, eventually, all the data from the rest of the Isles. Which is precisely what did happen and it is from this grand coalition of data that we begin our tour.

  On my imaginary map, I moved all the Irish gene-coins across the Irish Sea and began to distribute them according to their geographic origins. Each one of these was the end point of a journey–the journey of a line of ancestors stretching through maternal and paternal threads way back into the deep past. We know, from the archaeological records, that every one of these ancestral journeys must have ended in Ireland within the last 9,000 years when the first Irish built their timber-framed houses on the banks of the River Bann at Mount Sandel. Before that, as we know, Ireland had been uninhabited since the Ice Age. Could it be that some of these DNA fragments from today’s Irish men and women have actually been there all that time? How would we know?

  I began with the maternal DNA. I knew, from the identity of their clan mothers, when and where all these journeys had begun. And from the locations on the map of Ireland, I also knew where these journeys had ended. Well, not ended, because many of these genes will go on travelling the world for millennia to come. To be more accurate, I knew where these immortal time travellers had reached by the late twentieth century.

  The longest journeys, in both time and distance, had been travelled by Ursula’s descendants. Ursula herself had lived in Greece about 45,000 years ago, at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic, and had shared the land with the far more ancient Neanderthals. We knew this date from counting up all the mutational changes that had happened among her descendants and dividing this figure by the mutation rate. As we have seen, among the seven principal clans in Europe there were far more changes in the descendants of Ursula than in any of the others. That simple fact meant the clan of Ursula was the oldest of the seven. We arrived at the age of the clan, and thus the time in the past when Ursula herself lived, by factoring in a mutation rate of one change in every 20,000 years. From thousands of DNA samples from all over Europe we knew that, on average, Ursulans have 2.25 mutations in their mitochondrial DNA compared to the DNA of Ursula herself. That puts the age of the clan at 2.25 © 20,000 = 45,000 years.

  We arrived at Ursula’s own location in Greece by looking to see where the clan today is both the most frequent and at its most diverse. So long as there was good archaeological or climatic evidence that the location was inhabited, or at least habitable, at the time, then that was where we placed the matriarch. I realize from many letters that it is a frequent and understandable misunderstanding (if there can be such a thing) that we have located the skeleton of Ursula and the other matriarchs and then worked out how long ago they lived from carbon-dating. But this is not so; it is all accomplished by reconstructions.

  From the DNA fragments now displayed on the map of Ireland, I could see that almost exactly 10 per cent of Irish men and women are the direct maternal descendants of Ursula, each carrying her DNA modified by the occasional mutation. Converting that proportion of 10 per cent to actual numbers of people means that of a total population of 5.7 million there are roughly 570,000 Ursulans in all of Ireland. Altogether, counting Dan’s published data, we have the mDNA sequences of 91 Ursulans from a total of 921 Irish samples. However, because the clan is so old and there has been such a long time for mutations to accumulate, we found only three people who have Ursula’s sequence unmodified by genetic change. As all three are customers of Oxford Ancestors, I can trace their present whereabouts and none of them lives in Ireland! One lives in Hampshire in southern England, another in London and the third in New York. It is their grandmothers and great-grandmothers who lived in Ireland and who then joined the stream of emigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But their DNA did pause in Ireland before it resumed its journey around the globe.

  I shall refer to these three as ‘pure’ Ursulans, while, I hope, avoiding the implication that mutations in the others have somehow sullied the pristine genetic heritage of Ursula herself. I hope I am not accused of implying that their DNA is, in contrast, somehow impure, which is complete nonsense of course. But it has been modified. Of the other Irish Ursulans, some have one change on the ‘pure’ Ursulan background–and I call them first-generation Ursulans. There are 22 of them. By the same token, there are 23 second-generation, 26 third-generation, 10 fourth-generation, 5 fifth-generation, one sixth-generation and one seventh-generation Ursulan. The third-generation Ursulans, with three mutations compared to Ursula herself, are the most frequent, closely followed by Ursulans of the second ‘mutational’ generation with two changes compared to the original. The numbers in higher generations tail off slowly until we reach the Irish Ursulan record-holder, a doctor now living in Chichester, in Sussex, with seven changes since Ursula. I had better stress once again that the ‘pure’ Ursulans and all the others up to and including the record-holder are separated from Ursula by the same 45,000 years and, roughly, the same number of actual maternal generations. It is chance alone that has left the three ‘pure’ lines untouched by mutations while the good doctor’s has been hit seven times.

  We are in the most technical part of the book and I beg for your indulgence to explain a very important point. From the numbers of ‘pure’ and first-, second- and higher-generation Ursulans, we can work out the average number of mutations over all the Irish Ursulans. It comes to fractionally over 2.5. If we now multiply this by the mutation rate of one change in every 20,000 years, it comes to just over 50,000 years, which is older than Ursula!

  Actually, this is not that far from the 45,000-year date for Ursula herself and well within the mathematical error of the estimate. But it is an awful lot longer than the 9,000 years we know that people have been in Ireland. How can we explain this apparent discrepancy? We have 50,000 years’ worth of accumulated mutation in an island which we know has only been inhabited for 9,000 years. It has to mean that most of the mutations in the Irish Ursulans must have already occurred before and not after they arrived in Ireland. We cannot just use the 50,000-year genetic date and say that is when Ireland was first inhabited.

  My colleague Martin Richards and I got into a lot of trouble when we first used a superficially similar argument to back up our controversial proposition that the ancestors of most Europeans were Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers who had arrived a long time before the Neolithic farmers. We said that there was far too much accumulated mutation in all the major European clans, save Jasmine, to have developed in the 10,000 years or so since farming had been invented in the Middle East, and therefore these clans were Palaeolithic in origin. The counter-argument was vigorously expressed in terms of a Martian metaphor. Suppose a representative selection of Europeans had been transported to Mars and then, a few years later, had their DNA sampled and analysed–presumably by Venusians who didn’t know about the landing. They had then done the calculations and showed that, according to the amount of accumulated genetic differences, the Martians had been there for tens of thousands of years, whereas we know they had arrived only a few years earlier. The flaw in the Venusians’ argument–and by implication in ours–was that they had assumed that all the mutations had accumulated after the earthlings arrived on Mars, when, in fact, they had all occurred before they set off from Earth.

  Although Martin and I, for a number of reasons, did not think this was a good analogy for what we had actually done, we none the less set out to try to prove that the mutations in Europeans (we are back on Earth now) had accumulated in Europe and had not been imported from the Middle East by Neolithic farmers. Martin particularly, helped by our new recruit, theoretical physicist and mathematician Vincent Macaulay, spent three long years doing this.

  To cut a very long story short, they scoured the Middle East for as many DNA samples as they could find, then searched these for matches to the DNA from Europe. The point was to find out how many of the mutations in Europe were genuinely European and how many had already happened
in the Middle East. Basically, if a match was found, and if we could be certain that it had actually originated in the Middle East, rather than being carried back there from Europe by some sort of reverse migration, we subtracted it from our tally of ‘European’ mutations and did the time calculations once again. It was an exhaustive, and exhausting, analysis which in the end gave us a set of dates for the settlement of Europe that we could all rely on. Fortunately, they were not so very different from our original ones and did not reverse our conclusion that most Europeans had hunter-gatherer ancestors.

  Turning back once more to the Irish Ursulans, could I do the same sort of thing to work out which mutations were Irish ‘originals’ and which were imported? If I could, then the genetic dates would mean something. This I did by checking each of the Irish Ursulans’ DNA sequences against every other sequence that I knew about from all over, first Europe, and then the world. I was looking to see how many of them had also been seen outside Ireland. Although my computer helped a great deal in sorting all the results so that identical sequences appeared on consecutive lines on the screen, I also checked the list of Irish Ursulans one by one. One Irish Ursulan, a lady from Donegal, for example, had only one matching sequence and that was a man from the Czech Republic. It is very unlikely we will ever know the precise tracks that trace the wanderings of the ancestors of these two genetic relatives back to the woman whose DNA they both share. But it is in just these tracks, like footprints in the sands of time, that we can read the signals from the past.