Posted on 06/24/2003 10:33:30 AM PDT by blam
Y chromosomes rewrite British history
Anglo-Saxons' genetic stamp weaker than historians suspected
19 June 2003
HANNAH HOAG
Some Scottish men's Y's are remarkably similar to those of southern England. © GettyImages
A new survey of Y chromosomes in the British Isles suggests that the Anglo-Saxons failed to leave as much of a genetic stamp on the UK as history books imply1.
Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans invaded Britain repeatedly between 50 BC and AD 1050. Many historians ascribe much of the British ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons because their written legacy overshadows that of the Celts.
But the Y chromosomes of the regions tell a different story. "The Celts weren't pushed to the fringes of Scotland and Wales; a lot of them remained in England and central Ireland," says study team member David Goldstein, of University College London. This is surprising: the Anglo-Saxons reputedly colonized southern England heavily.
The Anglo-Saxons and Danes left their mark in central and eastern England, and mainland Scotland, the survey says, and the biological traces of Norwegian invaders show up in the northern British Isles, including Orkney.
Similar studies, including one by the same team, have looked at differences in mitochondrial DNA, which we inherit from our mothers. They found little regional variation because females tended to move to their husbands.
But the Y chromosome shows sharper differences from one geographic region to the next, says geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza, of Stanford University, California. "The Y chromosome has a lower mutation rate than mitrochondrial DNA."
Goldstein's team collected DNA samples from more than 1,700 men living in towns across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They took a further 400 DNA samples from continental Europeans, including Germans and Basques. Only men whose paternal grandfathers had dwelt within 20 miles of their current home were eligible.
The Y chromosomes of men from Wales and Ireland resemble those of the Basques. Some believe that the Basques, from the border of France and Spain, are the original Europeans.
The new survey is an example of how archaeologists, prehistorians and geneticists are beginning to collaborate, comments Chris Tyler-Smith of the University of Oxford, UK, who tracks human evolution using the Y chromosome. "It would be nice to see the whole world surveyed in this kind of detail, but it's expensive and there are other priorities."
References Capelli, C. et al. A Y chromosome census of the British Isles. Current Biology, 13, 979 - 984, (2003). |Article|
© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003
Indeed: what is far more likely is that while the Celts dominated the British Isles culturally, they did not displace the existing population, particularly in Ireland.
It's amazing when you consider the Kennewick Man is (majority) Ainu.
Apparently not in England either.
9,000 year old Cheddar Man still has relatives living there.
I don't think they ventured that far east. I suspect they lived around the Caspian sea for a while before they moved either through Iran or Afganistan over to where they are now. Well the above opinion was formed with very little information, so I could be wrong.
Don't remember but Cool Guy turned me on to this:
How DID the Hebrew tribes get to the Basque area without leaving their genes anywhere in between???
36 pages? That many? Don't forget the pages and pages of citations to his own books... and his bio... don't forget his bio-fiction-ography.
PS I like your new Smiledon...
The Beauty Of Loulan
This is the reconstructed face of one of the 4,000 year old Tocharian mummies found in the China desert. Her Image has been adopted by the Ughars as the mother of their country and appears on their currency, etc.
Thanks, sounds interesting, I'll look into them. (it just went on to my 'to do' list)
Professor Christy Turner of Arizona State University has done a wonderful dental study of various races. James Chatters (The archaeologist who did the Kennewick Man work) in his book Ancient Encounters, about Kennnewick man, consulted Christy Turner and it was determined that Kennewick Man had Caucasian 'type' teeth as did Spirit Cave Man, the 9,400 year old mummy (The oldest mummy in the Americas) Buhl Woman and Prince Of Wales Island Man. Meaning that they were not typical of Asian teeth.
This may interest you also, Arlington Springs woman, 13,000 year old human skeleton found on California island. (The oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas)
Sounds like a good idea....now to figure out how to weasel it out of them... ;-)
ROFL. I can see how that might be a bit tricky.
Maybe you could steal their toothbrushes. ;-)
Pardon me, I need to correct the above statement. Kennewick man had Sundadonty type teeth as explained by Christy Turner below:
"Sundadonty is named after the Sunda shelf, an area in Indonesian waters which was exposed during the ice age. This shelf was a massive exposed land mass during the Pleistocene, stretching hundreds of miles southeast from the current shores of Asia. The Sundadont dental group includes those who have a small shovel on the lingual side of their incisors; in other words, they have a small indentation near the tongue on their front teeth. In addition, Sundadonts have a double-rooted upper first pre-molar, a triple-rooted upper second molar, and double-rooted first and second lower-molars. Sundadont dental structure is characteristic of southeastern Asia and southern China.
Sinodonts have deep shovels on their incisors, a single-rooted upper first pre-molar, a double-rooted upper second molar, a triple-rooted lower first molar, and a single-rooted lower second molar. Turner proposed that the Northern Chinese and Siberian dental structure, Sinodonty, evolved rom Sundadonty around 18,000 B.C. He based this estimate on the time it would take for the two present forms to evolve from a common ancestry.
The dental structure of Native Americans appears to be a variation of Sinodonty- it has almost exactly the same characteristics. Turner proposed that to account for the current differences in dental structure, the American population would have had to split from the main Sinodont body around 12,000 B.C."
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