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"One of the individuals - a little boy actually - ...had three copies of Chromosome 21. So, he would have had Down syndrome. And, yeah, that was unexpected and quite a moving little glimpse into the world of somebody with a disability in the very, very deep past," Cassidy said. The research team puts the discovery at between 4,000 and 6,000 years old, making it the oldest known case of Down's Syndrome in the world... "What we do, basically, is we powderise that [the petrous temporal bone in the inner ear] and we put the powder in solution and try...

The foundations of a 5,700-year-old Neolithic house, evidence of Bronze Age burials and Iron Age smelting have been discovered by archaeologists as a result of excavations at the sites of two road realignment projects in Co. Cork. They were unearthed in a total of eight separate excavations carried out after the county council undertook two road realignment projects on the N73 (the main road between Mallow and Mitchelstown) close to the villages of Shanballymore and Kildorrery. On one of the sites, archaeologists discovered the foundations of a Neolithic house dating back to approximately 3,700 BC, which they believe may have...

An ancient tomb, described by archaeologists as "untouched" and "highly unusual" has been discovered on the Dingle Peninsula in Co Kerry...The tomb was uncovered by a digger during land reclamation work when a large stone slab was upturned, revealing a slab-lined chamber beneath.On closer inspection an adjoining sub-chamber was found at what appears to be the front of the tomb.The tomb contained an unusual smooth oval-shaped stone and what is believed to be human bone.It is believed the tomb may date to the Bronze Age (2000BC-500BC), but it could be even earlier as it displays a number of highly unusual...

Newgrange is a prehistoric passage tomb in County Meath, Ireland. built during the Neolithic period around 3200 BC and predates monuments such as Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. The site consists of a circular mount with retaining walls and contains stone passages and chambers where human remains have been discovered on previous archaeology excavations by antiquarians from the 18th century. Normally we inherit two copies of the genome, one from each parent, but the individual buried in the chamber had genomes that were remarkably similar, suggesting that his parents were first-degree relatives and are a key indicator of inbreeding... Dan...

One of the enduring consequences of the era of Phoenician influence -- which had by around 800 BC progressed from trading outposts to full-blown colonies in southern Spain -- was the adoption of alphabetic writing by the native population, first in the south-west. The number of known Tartessian inscriptions on stone is now about 90 and steadily rising with new discoveries. Concentrated densely in southern Portugal (the Algarve and Lower Alentejo), there is a wider scatter of fifteen over south-west Spain. The best exhibition of the inscriptions is on view in the new and innovative Museu da Escrita do Sudoeste,...

With a vial of saliva and a little cutting-edge science, AncestryDNA can tell you if you’ve got any Irish heritage in your genes. And with a lot of cutting-edge science, researchers in December 2015 published a study telling the world where that Irish heritage first originated. By studying the 5,000-year-old remains of a female farmer buried near Belfast, Ireland, and the remains of three men buried 3,000 and 4,000 years ago on Rathlin Island in County Antrim, archaeologists and geneticists now say they now know where the modern Irish people originally came from. The remains of the Stone Age female...

Ten years ago, an Irish pub owner was clearing land for a driveway when his digging exposed an unusually large flat stone. The stone obscured a dark gap underneath. He grabbed a flashlight to peer in. "I shot the torch in and saw the gentleman, well, his skull and bones," Bertie Currie, the pub owner, said this week. The remains of three humans, in fact, were found behind McCuaig’s Bar in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. And though police were called, it was not, as it turned out, a crime scene. Instead, what Currie had stumbled over was an ancient burial...

An archaeological bid to discover more about the hilltop where Ulster chieftains were crowned 700 years ago has uncovered artefacts dating back more than 7,000 years. Tullaghoge Fort in rural Co Tyrone was the place leaders of the dominant O'Neill clan came to be crowned from around the 14th Century to just before the arrival of the planters at the start of the 17th Century. Targeted excavation work around the picturesque tree encircled earthen mound ahead of the planned development of new visitor facilities hoped to find and preserve buried artefacts from that period -- but it ended up unearthing...

A team of geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen's University Belfast has sequenced the first genomes from ancient Irish humans, and the information buried within is already answering pivotal questions about the origins of Ireland's people and their culture. The team sequenced the genome of an early farmer woman, who lived near Belfast some 5,200 years ago, and those of three men from a later period, around 4,000 years ago in the Bronze Age, after the introduction of metalworking. Their landmark results are published today in international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team sequenced the genome of an early farmer woman, who lived near Belfast some 5,200 years ago, and those of three men from a later period, around 4,000 years ago in the Bronze Age, after the introduction of metalworking. Their landmark results are published today in international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Ireland has intriguing genetics. It lies at the edge of many European genetic gradients with world maxima for the variants that code for lactose tolerance, the western European Y chromosome type, and several important genetic diseases including one of excessive iron retention, called...

The mummified remains of a body found in a Laois bog two years ago have been found to date back to 2,000BC, making it the oldest "bog body" discovered anywhere in the world. The 4,000-year-old remains, which predate the famed Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun by nearly 700 years, are those of a young adult male. He is believed to have met a violent death in some sort of ritual sacrifice. The body was unearthed in the Cúl na Móna bog in Cashel in 2011 by a Bord na Móna worker operating a milling machine. Initially, experts thought it dated from the...

Dublin: Scientists in Ireland may have found the country's most fertile male, with more than 3 million men worldwide among his offspring. The scientists, from Trinity College Dublin, have discovered that as many as one in twelve Irish men could be descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, a 5th-century warlord who was head of the most powerful dynasty in ancient Ireland. His genetic legacy is almost as impressive as Genghis Khan, the Mongol emperor who conquered most of Asia in the 13th century and has nearly 16 million descendants, said Dan Bradley, who supervised the research. "It's another link...

A massive research project, 15 years in the making, has revealed that beneath Dublin’s modern streets lies a trove of buried Viking warriors and artifacts. Archaeologists say the number of Viking warrior burials in Dublin is astounding. A project cataloguing these burials was began in 1999. Now nearing its conclusion, the project will result in the publication of an 800-page tome titled ‘Viking Graves and Grave Goods in Ireland.’ ...the National Museum of Ireland... houses a Viking exhibition, which includes a ninth century Viking skeleton with sword and spearhead, found in the War Memorial Park, Islandbridge in 1934. Between the...

‘Tis a good day for the Irish -– and a really bad one for Basil Fawlty — thanks to my colleague Nicholas Wade’s article tracing the genetic heritage of the British Isles. I grew up listening to my Irish-American relatives bristle at the social pretensions of the Anglo-Saxons in England: “We were preserving civilization while they were painting themselves blue! Blue, I tell you!” Now we can point to research suggesting the Celts started civilization in those isles by introducing agriculture 6,000 years ago. We also have confirmation of our illustriously long lineages — next to us, the Angles and...

Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country’s western and northern fringes. But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of...

Up to three million men around the world could be descended from a prolific medieval Irish king, according to a new genetic study.It suggests that the 5th-century warlord known as "Niall of the Nine Hostages" may be the ancestor of about one in 12 Irishmen, say researchers at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Niall established a dynasty of powerful chieftains that dominated the island for six centuries.In a study of the Y chromosome - which is only passed down through the male line - scientists found a hotspot in northwest Ireland where 21.5% carry Niall’s genetic fingerprint, says Brian McEvoy,...

DUBLIN (AFP) - Up to three million men around the world could be descended from a prolific medieval Irish king, according to researchers at Trinity College Dublin. A genetics study suggests that the fifth-century warlord known as "Niall of the Nine Hostages" may be the ancestor of about one in 12 Irishmen. He established a dynasty of powerful chieftains that dominated the island for six centuries. In a study of the Y chromosomes -- which are only passed down through the male line -- scientists found there is a genetic fingerprint hot-spot in northwest Ireland where 21.5 percent carry it,...

Blood of the Irish The Blood in Irish veins is Celtic, right? Well, not exactly. Although the history many Irish people were taught at school is the history of the Irish as a Celtic race, the truth is much more complicated, and much more interesting than that ...Research done into the DNA of Irish males has shown that the old Anthropological attempts to define 'Irish' have been misguided. As late as the 1950s researchers were busy collecting data among Irish people such as hair colour and height, in order to categorise them as a 'race' and define them as...

A genetic study of snails, combined with other factors, suggests a migration of Mesolithic peoples from the Pyrenees to Ireland. A recent study of the mitochondrial DNA of the Cepaea nemoralis land snail, a snail curiously common only between Ireland and the Pyrenees region of Southern France, has led researchers to conclude the possibility that ancient Mesolithic people carried the fauna with them in a migration from the French region to Ireland about 8,000 years ago. This correlates with studies of human genetics and the colonization of Ireland, according to the research* published June 19 in the open access journal...

We're nearly all Celts under the skin IAN JOHNSTON SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT A MAJOR genetic study of the population of Britain appears to have put an end to the idea of the "Celtic fringe" of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Instead, a research team at Oxford University has found the majority of Britons are Celts descended from Spanish tribes who began arriving about 7,000 years ago. Even in England, about 64 per cent of people are descended from these Celts, outnumbering the descendants of Anglo- Saxons by about three to one. The proportion of Celts is only slightly higher in Scotland, at...