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‘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...

In a seemingly paradoxical study, US researchers found that redheads have a preternaturally high pain tolerance — wait for it — due to a mechanism that ups their susceptibility to sunburns. “These findings describe the mechanistic basis behind earlier evidence suggesting varied pain thresholds in different pigmentation backgrounds,” said Dr. David Fisher of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Massachusetts. He led the fiery study published in the journal Science Advances. The research found that the cells that determine skin color — called melanocytes — play a large role in deciding how people experience pain.

A DNA study of Britons has shown that genetically there is not a unique Celtic group of people in the UK. According to the data, those of Celtic ancestry in Scotland and Cornwall are more similar to the English than they are to other Celtic groups. The study also describes distinct genetic differences across the UK, which reflect regional identities. And it shows that the invading Anglo Saxons did not wipe out the Britons of 1,500 years ago, but mixed with them. Published in the Journal Nature, the findings emerge from a detailed DNA analysis of 2,000 mostly middle-aged Caucasian...

The Romans, Vikings and Normans may have ruled or invaded the British for hundreds of years, but they left barely a trace on our DNA, the first detailed study of the genetics of British people has revealed. The analysis shows that the Anglo-Saxons were the only conquering force, around 400-500 AD, to substantially alter the country’s genetic makeup, with most white British people now owing almost 30% of their DNA to the ancestors of modern-day Germans.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 02 2001 Genetic survey reveals hidden Celts of England JOHN ELLIOTT AND TOM ROBBINS THE Celts of Scotland and Wales are not as unique as some of them like to think. New research has revealed that the majority of Britons living in the south of England share the same DNA as their Celtic counterparts. The findings, based on the DNA analysis of more than 2,000 people, poses the strongest challenge yet to the conventional historical view that the ancient Britons were forced out of most of England by hordes of Anglo-Saxon invaders. It suggests that far from being ...

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...

26 March 2002 01:46 GMT DNA traces roots back to Stone Age By Paul Lashmar 24 March 2002 Are you a Viking, Saxon, Pict, Celt, or descendant of an ancient African tribe? New DNA testing methods will enable us to trace our family tree right back to the Stone Age. Until recently, researching your ancestry meant hours of painstaking digging through fusty old files in public record offices or asking older relatives about their family memories. When the 1901 census was released online, demand was so great that the system crashed. The new scientific technique for tracing relatives allows individuals...

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 different to the British....

The ancient split between the English and Scots is older than previously thought, an Oxford don said today. Traditionally the difference between the English and Scots, Welsh, Irish and Cornish was attributed to the foreign influence of invading forces such as the Anglo-Saxons, Celts and Vikings settling in different areas of Britain hundreds of years ago. But Professor Stephen Oppenheimer of Oxford University, believes the difference originates much further back in history. In a book tracing humankind from its origins in Africa 80,000 years ago, Prof Oppenheimer develops a theory of the original inhabitants of Britain. The professor of clinical...

Over the centuries, they’ve been scorned, persecuted and marginalized. But it was an example of modern-day disdain towards redheads that prompted an Italian photographer’s mission to safeguard their diversity, The Local has learned. Let’s face it, redheads get a tough time, especially in the early years of their life. I should know, because I am one. But more on that later. Marina Rosso, a 29-year-old fine art photographer and researcher from Udine, is not a redhead as the English translation of her surname might suggest. But after hearing in 2011 that flame-haired men were being rejected from the world’s largest...

A DNA expert has has made the bold claim that ginger hair gene could die out if Scotland climate improves. REDHEADS could become extinct as Scotland gets sunnier, experts have claimed. The gene that causes red hair is thought to be an evolutionary response to the lack of sun in Scotland. Redhead colouring allows people to get the maximum vitamin D from what little sun there is. Only one to two per cent of the world’s population has red hair but in Scotland the figure is about 13 per cent, or 650,000 people.

Scientists believe the gene that causes red hair could die out if temperatures continue to rise Polar bears and Emperor penguins aren't the only species under threat due to climate change. Gingers could become extinct as a result of increasingly sunny skies, experts have warned. Scientists believe the gene that causes red hair is an evolutionary response to cloudy skies and allows inhabitants to get as much Vitamin D as possible. But if predictions of rising temperatures and blazing sunshine across the British Isles turn out to be correct, flaming red heads could cease to exist within centuries. While only...

Full headline: Treasure trove of skulls reveal missing link in human evolution: Facial bones suggest early Neanderthals used their teeth as a 'third hand' The 17 skulls belong to a single population of a fossil hominin species This is the biggest collection of human fossils ever found on one site They shed light on pre-human evolution from around 400,000 years ago Skulls showed Neanderthal features in face and teeth but not elsewhere These features evolved due to eating and perhaps for use as a 'third hand' Study adds to theories that the Neanderthals developed their characteristic looks slowly, and intermittently,...

"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... New evidence for the genetic ancestry of modern Britons comes from analysis of blood groups, oxygen traces in teeth, and DNA samples taken from skeletal remains... The most visible British genetic marker is red hair, he added. The writer Tacitus noted the Romans' surprise at how common it was when they arrived 2,000 years ago. "It's something that foreign observers have often...

‘Red Festival’ In Udmurtia 19 November 2010, 07:50 Nadezhda Volokitina The Udmurts are the most red-haired Finno-Ugric people, the most red-haired nation in Russia, and as far as the rest of the world is concerned, they are inferior only to the Irish in this respect. The so-called ‘Red Festival’, which gathers a lot of people, takes place annually in the capital of Udmurtia, Izhevsk. There organized such contests and competitions as ‘Mother, Father and I are a Red Family’ (the most red-haired family contest), ‘Mischievous Gingers’ (the most red-haired child contest), as well as ‘red’ pet contests for cats, dogs,...

Find Your Inner Neanderthal Published by ScottH under Ancestry http://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/find-your-inner-neanderthal/ They had bigger brains and muscles, but for some reason Neanderthals —thick boned humans who thrived for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe and parts of Asia— died out about 30,000 years ago, while we modern humans survived. Why we, Homo sapiens, flourished and our Homo neandertalensis cousins died out is an evolutionary mystery that biologist are trying to unravel. In the last few years, scientists have uncovered clues not just to what the lives of Neanderthals may have been like, but also clues that tell us more about...

Neanderthals roamed as far as Siberia 18:00 30 September 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi DNA extracted from skeletal remains has shown that Neanderthals roamed some 2000 kilometres further east than previously thought. Researchers say the genetic sequence of an adolescent Neanderthal found in southern Siberia closely matches that of Neanderthals found in western Europe, suggesting that this close relative of modern humans migrated very long distances. Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues examined skeletal remains found in the Okladnikov cave in the Altai Mountains and dated as between 30,000 and...

What most people know about the inheritance of eye color is that brown comes from a dominant gene (needing one copy only) and blue from a recessive gene (needing two copies). University of Queensland geneticist Rick Sturm suggests that the genetics are not so clear. "There is no single gene for eye color," he says, "but the biggest effect is the OCA2 gene." This gene, which controls the amount of melanin pigment produced, accounts for about 74 percent of the total variation in people's eye color. Sturm has recently shown that the OCA2 gene itself is influenced by other genetic...

Fair skin and red hair first appeared around the time people settled in Europe and still remains a dominant gene in southern Europeans today, even if they become tanned. Known as V6OL allele, the gene made skin lighter as humans were getting less vitamin D from no longer being in the harsh African sun , the study reported. However it brought with it health risks as it is commonly associated with melanoma - a serious form of skin cancer. Researchers made the discovery while examining the evolutionary processes of particular genes of 1,000 people from Spain. Study author Dr Saioa...

~~~snip~~~ hey did a DNA test on the Cherchen man (the 3800 year old 6'6 tall dark blonde mummy and the oldest mummy found), and the beauty of Loulan (the red hair mummy), and both of these mummies contained East Asian Mongoloid DNA. Even the Chinese scientist were astonished. The Mongoloid component of the Tocharians are not from Han Chinese or pre Han Chinese, but most likely from Altaic types of Mongoloids such as Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Mongolians. This obviously indicates that the Tocharians were already mixed for quite a few generations, since they looked mostly Caucasian. Very interesting....