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Genetic markers for the Clan MacDougall... descends from Dougall, King of the Isle of Man and founder of the ancient Scottish Kingdom of the Isles and Lorn. Dougall (c1140-c1207) was the eldest son of Somerled, the ancient warrior sea-king and progenitor of the MacDonald, MacAllister, and MacDougall clans. Somerled expelled his Scoto-Norse rivals from Argyll, Kintyre and the Isles but was himself a Norseman paternally, having a genetic signature that is more common in Scandinavia than in Scotland. The first genetic signature for Somerled was discovered and published in 2005 by researchers at the University of Oxford, and since then,...

Two Senate committee chairmen authored a letter to a former Hillary Clinton aide pushing him to accept limited immunity in order to testify before Congress on the set-up of the former secretary of state’s private server.First reported by McClatchy, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, sent the letter to ex-State Department computer staffer Brian Pagliano and his lawyer Friday emphasizing the possibility of an “immunity order.”In response to a subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Pagliano’s attorney Mark MacDougall told...

DNA shows Celtic hero Somerled's Viking roots IAN JOHNSTON SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT A HISTORIC Celtic hero credited with driving the Vikings out of western Scotland was actually descended from a Norseman, according to research by a leading DNA expert. According to traditional genealogies, Somerled, who is said to have died in 1164 after ousting the Vikings from Argyll, Kintyre and the Western Isles, was descended from an ancient royal line going back to when the Scots were living in Ireland. But Bryan Sykes, an Oxford University professor of human genetics who set up a company called Oxford Ancestors to research people’s...