Welsh people: Who overlaps with them?

[Oliver109]

A bit of an exaggeration, I assume you only mean in a British Isles context. Even then you could equally say every nation in the Isles looks different. The numbers don't tell the full genetic story though, the Welsh have been mostly isolated for around 3000 years, whereas Scotland is a more heterogenous medieval mix of Gaels, Britons/Picts, Anglo-Saxons, as well as Norse, Normans and Flemings.

Obviously they look more like the Scottish than the Italians haha but they generally resemble their closest neighbours in southwest England and the West Midlands, there is just no obvious similarity between Welsh and Scots, even with the Irish it is very minor. There is likely more resemblance with provincial England.

[Septentrion]

Welsh still look nothing like Scottish though, regardless of genetics Scots are more frequent in proportions of brunn, nordo brunn, nordo borreby and tronder while in Wales people are usually more atlantid and have significant proportions of paleo atlantids. Eye colour i believe is darker in twice as many Welsh as Scots.

Please stop confusing genetics with physical anthropology. Nevertheless the Scottish and English do have a higher frequency of Brunn phenotypes than the Welsh who on the other hand possess the highest frequency of North Atlantids in Europe. Corrections, in terms of eye colour, the Welsh are only slightly darker-eyed than the Scottish. The Welsh are equal to the English in eye colour (Contrary to the old Anglo stereotypes of the Welsh). You been reading too much on the isolated districts of Wales. By the way, the most common eye colour in Wales is blue, as it is in the rest of the British Isles. Almost half of the Welsh population are blue-eyed! Let me obliterate the old myths right here, within the British Isles, the Welsh are not the darkest - eyed. In fact, there is a higher ratio of blue eyes among the Welsh than among the Eastern, South-Eastern and South-Western English. The darkest - eyed people of the British Isles are rather the South-Western English. I compared the Welsh with some continental groups, they are at least bluer - eyed than the Belgians, French, Germans, Italians, Portuguese, Spanish and Swiss. In fact in terms of blue eyes, the Welsh are closer to the Danes than they are to either the French or Belgians or Germans. Although Northern Germans when separated equal the Welsh. The only "truth" there is that the Welsh have a higher frequency of darker hair than the other British Islanders.

[Septentrion]

Phenotypically, the British Islanders whether Welsh, English, Scottish or Irish are all linked by the Keltic Nordid racial phenotype. This Nordid racial type hold sway and is "universal" there. Although, it is a very variable racial type. What separates each of these British Islander groups are the predominant (over 60%!) racial phenotypes combinations.
English people - Keltic Nordid + Anglo - Saxon + North Atlantid (65%)
Welsh people - North Atlantid + Paleo Atlantid (65%)
Scottish people - Keltic Nordid + Tronder + North Atlantid (62%)
Irish people - Brunn + Keltic Nordid (70%)
Just by looking at the combos, one can easily tell why the Welsh are overall the darkest-haired. Both the North Atlantid and Paleo Atlantid are for the most part dark or darker - haired.

[Grace O'Malley]

Surely the Welsh would overlap the most with the southern Scottish considering said population are mostly Brythonic. I also would have thought that they would have overlapped with the Irish more than the English. A lot of the Welsh GedMatch kits seem to cluster heavily with the Irish, anyhow. My pal from North Wales got a shedload of Irish on LivingDNA. Something alone the lines of 40% of his DNA was of the ‘Ireland’ cluster. But I guess that geography ensured some form of genetic drift to take place whereby the Gaels would differ from the Britons, and the English have a significant amount of Brythonic admixture, even if it’s 30%, rather than 60% (as was previously surmised) of the average English genome.
I wish we knew more about Scotland and how extensive the Goidelic settlement was. What is now the east of the country was, ofc, the kingdom of the Picts, but that area now is overwhelmingly chock-a-block with Gaelic names. However, the eastern Scottish don’t seem to cluster with the Irish all that much. Maybe it was a case of an ‘elite’ settlement, with the Pictish locals adopting their ‘Gaelic’ ways. Obviously that appears to be the same for the Britons in the south as well. There is no doubt there was Gaelic settlement in the extreme southwest of Scotland (Galloway), but there is little evidence there was further migration inland (into the likes of Lanarkshire). The main settlements of central southern Scotland all maintained those Brittonic names; Glasgow, Renfrew, Lanark, Linlithgow. Lothian also can’t be derived from anything other than Brittonic.
But it is fascinating that even when Robert Burns was alive, Gaelic was spoken within his vicinity of origin.

I go by dna studies as they are much more accurate than using amateur calculators like Gedmatch and yes Welsh are closer to English which shouldn't surprise anyone as they share a border with England. West and Southwest Scots are closest to Irish and other Scots closest to Northern English. With the Irish it is Scots, English and then Welsh. This is from reading studies which use finescale techniques and also IBD. There is no pure populations anyway and they have all had some admixture from each other.

You can also see this here from the Irish Traveller dna study. North Wales though is definitely drifted and if you look at genetic distance even Irish are closer to English than North Wales looking at this diagram anyway.



I enjoy Gedmatch and G25 and find it useful and informative but no I don't think they trump dna studies and IBD etc. On Gedmatch and G25 after Irish I'm closest to Icelanders but I doubt that is accurate if using things like IBD and the techniques they use in dna studies.

I don't think calculators are the sole resource to use in these questions. Anyway it's most probably more complicated. IBD just shows more recent relationships and admixture is something different again.

[Mopi Licinius Crassus]

I go by dna studies as they are much more accurate than using amateur calculators like Gedmatch and yes Welsh are closer to English which shouldn't surprise anyone as they share a border with England. West and Southwest Scots are closest to Irish and other Scots closest to Northern English. With the Irish it is Scots, English and then Welsh. This is from reading studies which use finescale techniques and also IBD. There is no pure populations anyway and they have all had some admixture from each other.

You can also see this here from the Irish Traveller dna study. North Wales though is definitely drifted and if you look at genetic distance even Irish are closer to English than North Wales looking at this diagram anyway.



I enjoy Gedmatch and G25 and find it useful and informative but no I don't think they trump dna studies and IBD etc. On Gedmatch and G25 after Irish I'm closest to Icelanders but I doubt that is accurate if using things like IBD and the techniques they use in dna studies.

I don't think calculators are the sole resource to use in these questions. Anyway it's most probably more complicated. IBD just shows more recent relationships and admixture is something different again.

North Wales still has numerous towns & villages that are predominantly Welsh speaking. It is a remarkedly remote area, as there are no motorways or major roads apart from the A55 which goes along the coast.
I'd imagine this has kept North Wales more insulated from Anglo-Saxon gene flow?

[Grace O'Malley]

North Wales still has numerous towns & villages that are predominantly Welsh speaking. It is a remarkedly remote area, as there are no motorways or major roads apart from the A55 which goes along the coast.
I'd imagine this has kept North Wales more insulated from Anglo-Saxon gene flow?

North Welsh are the most distinct population after the Orcadians.



Fig 4. Principal components 2 and 3 of combined Irish and British coancestry matrix.

(A) fineSTRUCTURE clustering dendrogram for combined Irish and British data, with cluster groups defined as in Fig 2. Immediately following the principal inter-island split, Orkney and Wales branch in sequence, consistent with previous observations. (B) Principal component analysis (PCA) of haplotypic similarity based on the ChromoPainter coancestry matrix, coloured by cluster group with their median locations labelled. PC2 captures an Orkney split, while PC3 captures a Welsh split.

[Grace O'Malley]

Here's another interesting plot but this is t-SNE not pca. You can also see in this that North Wales is quite distant. Also obvious border Wales is a mixed population with English and Welsh admixture. North Wales and South Wales are quite different on this.



Fig 3. t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding (t-SNE) of Irish and British coancestry matrix.

(A) fineSTRUCTURE dendrogram with clusters and cluster groups defined as in Fig 2. (B) Two-dimensional t-SNE embedding of ChromoPainter coancestry matrix, with median locations for cluster groups plotted. As t-SNE is a stochastic method, different runs produce different solutions to the 2-dimensional embedding; shown here is a typical result. t-SNE performed significantly better with the ChromoPainter coancestry matrix than with Hamming distances (identity-by-state) computed over single SNP markers (S9 Fig). The map and administrative boundaries were produced using data from the database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM; https://gadm.org), note some boundaries have been subsumed or modified to better reflect sampling regions.

[Mopi Licinius Crassus]

Why do you think the North Welsh are so distinct ?

[Grace O'Malley]

Why do you think the North Welsh are so distinct ?

I think what you said previously about isolation is a factor. They look a bit drifted and they didn't mix with others as much. What I would like to see is a study on the Welsh and how they relate to their neighbours. The border Welsh are obviously mixed. There is so much we don't know on populations. There is a lot done on the English but I'd like to especially see a study done on the Welsh and also something looking at the Irish and the medieval period when you had populations coming into Ireland. I would like to know what affect this had on the Irish population. The Welsh however are long overdue for a good dna study.

[Watersater79]

I go by dna studies as they are much more accurate than using amateur calculators like Gedmatch and yes Welsh are closer to English which shouldn't surprise anyone as they share a border with England. West and Southwest Scots are closest to Irish and other Scots closest to Northern English. With the Irish it is Scots, English and then Welsh. This is from reading studies which use finescale techniques and also IBD. There is no pure populations anyway and they have all had some admixture from each other.

You can also see this here from the Irish Traveller dna study. North Wales though is definitely drifted and if you look at genetic distance even Irish are closer to English than North Wales looking at this diagram anyway.



I enjoy Gedmatch and G25 and find it useful and informative but no I don't think they trump dna studies and IBD etc. On Gedmatch and G25 after Irish I'm closest to Icelanders but I doubt that is accurate if using things like IBD and the techniques they use in dna studies.

I don't think calculators are the sole resource to use in these questions. Anyway it's most probably more complicated. IBD just shows more recent relationships and admixture is something different again.

I am sort of glad you say that, hahaha, because my Gedmatch results were weird AF. I still don't understand how I got such a high showing of 'East Med' when at least 94% of my ancestry is Irish/English. How are the Irish genetically closer to the English than the Welsh and to reiterate, how unusual is that a North Welsh person would get a whoppingly high amount of 'Irish' on a DNA test?