Classify Rory McCann

**Watersater79** · 05-08-2024, 04:59 PM

6'6" tall Scottish actor. Passes flawlessly as Welsh. Does NOT pass as English, IMHO. Completely impassable in fact. He is a fine example of that underrated Scottish/Welsh phenotypical overlap (although the vast majority of Scots are pretty pale, something that can't quite be said for the Welsh).
I must reiterate that I find there are far more Scottish/Welsh that do 'nae' pass as English than there are Irish, despite the greater genetic distance between the English and the latter. Maybe the Welsh are still rather 'under-studied' as a group with too small a population to cement a good sample size because it's interesting how they seem to be genetically closer to the Irish than the Scottish.

Anyway, I would say McCann is Atlanto-Mediterranid.

**Albannach** · 05-08-2024, 05:46 PM

Rory McCann more than likely has Irish ancestry as McCann is an Irish surname. And I am pretty sure Western Scots are closer to the Irish than the Welsh are, a study from Trinity College Dublin has a large part of Scotland clustering with the Irish.

Which is unsurprising when you see how Gaelic Scotland once was.

You can also see with this study "The genetic landscape of Scotland and the Isles" just how close Scots and Irish are to each other, this is the most comprehensive genetic study dealing with Scotland. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1904761116

I thought what they said in this part of the study was interesting and touches on quite a bit of what you have spoken about in the past in regards to genetic divisions in Scotland.

"The modern genetic landscape of the Isles reflects splits in the early languages of the Isles: Q-Celtic (Scottish, Irish and Manx Gaelic) and P-Celtic (Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish, Old Brythonic, Pictish). Scotland, the main focus of our analysis, is defined by a southwest versus northeast division near the River Forth (geographically located between the Tayside-Fife and Sco-Ire clusters in Fig. 1A). This division also echoes the historical distributions of Gaels versus Picts (see SI Appendix, Fig. S9 for a distribution of Pictish place names). The entire northeast branch of fineSTRUCTURE clusters describes the boundaries of the Pictish kingdoms, with the southwest branch mapping the Dark Age kingdoms of Strathclyde (Sco-Ire) and Dál Riata (Argyll). The Borders cluster coincides geographically with the Brythonic kingdoms of the Gododdin (modern Lothian and Borders) and Rheged (modern Cumbria). The legacy of the later Norse Jarldom of Orkney and its Scandinavian admixture drives the differentiation of the Northern Isles [for distributions of relevant historical groups, see Leslie et al. (4)]. Studies of ancient genomes are required to shed further light on the links between this modern structure and these groups."