Are Welsh closer genetically and phenotypically to Scottish or to the Irish?

[Septentrion]

I wonder if that is all drift, or if there are real differences in deep ancestry, the Romans did speak of the 'Silures' in South Wales. I wouldn't be surprised if the south Welsh do in fact have higher British Neolithic ancestry than the North Welsh.

The north Welsh do seem a bit lighter, just from some photos, I have attempted not to cherry pick







Kids:



They look quite NW English or Irish in my opinion.



I think some also overstate this, we can swing too far into the other direction. Variation in NW Europe seems Clinal, with the British Isles being apart of the general Clines rather than an isolated cluster. For instance People in Kent are probably closer to Belgians phenotypically than West Irish people.

The North Welsh are genetically further away from the English than the South Welsh! Remember the Little England beyond Wales is in southern Pembrokeshire in South West Wales! That region of Wales was strongly settled by many Saxons, Flemish and Normans.

[Grace O'Malley]

The North Welsh are genetically further away from the English than the South Welsh! Remember the Little England beyond Wales is in southern Pembrokeshire in South West Wales! That region of Wales was strongly settled by many Saxons, Flemish and Normans.

The PoBI came up with the same scenario as the Insular Celtic paper. Wales is a bit more unique in these studies than even Ireland. The only more outlier place is Orkney

It is instructive to consider the tree that describes the hierarchical splitting of the 2,039 genotyped individuals into successively finer clusters (Fig. 1). The coarsest level of genetic differentiation (i.e. the assignment into two clusters) separates the samples in Orkney from all others. Next the Welsh samples separate from the other non-Orkney samples. Subsequent splits reveal more subtle differentiation (reflected in the shorter distances between branches), including separation of north and south Wales, then separation of the north of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland from the rest of England, and separation of samples in Cornwall from the large English cluster. There is a single large cluster (red squares) that covers most of central and southern England and extends up the east coast. Strikingly, even at the finest level of differentiation returned by fineSTRUCTURE (53 clusters), this cluster remains largely intact, and contains almost half the individuals (1,006) in our study.

As I've stated people here over emphasis phenotypical differences and I'm not getting involved in that aspect any more.

This is interesting as well.

The clustering (Fig. 1 and Extended Data Fig. 3) is striking both for its exquisite differentiation over small distances and the stability of some clusters over very large distances. Genetic differentiation within the UK is not related in a simple way to geographical distance. Examples of fine-scale differentiation include the separation of: islands within Orkney; Devon from Cornwall; and the Welsh/English borders from surrounding areas. The edges between clusters follow natural geographical boundaries in some instances, e.g. between Devon and Cornwall (boundaries the Tamar Estuary and Bodmin Moor), and Orkney is separated by sea from Scotland. However, in many instances clusters span geographic boundaries; e.g. the clusters in Northern Ireland span the sea to Scotland.