Farther north, the Irish Book of Invasions, written by an anonymous author in the 11th century, recounts that the “Sons of Míl Espáine … after many wanderings in Scythia and Egypt” eventually reached Spain and Ireland, creating a modern Irish people distinct from the British—and linked to the Spanish. That telling resonates with a later yarn about ships from the Spanish Armada, wrecked on the shores of Ireland and the Scottish Orkney Islands in 1588, Bradley says: “Good-looking, dark-haired Spaniards washed ashore” and had children with Gaelic and Orkney Islands women, creating a strain of Black Irish with dark hair, eyes, and skin.
Although it's a great story, Bradley says, it “just didn't happen.” In two studies, researchers have found only “a very small ancient Spanish contribution” to British and Irish DNA, says human geneticist Walter Bodmer of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, co-leader of a landmark 2015 study of British genetics.
The Irish also cherish another origin story, of the Celtic roots they are said to share with the Scots and Welsh. In the Celtic Revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, writers such as William Butler Yeats drew from stories in the Book of Invasions and medieval texts. Those writings described a migration of Gaels, or groups of Celts from the mainland who clung to their identity in the face of later waves of Roman, Germanic, and Nordic peoples.
But try as they might, researchers so far haven't found anyone, living or dead, with a distinct Celtic genome. The ancient Celts got their name from Greeks who used “Celt” as a label for barbarian outsiders—the diverse Celtic-speaking tribes who, starting in the late Bronze Age, occupied territory from Portugal to Turkey. “It's a hard question who the Celts are,” says population geneticist Stephan Schiffels of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
Bodmer's team traced the ancestry of 2039 people whose families have lived in the same parts of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales since the 19th century. These people form at least nine genetic and geographic clusters, showing that after their ancestors arrived in those regions, they put down roots and married their neighbors. But the clusters themselves are of diverse origin, with close ties to people now in Germany, Belgium, and France. “‘Celtic’ is a cultural definition,” Bodmer says. “It has nothing to do with hordes of people coming from somewhere else and replacing people.”
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