Ancient Irish had Middle Eastern Ancestry

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

Hitler.

You all sound 100% American, never mind anything else.

"I'm 1/8th Irish and 3/15ths Cherokee.'

Who gives a ****e?

RobertKK wrote: »

some people have an interest in complaining...

I guess that makes me 100% Irish.

There are strong similarities between numerals in Persian (Farsi) and Irish:

sefr 0
yek 1
do 2
seh 3
chahaar 4
panj 5
shesh 6
haft 7
hasht 8
noh 9
dah 10

It is said that the Celts originated in Central Asia so maybe we all have cousins we didn't know about.......

that explains it then....

LordSutch wrote: »

So I'm curious about a few things...

Up until yesterday we were told by some experts that "the Irish" had come from the Iberian pensula (Spain & Portugal), now we are told that we came from the Middle East! OK then lets say both editions are correct. What percentage of the Celtic gene is Middle Eastern, and what percentage is Iberian? and are we Celtic at all?

Did this influx of middle eastern wanderers come the whole way across Europe & Britain to just settle in Ireland? same with the Iberians, did they come all this way and just stop here? or did they also put down roots elsewhere?

Why leave such warm and pleasant climates to settle in a very cold post ice age island like Ireland? surely they would have checked out the place and realised that it was bloody freezing compared to their natural climates, turned tail and gone back home to 'de-thaw'

Lets face it the Romans landed here & realised that it was a one chilly bridge too far (after Britain) so they stayed on the slightly less moist/less chilly island (Britain) and built their infrastructures there!

It's all very interesting.

the "Iberian theory" is 10 year old bunkum pushed by the likes of Sykes and Oppenheimer. aDNA (ancient DNA) blows it out of water.

Their theory was based on modern distrubution of male lineage Haplogroup R1b. They noted that it reached high levels in Western Eurasia (eg. Ireland, Britain, France, Iberia). As a result they came to conclusion that R1b represented the male lineage of the "Ice age refuge" in Iberia and that it's high levels in Western Eurasia was due to expansion out of Iberia.

This was back in day when it cost anywhere between 100million and 1billion to sequence one full human genome (2004-2006), now adays you can get your genome sequence for circa $2,000 US and we are retrieving viable aDNA.

What I find interesting about comments so far is they are fixated on only one of the four aDNA samples from Ireland, namely the Neolithic (farmer) woman who is dated at 5,200 year sold. I would have thought most people knew that argiculture expanded out of middle east (fertile crescent), what her genome shows is that the arrival of argiculture in Ireland was not due to Mesolithic (hunter gathers) adopting farming but due to arrival of people from Europe.

In her case her people would have been in Europe for a couple thousand years before arriving in Ireland, thus she clusters with Central European Neolithic remains (and thus resembles modern Mediterraena populations such as Sardinians).

The three Bronze age remains are more interesting, as they show that there is population discontunity from Neolithic to Bronze age. They date from circa 2,000BC - 1500BC (give or take ± with C14 dating)

They show fairly large levels of Steppe ancestry, a major paper was published earlier this year which look at close on 200 ancient genomes from western Eurasia. It proposed that Proto-Indo-European languages spread into Europe during the Bronze age due to movement of Yamnaya herder/nomads from the Pontic Steppe (eg. Ukraine/Russia).

The Bronze age remains are about 30% Steppe in ancestry. We are possibly looking at the remains of first Indo-European speaking population in Ireland. Celtic is a branch of Indo-European that probably differenated during the late Bronze age, and obviously Irish is a member of Celtic family of wider Indo-European.

What's interesting as well is all three men belong to R1b-L21+ on their Y-Chromosome, this haplogroup makes up about 70% of modern male lineages in Ireland today (Busby -- Royal Society)

Hammer (Univeristy of Arizona) at FTDNA confernce back in 2013 proposed following for distrubution of modern branches of R1b in Europe, this was before we started getting lots of ancient DNA full genomes:

http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/6904/2eow.png

I should note Hammer's map was based on idea of R1b-M269 spreading out of Anatolia, ancient DNA has shown that it's probable that R1b expanded out of Steppe, UCD/TCD recently involved in paper which published first 26 aDNA genomes from Neolithic Anatolia (no R1b there).

The paper basically states that the Bronze age samples from Rathlin are closer related to modern Irish (and Scottish and Welsh) than the Neolithic sample is. Basically we have discontinuity between Neolithic and modern day when it comes to structure of modern Irish population.

As usual the media are clueless on this sorta thing, better to read the full paper here:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/12/22/1518445113.full.pdf?with-ds=yes

Razib Khan has done a blogpost about this, of course the title should be taken with a pinch of salt


The Gaels Were from Scythia
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-gaels-were-from-scythia/