Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  I decided to excavate my first pile of ‘gene-coins’ from the results of the Genetic Atlas Project and I would begin with the mDNA, those fragments of history that have been passed down in the bodies of women. To begin with I did what anybody would do with a pile of gene-coins. I counted them. I had a total of 3,686. I imagined a large outline map of the Isles spread out in front of me ready for me to place each gene-coin in its correct location. But before distributing them, I sorted the large pile out into smaller groups of different types, depending on their clan. Once I decided on that course, the way forward became a little bit easier to imagine. I could now abandon the manacles of conventional statistical analysis and approach my reconstruction of past events as a genetic archaeologist. That meant, for one thing, that I could give up trying to know everything, and also stop pretending that giving answers to sixteen decimal places means anything at all.

  Historians and archaeologists realized this a long time ago and make do with what they have, while being on the lookout for new material. Geneticists do not naturally think like that. They are not natural storytellers. If a geneticist does not get a watertight answer after an experiment or a survey of some kind, he or she will go back to the drawing board rather than risk saying anything that might be shown later to be wrong. If it is a survey and 1,000 samples have failed to produce a statistically significant result, our training tells us to say nothing and increase the number to 10,000, and if that doesn’t work to 100,000. Having reinvented myself as a genetic archaeologist, I was free to do my best to tell the story of the Isles in my own way with what data are available. The account will never be complete, even if I were to double or quadruple the number of DNA samples. Also, even though I knew perfectly well that I would have to do the actual operations on my computer, the vision of the gene-coins as tangible objects which could be picked up and examined and then moved into position on a map was unexpectedly reassuring. I had rescued the project from the number-crunchers.

  What did the pile of gene-coins look like? It was easy to decide on how to create the different piles. I would arrange them according to their maternal clan. I can tell the maternal clan of one mDNA sequence from the combination of mutations that it has. If I see the combination 126, 294 I know I am dealing with a member of Tara’s clan. If the sequence contains 256, 270 this is the mDNA of an Ursulan, and so on. These mutations became the inscriptions on the gene-coins and the portraits changed from tribal chieftains to the rough profiles of the seven matriarchs, Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine or Jasmine.

  In my mind the action moved to a baize-covered table. I soon sorted the large pile into smaller ones, one for each maternal clan. In the largest of these clan piles I had 1,799 gene-coins with the profile of Helena. The next biggest was the 434 in Jasmine’s pile, followed in sequence by 384 Tarans, 284 Katrines, 264 Xenias, 207 Ursulans and lastly 116 Veldans.

  But there were still a lot of gene-coins that remained in the unattributed pile. I looked at the portraits and the inscriptions. These were of other matriarchs, not the Seven Daughters of Eve, but ones I still recognized. The most common were the gene-coins belonging to the matriarch Ulrike. There were 101 in all, only a few short of the Veldans. I had not included Ulrike as one of the what would then have been Eight Daughters of Eve because, in the research in Europe, the clan of Ulrike was considerably less frequent than the other seven in the regions we had surveyed, which were mainly the southern and western parts. As more information came in from Scandinavia and eastern Europe, we saw more and more members of Ulrike’s clan. I’ve wondered since whether Ulrike should be promoted, as it were, into the select group of clan mothers.

  But even with the Ulrikans now separated from the rest, there were still quite a few gene-coins in the pile. They were an exotic collection, from matriarchs all over the world. I stacked them together for now. There were ninety-seven in all. These, then, were the fragments with which to build the genetic history as told by women.

  On the male side I had 2,414 Y-chromosome gene-coins from the Genetic Atlas Project and began to sort these into different piles according to their clans. Though the genetic details were displayed in a different form, the principle was the same. Each clan, of which there were five major ones in the Isles, traced a direct patrilineal line of descent right back to a common ancestor, the man who had founded the clan. In the Isles, these were the clans of Oisin (pronounced Osheen), Wodan, Sigurd, Eshu and Re.

  Even though I knew full well that the gene-coins did not exist in reality, the concept gave me a lot of confidence. I began to relish the prospect of trying my best to interpret them and what they told of the past, rather than despairing as I had been up to then. Now, at last, I was mentally ready to launch into the final stages of the project. It was now as an archaeologist that I settled down to explore the Blood of the Isles.

  8

  IRELAND

  The Irish landscape has often been compared to a bowl. A broad central limestone plain dotted by lakes and peat bogs and drained by sluggish rivers is surrounded by coastal ranges of hills and mountains. This upland barrier is only breached to any significant extent around the capital, Dublin. The total land area is 32,000 square miles (26,600 in the Republic and 5,400 in Ulster). The highest peaks, Lugnaquillia (926 metres) in the Wicklow Mountains south of the capital and Carrantuohill (1,041 metres) in Kerry, are on a par with the tallest mountains in Wales and England but well below many of the highest peaks in Scotland. In the west, the mountains thrust out long fingers into the Atlantic Ocean, creating a series of deep bays between, many of them now flooded river valleys. In the far south-west these rocky fingers are formed by parallel folds of sedimentary old red sandstone, like parts of northern Scotland, but further north in Galway, Mayo and Donegal, as well as in the Wicklow Mountains to the east, the rock is granite, the weathered remnants of once-molten magma forced to the surface by ancient movements of the earth’s crust. On the eastern coast, facing Britain, the coastline is more orderly, without the drama or the dangers of the stormbound west.

  As in the rest of the Isles, the landscape has been sculpted by ice. During the last glaciations, the ice covered only the northern half, extending as far as a line between Limerick in the west and Dublin in the east, but earlier Ice Ages enveloped the entire land in their frozen grip. The scouring of the central lowland plateau created the bedrock upon which the great peat bogs later grew and which, later still, provided the main supply of fuel for generations of rural households. The ice also ground the limestone base into a powder which formed the most important element of Irish soil. Without the glacial limestone powder to enrich it, the soil, made up of the weathering from older rocks like quartzite, granite and shale, would be infertile and unproductive like so much of the Scottish Highlands. But limestone gives it life, and thanks to this essential enrichment, and to the high rainfall, Ireland has thrived on its green pastures. Without the limestone, Ireland would not be the Emerald Isle, but the Brown.

  On the ‘Irish History’ shelves of any high-street bookshop, the titles on display are dominated by the political struggles of the last hundred years. Books abound on the Easter Rising of 1916, alongside biographies of Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera and other heroes in the struggle for independence from Britain. A struggle which continues to this day, as Republicans strive to unite Ireland into the single nation it once was. As I write, in 2007, the intensity of the cycle of violence and recrimination has all but disappeared. Earlier this year, in a political accord no one thought possible even six months before, the leaders of Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party, the two most polarised political opposites in Northern Ireland, agreed to share power in a devolved assembly. Peace, for the time being at least, has been restored. The roots of this struggle go back a very long way and, though Blood of the Isles is certainly not a political history, it is as well to be aware of events which may have had some influence on the genetic patterns we are setting out to interpret.

  The current struggles for
Irish political unity and independence are but the latest stages in a chain of events that began over 800 years ago when, in the autumn of 1171, Henry II, the Anglo-Norman king of England, landed in Ireland to make sure that it did not become a rival Norman state to his own. Five years earlier, the ambitious Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, himself an Anglo-Norman, had responded to an invitation by one of the numerous Irish kings, Dermot MacMurrough, whose lands in the Leinster had been seized by the High King, Rory O’Connor. This was a classic situation, seen many times before and since, where an invitation by a dispossessed or threatened king is used as a cover for invasion. De Clare, whose sobriquet ‘Strongbow’ adequately describes his attitude to conquest, seized the chance and established a secure foothold in Wexford and the south-east part of Ireland which faced his base in Pembroke, only 40 miles by sea. His military campaigns were extremely effective, thanks largely to the superior weapons he brought across. Heavily armoured knights, especially when mounted on horseback, easily overcome the local opposition armed only with light bows and spears.

  Anxious that de Clare’s success did not lead to the establishment of a rival kingdom, Henry arrived to impose his authority. This he did by granting Leinster to de Clare and County Meath to one of his own commanders, Hugh de Lacy, while at the same time forcing the remaining Irish kings into various forms of submission, including the obligation of giving forty days’ military service and requiring Henry’s permission to marry. From then until 6 December 1921, when three of the four provinces broke away from British rule to become the Irish Free State, Ireland’s history and its fortunes were tied to England’s. The name changed to Eire in 1937 and, finally, became the fully independent Republic of Ireland in 1948.

  The occupation of Ireland by the English between these dates was never entirely convincing and oscillated between periods of calm indifference and others of turmoil and ruthless exploitation. The exclusion of Ulster from the Irish Free State was the visible residue of the Protestant Ascendancy which followed the defeat by William of Orange of James II at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. This well-remembered and, in Ulster, celebrated victory was the culmination of centuries of rebellions and uprisings within Ireland against the influence of England. In Ireland, not only the Gaelic lords but also the descendants of the Anglo-Normans frequently found their lands confiscated as, from the time of Elizabeth I, they were granted as plantations to favourites and adventurers. The policy was continued by Elizabeth’s successor James I of England (James VI of Scotland), who encouraged the large-scale settlement of Ulster by lowland Scots. From the genetic point of view, what distinguishes this episode from what had gone before is that, instead of estates merely changing hands from one member of the aristocracy to another with little effect on the majority of the population, the plantation of Ulster imported tenant farmers and labourers from Scotland to work the land. The earlier Anglo-Normans had not as a rule imported their labour force, so we would not expect any genetic influence to be felt especially strongly. However, in Ulster we need to be aware of the possible effects of the plantations on the genetic patterns.

  Before we leave the turbulent centuries of Irish history, there is one more episode that we must not forget. So far we have only mentioned immigration into Ireland, by Anglo-Normans at first and then through the plantations. But these are numerically dwarfed by the departures. Religious intolerance and persecution from the sixteenth century onwards, closely coupled to land seizure, drove many Catholic landowners abroad, mainly to France and Spain. Though doubtless traumatic for them, these exiles did not really affect ordinary Irish agricultural workers, for whom life continued much as before, though the land was under new ownership. However, in the nineteenth century, Irish emigration on a large scale began in earnest.

  In the first decades of the century, agricultural prices fell, estate rentals declined, investment in the land was reduced to a trickle, and the rural population grew. Whatever the ultimate causes of this cycle of economic decline, the effects on the rural poor were catastrophic. Reduced to almost complete dependence on the potato as the staple crop, the countryside was decimated when the crop was infested with the potato blight and rotted in the ground. During the Great Famine of the mid 1840s, thousands died of starvation or of the infectious diseases which swept through the malnourished population. Though many thousands died, thousands also made their escape. Ireland’s mid-nineteenth-century population of 8 million began a steady decline that has only very recently stabilized at 4.1 million in the Republic and 1.7 million in Ulster. The desparate diaspora of the Irish saw massive immigration both to Britain and to the New World, especially the United States. Today, there are far more ‘Irish’ genes abroad than there are in Ireland itself.

  Though Ireland is not yet united into a single political state, the poverty and suffering which suffuse all accounts of the history of the last centuries cannot be equated with Ireland today. The economy is transformed. The bars and cafés of Dublin are as lively and as sophisticated as anywhere in Europe. There is a tangible feeling of optimism in the air wherever you go. Though we will have to wait to see how much of the turmoil of past centuries is remembered by the genes, I suspect the main effect will be of emigration and the dispersal of Irish genes around the globe. Now that the future of Ireland as an independent country is looking so good, this is the time to move the sad centuries to one side and examine Ireland before the day when Henry II arrived to begin the English occupation. That is where we must seek to interpret the patterns of the genes. What do we know of these earlier times?

  The appeal that Dermot MacMurrough made to Richard de Clare to come to his aid, the appeal de Clare used as an excuse to invade, is a clear indication of the state of affairs in medieval Ireland – the struggle for dominance of one minor king against another. It is so very typical of the middle stage of evolution of any modern society and one that is only too visible in other parts of the world. Except that in those places, like Afghanistan or unstable African countries, these men are not dignified with the title ‘king’ but denigrated as ‘warlords’. In Ireland during the first millennium AD there was a constant struggle for dominance between different minor kings. According to one source, there may have been 150 of them at any one time, lending some credibility to the common Irish boast that they are all descended from lines of Irish kings. This may be something we can test as it could be visible in the Y-chromosome gene pool by what has come to be known as the ‘Genghis Khan effect’.

  A few years ago, researchers from Oxford found a Y-chromosome that was very widespread throughout Asia, more or less within the geographical limits of the Mongol Empire. Finding a particular Y-chromosome with a specific fingerprint across such a wide area is highly unusual. Y-chromosomes are generally much more localized. The explanation, which I think is the correct one, is that this is the Y-chromosome of the first Mongol emperor, Genghis Khan, who lived in the first half of the thirteenth century. Not only is the Y-chromosome fingerprint geographically dispersed, it is also very common. In Mongolia, for example, 8 per cent of men have inherited the Genghis chromosome. If you compute the number of men who carry this Y-chromosome throughout Asia, and occasionally on other continents, then it comes to a staggering 16 million. Even a cursory glance at Genghis Khan’s methods in warfare is enough to understand the genetic mechanism. On conquering an enemy’s territory he would kill all the men, then systematically inseminate all the good-looking women – he left his commanders strict instructions on that point. When he died, the custom of patrilineal inheritance ensured that his empire was distributed among his sons, and their sons. Thus his Y-chromosome increased with each generation of male descendants, who inherited not only a portion of his wealth but also, presumably, his attitude to women. Though we have no historical records of men with quite such sexual predominance in the Isles, the confusion of minor kings is just the sort of condition where one might expect to discover the Genghis effect.

  It was not all chaos in Ireland. Some kings managed to exe
rt sufficient authority to stake a claim to the title of High King and to be installed at the sacred site of Tara, about 20 miles north of Dublin. Though none of the High Kings ever managed complete dominance over the whole island, some had a very good try and this may well be reflected in an Irish Genghis Khan effect. While such behaviour may rearrange the genes of Ireland, or anywhere else in the Isles for that matter, it is however only a rearrangement. While the Genghis effect will mean that one, or a few, Y-chromosomes may prosper at the expense of others, no amount of Khan-like behaviour can actually create new Y-chromosomes. And it has no effect whatsoever on the maternal lineages, traced by mitochondrial DNA. These will persist whatever the kings get up to.

  Peering further back into the Irish past, what can we see that needs to be taken into account? Though it was Ireland’s misfortune to be occupied by the English for so long, it entirely avoided being conquered by the Romans, which large swathes of Britain did not. Ireland was very lucky to escape. The Roman historian Tacitus, in his account of the campaigns of his father-in-law Agricola, tells how the great general seriously contemplated an invasion. In his fifth year of campaigning in Britain, in AD 88, Agricola brought his army and his ships to Galloway in south-east Scotland, only 20 miles across the sea from Ireland. Such were the inaccuracies in the geography of the day that Agricola believed that Ireland was midway between Britain and the Roman province of Spain. So he could see the tactical advantages of including Ireland within the Empire. He had received favourable reports about the character and way of life of the inhabitants and of the soil and climate. To a Roman they did not differ much from the British, whom he had successfully subdued during the previous five years. Tacitus wrote that he often heard Agricola say that Ireland could be conquered, and held, with a single legion supported by a modest force of auxiliaries. Agricola even took the precaution of befriending a minor Irish king who had been exiled in case the opportunity to use him should arise. In the end he decided against an invasion. Tacitus does not say why and we can only guess. But that he had serious intent is certain.