“Overall, the genetic structure of the Isles is stubbornly Celtic.”
By Steve Sailer
As every schoolboy used to know, the episodes of group migration into the British Isles were remarkably few between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the beginning of modern mass immigration after 1945: the French Huguenot refugees, the modest flow of Ashkenazi Jews, and a few others. Nevertheless, in recent years the politically-correct elites on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to promote the improbable contention that Britain has always been a land of immigration.
Ironically, just as this has become an article of faith, genetic evidence has begun to pile up about how profoundly wrong it is. Not only did immigration after 1066 play a vanishingly small role in the makeup of the offshore islanders, but even the famous invasions of previous millennia—Normans, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, and Romans—merely added a fairly minor overlay to the prehistoric gene pool.
Political control and even language varied in the British Isles over time. But the oldest occupants endured, adapted, and flourished. In the words of Oxford University geneticist Bryan Sykes in his new book Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland [published in the United Kingdom under the title Blood of the Isles:
“We are an ancient people…”The family trees of the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish are overwhelmingly indigenous to the British Isles since far back into prehistoric times. The title of Sykes’ first chapter, “Twelve Thousand Years of Solitude,” summarizes this finding. The “average settlement dates” in the Isles for the ancestors of modern British and Irish people, he estimates, were around 8,000 years ago.
Historical population genetics is an extremely complicated science. It’s not uncommon for well-known authorities, such as Sykes and his rival L.L. Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford, to differ. Bearing that in mind, Sykes’ recreation of the genetic history of Britain and Ireland appears plausible.
Sykes’ team obtained DNA samples from 10,000 individuals in the United Kingdom and Ireland and reviewed genetic records for 40,000 more. They looked at functionally trivial mutations in the Y-chromosome to group each man into clans based on patrilineal lines of descent (e.g., Abraham begat Isaac who begat Jacob who begat …). And they examined mitochondrial DNA to group individuals into matrilineal descent clans. (I reviewed in VDARE.com Sykes’ 2001 book The Seven Daughters of Eve, which outlined the initial European-wide genealogical discoveries revealed by mitochondrial DNA. If you are interested in the understanding the technical aspects more, please see that article.)
From his database, Sykes concludes that the majority of the genes of the peoples of the British Isles are descended from the oldest of the modern inhabitants: Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, who began arriving 10,000 years ago from Continental Europe after the end of the last Ice Age, as soon as the islands became habitable again.
http://vdare.com/sailer/070415_diverse.htm