Blood of the Isles Exploring the genetic roots of our tribal history

Reviewed by Tom Kennedy on 28 Feb 2007

Don't get the idea that the Celts, Vikings, and Normans ganged up to wipe out the Irish, and as for the English, well, the truth of it is that they were not much different from us anyhow. In fact, the English have managed to convince themselves that they are some sort of Saxon hybrid, and the rest of us, the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish, are just a bunch of wild and troublesome Celts. As Bryan Sykes explains in his book, Blood of the Isles, the Irish may be troublesome, but they should not be accused of being Celts, and the English should stop going on about their brave Saxon ancestors, because they actually don't have that many to boast about. Alas for the myths, our genes tell a different story, and as Bryan Sykes writes, if the English had not been so inventive about their past, the world would have been spared an awful lot of trouble.

Bryan Sykes is a scientist, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford, and founder of the Oxford Ancestors company - which claims to be the world's leading provider of DNA-based services for use in personal ancestry research.

The Oxford Professor's quest to map our genes began some years ago, his interest sparked off by the discovery that DNA from the earliest inhabitants of Britain is not that different from that of people living now. That these fragments of DNA have come to us, unchanged, over thousands of years, said Bryan Sykes, still fills him with awe.

Those genes are the key to unlocking our past, and the history they tell is nothing but the unvarnished truth. Like it or not, DNA, unlike the usually selective family tree, really shows us where we came from.

In his book, Bryan Sykes describes how the gene mapping project expanded, and as luck would have it, an Irish study, under Dan Bradley at TCD, had started, so the two sister isles could be studied as a whole, and as the conclusions show, genetically this made a lot of sense.

This is a book packed with asides, Bryan Sykes constantly strays off the beaten path while describing how the thousands of samples were collected, so much so that the reader is in danger of losing the core plot. We get the genetics, and we also get the Táin and the Book of Invasions in which 90 warriors after arriving in Kerry go north to encounter the Tuatha Dé Danaan.

The asides are quite interesting, and significant, because so many of the really old stories, unlike the more recent Saxon and Celtic myths, seem to square with the genetic evidence. The early medieval Irish annals, for example, give an account of people moving up from the south, Spain, North Africa, and east from the Mediterranean, and our genes now tell us that this is indeed where most of the Irish came from. Ireland and Britain were populated by people moving up the Atlantic coast. There was no Celtic invasion, and as Bryan Sykes writes, the Celts were invented by Edward Lhuyd at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The word was derived from an ancient Greek term, Keltor, referring to uncivilized foreigners, and some people, like the nasty surgeon and bigot, Robert Knox, seized on it as a term of abuse. Knox publicly denounced the Celts, declaring that the race "must be forced from the soil, by fair means if possible, still they must leave." Chilling sentiments from a man who did not realise that this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Like many of his kind, Knox thought of himself as fortified with Saxon blood, but if Bryan Sykes and his team had been around in his time, they could have set the record right. The reality is, that despite the various invasions and hit and run raids, the genetic bedrock of Britain remains that of the original inhabitants.

As Bryan Sykes comments, the damage caused by the perpetuation of that Saxon myth is staggering. Not only did the English set themselves apart from their brothers and cousins, but the myth, fostered for political reasons, took a more sinister twist in the 20th century as it mutated into a the notion of Ayran supremacy.

Coming back to the Celts, the genes tell is one thing, and the archaeology shows us something else. Those wonderful swirls and interweavings that we think of as typically Celtic, are, in the author's view, no more convincing than a Rolex watch bought over the internet. That naturalistic Le Tene style, ultimately laying the foundations for the flowering of Art Nouveau, originated by the lakes of Switzerland, a cross-roads of the ancient world. Style, then, as now, took the world by storm, so this was a movement of fashion, not people.

Naturally, Bryan Sykes has a lot to say about how the genetic evidence is read, and, while the idea of tracing mitochrondrial genes back to a small number of 'clan mothers', has become familiar, he explains that we can now find the daddy of us all. The mothers can be traced back because all our mitochondrial DNA comes from the female side, but the fathers can be traced by slight variations in the Y chromosome. In Ireland, or Britain, most men can trace themselves back to just one of five clan fathers, which have been fancifully named, Oisín, Wodan, Sigurd, Eshu and Re.

In Ireland, 80 per cent of the population belongs to the Oisín clan, and these are no blow-ins. In the sunny south east, the Oisins are down to 73 per cent, and when Dan Bradley and TCD graduate student, Emmeline Hill (now a member of staff at UCD), looked at the surnames, they concluded that this must have been due to the arrival of the Normans. In Munster and Connaught, the Oisins held their own, 95 and 85 per cent respectively.

It's an entertaining and informative book, and it certainly puts a lot of our history into perspective.

Hardback: £Stg17