Interesting background to 5000+ y/o Irish 'farmer'...

tac foley

Apologies if this is n the wrong forum.....

Quoted from this morning's BBC CEEFAX and expanded....

DUBLIN: Scientists have sequenced the first ancient human genomes from Ireland, shedding light on the genesis of Celtic populations.
The genome is the instruction booklet for building a human, comprising three billion paired DNA “letters”. The work shows that early Irish farmers were similar to southern Europeans.
Genetic patterns then changed dramatically in the Bronze Age – as newcomers from the eastern periphery of Europe settled in the Atlantic region.
The research is done by the geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen’s University Belfast.
Team members sequenced the genomes of a 5,200-year-old female farmer from the Neolithic period and three 4,000-year-old males from the Bronze Age.
Opinion has been divided on whether the great transitions in the British Isles, from a hunting lifestyle to one based on agriculture and later from stone to metal use, were due to local adoption of new ways by indigenous people or attributable to large-scale population movements.
The ancient Irish genomes show unequivocal evidence for mass migration in both cases.

tac

Mountainsandh

tac foley wrote: »

Apologies if this is n the wrong forum.....

Quoted from this morning's BBC CEEFAX and expanded....

DUBLIN: Scientists have sequenced the first ancient human genomes from Ireland, shedding light on the genesis of Celtic populations.
The genome is the instruction booklet for building a human, comprising three billion paired DNA “letters”. The work shows that early Irish farmers were similar to southern Europeans.
Genetic patterns then changed dramatically in the Bronze Age – as newcomers from the eastern periphery of Europe settled in the Atlantic region.
The research is done by the geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen’s University Belfast.
Team members sequenced the genomes of a 5,200-year-old female farmer from the Neolithic period and three 4,000-year-old males from the Bronze Age.
Opinion has been divided on whether the great transitions in the British Isles, from a hunting lifestyle to one based on agriculture and later from stone to metal use, were due to local adoption of new ways by indigenous people or attributable to large-scale population movements.
The ancient Irish genomes show unequivocal evidence for mass migration in both cases.

tac

Seems like very definitive conclusions from a sample of 4 individuals !

dubhthach

The 3 Bronze age samples are more interesting if you ask me.

Of course this is first wave of aDNA samples, Bradley has circa 30 aDNA full genomes supposedly from every period of Irish pre-history. Of course it gets more interesting when the "protocol" is applied I imagine to archaelogical sites such as Ballyhanna where over 1,000 remains were recovered dating from circa 800-1300AD.

Media as usual are at sea when it comes to this stuff, full paper can be read here:

The Neolithic remains fit into pattern observed with Neolithic remains from continental Europe so no big surprises there:

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

recedite

Here's a less esoteric article about the easterners whose DNA crops up in the later samples, the Yamnaya.
Amazing that "milk drinking Russians" (or their ancestors) got all the way to Rathlin island.
I presume these were the people who eventually became known as the Celts.
It seems that retaining the enzyme lactase into adulthood was a major survival advantage which first arose on the steppes. Domesticating horses was also a major travel advantage.
Combining the two, we have a population that can live successfully in small mobile groups, driving cattle through the forests and transporting belongings in carts.
Even by the time Caesar conquered Gaul, this is what he mostly encountered. Vast numbers of people well connected with each other, but dispersed over a wide area and with few urban centres.

Ipso

Here is a good article about the findings.

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-gaels-were-from-scythia/

dubhthach

recedite wrote: »

Here's a less esoteric article about the easterners whose DNA crops up in the later samples, the Yamnaya.
Amazing that "milk drinking Russians" (or their ancestors) got all the way to Rathlin island.
I presume these were the people who eventually became known as the Celts.
It seems that retaining the enzyme lactase into adulthood was a major survival advantage which first arose on the steppes. Domesticating horses was also a major travel advantage.
Combining the two, we have a population that can live successfully in small mobile groups, driving cattle through the forests and transporting belongings in carts.
Even by the time Caesar conquered Gaul, this is what he mostly encountered. Vast numbers of people well connected with each other, but dispersed over a wide area and with few urban centres.

All modern European's can be modelled as admixture of three putative ancestral populations. Namely:

• Western Hunter Gather
• Early European Farmer
• Ancient North Eurasian -- an extinct meta-population that contrubuite to both European's and Amerindians

I wouldn't rely on Daily Fail, when you can read the actual paper which sequenced Yamnaya remains and compare them to modern populations on Harvard Reich lab website:

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for
Indo-European languages in Europe

https://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reich/Reich_Lab/Welcome_files/nature14317.pdf

The new study with 4 irish aDNA remains can be read here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/12/22/1518445113.full.pdf?with-ds=yes

Mountainsandh

I had a look at the studies, but I have to say it's great to have the Daily Fail English translation... :pac:

Does all that mean that Paleolithic population in Ireland was practically non-existent, or that it was completely overcome later on ?
There just seems to be no trace of them whatsoever !

tac foley

'Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence' - it might mean that we have either not yet found it, or it has been mistaken for something else.

tac

dubhthach

Mountainsandh wrote: »

I had a look at the studies, but I have to say it's great to have the Daily Fail English translation... :pac:

Does all that mean that Paleolithic population in Ireland was practically non-existent, or that it was completely overcome later on ?
There just seems to be no trace of them whatsoever !

Do we have any evidence of Paleolithic inhabitation in Ireland so far? As far as I thought the earliest contuinance inhabitation is after the Last Glacier Maximum (LGM) with start of Mesolithic? In Ireland case from about 8000BC onwards?

Well modern Irish people obviously have mesolithic (Western Hunter Gather) ancestry, if anything it probably makes up single biggest component. The model proposed using aDNA seems to show following

Neolithic spread with EEF population, during first part of this period WHG seem to have no to low part in ancestry of early Neolithic people who've been sequenced. Later we see an increase in WHG ancestry (Due to mixing of peripheral WHG groups into Neolithic farming population). This results in a new mixed population (think of example of Latin American mixed European/Amerindian populations)

Likewise when Yamnaya type ancestry comes into Europe from Steppe it gradually mixes with present population, though initially there's large input.

They compared the 3 Bronze age remains to the Neolithic one (Rathlin vs. co. Down). It would seem that the "neolithic" like ancestry that the BA men carried is closer to Neolithic remains from Germany than it was to Irish Neolithic woman.

This seems to imply that their ancestral population had mixed with European neolithic population first.

Obviously throw in 4,000 years of time and the great blender of been stuck on island together, result everyone ends up with shared ancestry. Basically to use comparison it's like Latin America except instead of mixing over a 3-400 year period you are looking at mixing over 4,000-5,000 year period! We are all "nicely blended" at this stage

What's gonna be important is when Bradley's lab release the other 26 genomes he supposedly has.

With regards to diagram above, it's taken from the following paper also from Reich Lab in Havard

“Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans”

http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reich/Reich_Lab/Welcome_files/2014_Nature_Lazaridis_EuropeThreeAncestries_1.pdf

recedite

dubhthach wrote: »

Do we have any evidence of Paleolithic inhabitation in Ireland so far? As far as I thought the earliest contuinance inhabitation is after the Last Glacier Maximum (LGM) with start of Mesolithic? In Ireland case from about 8000BC onwards?

I think it is helpful to forget about Ireland and Britain as the islands we know today, and instead think of a different western european coastline, with ice sheet to the north.
Daily Fail to the rescue again
The red areas on the map were land. In this scenario, a "western hunter gatherer" walking northwards along the seashore from Portugal ends up somewhere in Waterford or Cork. Continuing on along the west coast they would soon reach Donegal. Looking at it like this, Ireland does not seem so isolated. These people could have lived quite well on shellfish and by using tidal fish traps and by spearing plaice etc. This would be the "littoral" lifestyle. Certainly there are plenty of oyster middens to be found along the west coast.

It would be very interesting to see what artifacts lie under the sea along a line from Brittany to Cork, probably every bit as rich as Doggerland.

There are remnants of this lost land in Irish nature too, the "Lusitanian" fauna and flora. We have the Arbutus tree native to the southwest, which is also found in Iberian peninsula. Also the Natterjack toad. The Irish shrew has genetic links to shrews in the Basque country and Andorra. The oldest deer bones in the country, found in a cave in Waterford were also DNA sequenced recently and found to be near identical to the Red Deer herd in Killarney, so at the ice age maximum, these deer probably inhabited that area of land between SW Ireland and Iberia, which is now submerged. It was only later that the population became isolated.

Of course somebody else can look at the same data and come up with a different hypothesis; that the first people waited until the land bridges had submerged, then travelled to Ireland via Britain by boat, carrying the deer and other wildlife in special luggage compartments.

It is interesting to speculate though.

Either way, it does seem that the first wave of hunter gatherer people came from the southwest, and a later wave of people came from a more northeast direction.