Genetic differentiation between contemporary British and Irish populations

 

"This seems to me a thing to be noticed, that just as the men of this country are, during this mortal life, more prone to anger and revenge than any other race, so in eternal death the saints of this land, that have been elevated by their merits, are more vindictive than the saints of any other region." - Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica 

"The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood." - Benjamin Disraeli

"Besides some small islands round about Britain, there is also a large island, Ierne, which stretches parallel to Britain on the north, its breadth being greater than its length. Concerning this island I have nothing certain to tell, except that its inhabitants are more savage than the Britons, since they are man-eaters as well as heavy eaters, and since, further, they count it an honourable thing, when their fathers die, to devour them, and openly to have intercourse, not only with the other women, but also with their mothers and sisters; but I am saying this only with the understanding that I have no trustworthy witnesses for it; and yet, as for the matter of man-eating, that is said to be a custom of the Scythians also, and, in cases of necessity forced by sieges, the Celti, the Iberians, and several other peoples are said to have practised it." - Strabo, Geographica

                                                                                

How different (or similar?) are the Irish and their beloved British neighbours? The answer will more than likely piss off both armchair republicans and loyalists alike. The latter claiming to be the true original inhabitants of the Cruithin only retaking what was always rightfully theirs whilst the former claim to be bastard descendants of Egpytian pharaohs and shipwrecked Basque pescaderos. The sad truth is that both factions are far more interrelated to one another than both would be comfortable admitting regardless of who was what or where going back to antiquity because the British and Irish relationship is far deeper than antiquity. As old to antiquity as antiquity is to us now in 2021. But in the case of the Irish there has been substantially less homogenisation since then. Almost going back as far to the late bronze age (but unfortunately no samples have yet been published from Ireland).

To illustrate this elevated single grave/rhineland bell beaker drift in Ireland (which I believe peaks in Connaught where y-haplogroup R1b reaches its highest frequency in the world) I will be resorting to the Global 25 PCA courtesy of the eurogenes blog and examine samples going all the way from Bronze age to Medieval times.

Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age

While the G25 is not perfect for mapping NW euro variation
it does a damn fine job of playing out this bronze age
drift.

Middle Bronze Age

MBA samples from Ireland/Wales not available but gradually
the distances to moderns become lower as local neolithic
holdouts are absorbed into the overall population.

Late Bronze Age

Before arrival of Brythonics with Hallstatt C culture.

Iron Age

After arrival of Brythonics there is noticeable increase in EEF.
Even slightly more than modern Irish surprisingly hence the 
higher distance than Scotland_LBA. 
Surely after the arrival of Anglo-Saxons and Vikangs
this close drift with Irish ends?

Early Medieval

Picts narrowly plot closer to modern Scots but quite shockingly

the early medieval samples mostly taken from an 8-9th century

grave from Hinxton, Cambridgeshire plot 

nearest to Irish again so they are heavily intermingled 

with assimilated Brythonics. This would seem to 

indicate that modern Anglos require extra "Southern" drift

that likely arrived from France during the high medieval

era due to the close relations Plantagenets had with French

nobility.

  

Last year's Viking burial paper Sikora et al 2020 goes into this southern drift which I have suspected for some time in the supplementary materials note 11:

"A major 2020 study, which used DNA from Viking-era burials in various regions across Europe, found that modern English samples showed nearly equal contributions from a native British "North Atlantic" population and a Danish-like population. While much of the latter signature was attributed to the earlier settlement of the Anglo-Saxons, it was calculated that up to 6% of it could have come from Danish Vikings, with a further 4% contribution from a Norwegian-like source representing the Norwegian Vikings. The study also found an average 18% admixture from a source further south in Europe, which was interpreted as reflecting the legacy of French migration under the Normans."

18% seems bang on but this turnover did not come from 
Normans themselves who were largely an elite, but rather
from Gascony which was an English possession for centuries
even to the point medieval French chroniclers considered them
to be "Anglais".

"Oui oui vee ar caming vor vour vimmin Haroldus"

Taking an average of all Irish/British bronze age 
samples available on G25 we get what I feel is a 
reasonably accurate picture of where this continuity is highest
My thanks to ancestral whispers for the map and reconstruction of
Rathlin 1, pictured on the left. 
Although there are only two Irish BA samples available
currently so the overwhelming majority of these samples are from
Britain. 

The first Irelanders

3D reconstruction of the crania of Louschbour man,
a WHG (Western Hunter Gatherer) who lived around 6000BC
in what is now Belgium, Irish WHG would've looked more or less like this.

Ten thousand years ago, or twelve depending on who you ask, a small band, probably no more than a couple dozen, dark skinned, blue eyed people made landfall on a small island for the first time ever to our knowledge. 

Only a few millennia before the island had been an arctic wasteland that was completely inhospitable to human habitation. Covered in glaciers which gradually melted during the Bølling–Allerød oscillation resulting in the hilly landscape seen here today. The Allerød oscillation resulted in warmer temperatures in the North Atlantic similar to modern levels, before things eventually got cold again, even colder than LGM levels in fact. This cold period is known to us as the 'Younger Dryas' and would've roughly coincided with the arrival of these hunter gatherers to the island we know today as Ireland.

Their ancestors would have originated somewhere in the vicinity of modern day south eastern Europe, belonging to the Epigravettian complex. Rather than the previously hypothesised Franco-Cantabrian regium hypothesis, with the dinosaur Palaeolithic continuist nonsense of R1b cromagnon supermen colonising everything, it seems that Iberia, which was for the latter half of the Upper Palaeolithic a bastion for some of the first Anatomically modern human populations to arrive in Europe during the Aurignacian, however these UP survivors themselves it seems did not survive the expansion of the Epigravettian foragers from the Balkans, with samples from the Epipaleolithic Azilian harbouring significantly higher levels of WHG related genetic ancestry than those hunters of the preceding Magdalenian. The fact that Basques today exhibit the highest WHG genomic ancestry is as it turns out a mere coincidence with virtually all but one Mesolithic and Neolithic samples belonging to paternal lineages other than R1b, such as G2a, I2a and H2a, with the lone exception from El Trocs cave with one farmer belonging to now extinct (except in Sardinian men) R1b-V88. 

This lineage likely made its way into early farming communities from Anatolia somewhere in the Balkans where it was found in Mesolithic samples from Lepenski Vir, Serbia, and the Epigravettian Villabruna individual, the oldest known WHG yet uncovered. 

Front and lateral view of Ripari
Villabruna's skull, oldest as of
yet known individual to possess
the R1b haplogroup, as well as 
blue eyes.
14kya.

Magdalenian hunters (El Miron) already harboured significant levels of WHG ancestry 
as early as 20,000BC WHG had expanded across the Mediterranean. 

With the extinction of most megafauna towards the end of the Pleistocene, early Holocene foragers such as the WHG became dependant on smaller game, with red deer, Irish elk, boars, wild aurochs and rabbits for meat. An emphasis on freshwater fish was also made with most Mesolithic sites being located next to river lanes. As a result of this, WHG were substantially shorter than hunter gatherers that hunted the megafauna that proved plentiful during the UP. With the average Gravettian male standing at 1.83m WHG men on average stood at a much shorter 1.63m. Though were powerfully built.

From Grasgruber et al 2014

For the first time ever we now have two samples from the Mesolithic era from Irish Western Hunter Gatherers, and rather intriguingly they appear to be somewhat inbred, although not to the same extent of that of the "god king" individual buried at Newgrange almost to the point of forming their own unique clade from continental and even British WHG. From the supplement of Cassidy et al 2020: 

"We note a significant decrease in inbreeding through time in ancient populations. Hunter-gatherers show both the largest variance in inbreeding coefficients and the highest median. However, none are estimated to have parents who are more closely related than four degrees. This demonstrates that the maintenance of outbreeding mating networks was common practice in the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods of Europe, as already seen for the Sunghir site in Russia."

These people knew about inbreeding, and the problems that would have resulted from it.

The samples were taken from from the remains of two male individuals from Killuragh in Limerick and Sramore in country Leitrim. They both lived around the tail end of the Mesolithic roughly 4000BC. Just as the first wave of farmers were beginning to colonise the island from the Atlantic façade.

After four to six thousand years of isolation they had become so genetically drifted from continental WHG to the point of almost being a separate lineage entirely. At its zenith the largest Mesolithic population would have been no more than a few hundred individuals. Which would explain why Irish Neolithic samples were largely identical in terms of WHG admixture to continental counterparts.

Like the vast majority of WHG the uniparentals for these two were fairly typical. Both belonged to subclades of mtDNA haplogroup U5b and Y-DNA haplogroup I2a. With Killuragh6 belonging to I2a1a2 and Sramore62 to I2a1b2, the same haplotype as that of the most famous WHG, Cheddar man. Who made the headlines in 2018 for a somewhat subpar reconstruction.

 A more recent and quite frankly 

probably more accurate reconstruction 

compared to that created by 

the Natural History museum of London.

Artist’s impression of a mesolithic Iberian from
La Braña, Arintero from around 5000BC
just as the first wave of cardial farmers arrived
from across the Mediterranean. 
Basques today have amongst the highest proportion of 
WHG admixture in Europe.

Killuragh cave, a site which appears to 

have been frequented by mesolithic hunters

for thousands of year with many 

bone fragments being recovered from here.

Rather then being buried within the cave systems, bones were placed at the mouth of the cave, perhaps for ritualistic reasons which were then washed away by natural processes. 

                                                                                                                                       

"Closest" modern populations

As per the conclusion of Cassidy et al 2020, the two Mesolithic individuals shared highest drift with British and other Epigravettian offshoot populations from the continent. 

3D PCA

2D PCA

When modelled with Epigravettian WHG (Villabruna)
Irish samples do not score any Iberian HG as previously thought

As for introgression by Irish WHG into oncoming neolithic communities that established themselves on the island roughly around 4000BC, this signal seems to be nonexistent as the vast majority of Neolithic samples from the island do not harbour significantly higher levels compared to contemporaneous samples from the continent, specifically the cardial Mediterranean region where we now know they spread from. 

Genocide?

Given that the foragers would've numbered no more than a few hundred, and the farmers in the tens of thousands, it's logical to think that Irish WHG more or less met their end by the beginning of the Neolithic transition, as did most WHG did in general with some straggler groups surviving in northern Scandinavia in isolated pockets as recently as 2000BC.

For the majority of or at least the first half of its populated history, as much time has transpired since the beginning of the Neolithic to now as has the beginning of the Mesolithic to its end, if we take the twelve thousand year date into consideration.

Conflicts over land probably did occur, with local WHG probably hunting imported domesticated livestock and sparking the occasional scrap, but I don't see any reason to suspect any semblance of a violent genocide, with peaceful integration probably occurring over several centuries as cultural boundaries between the two began to fade as it would do again in the later Bronze age. 

Cosy