Researchers have found out that the Irish ancestry came from farmers of the Middle East and bronze metalworkers in Pontic Steppes, a vast steppeland in the northern shore of Black Sea.
A team of geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen's University Belfast has sequenced the genome of a woman who lived 5200 years ago and three men in Rathlin Island who lived 4000 years ago in the Bronze Age after the beginning of metalwork.
"There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe from above the Black Sea into Bronze Age Europe and we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island," said Professor of Population Genetics in Trinity College Dublin, Dan Bradley, who led the study, "and this degree of genetic change invites the possibility of other associated changes, perhaps even the introduction of language ancestral to western Celtic tongues."
According to the press release of Trinity College Dublin in EurekAlert!, the researchers discovered that the woman is most probably from the Middle East, where agriculture is invented, and had black hair, brown eyes and more resembled southern Europeans. However the three men genomes showed that about a third of their ancestry coming from ancient sources in the Pontic Steppe and had had the most common Irish Y chromosome type, blue eye alleles and the most important variant for the genetic disease, haemochromatosis.
"It is clear that this project has demonstrated what a powerful tool ancient DNA analysis can provide in answering questions which have long perplexed academics regarding the origins of the Irish," said Dr Eileen Murphy, Senior Lecturer in Osteoarchaeology at Queen's University Belfast.
"Genetic affinity is strongest between the Bronze Age genomes and modern Irish, Scottish and Welsh, suggesting establishment of central attributes of the insular Celtic genome some 4,000 years ago," added PhD Researcher in Genetics at Trinity, Lara Cassidy.
The study entitled 'Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome' is available for viewing in the Proceeding of National Academy of Sciences.
