The Surprising origins of the Irish

This explains some of my husband's DNA results... he is the 'Emerald Isle' the whole way, but with a tiny trace of European Jew and Caucasian... so some of his ancestors possibly walked west to Ireland and Great Britain. I say that, because he doesn't have any recent ancestors from anywhere other than Great Britain and the US.

The Irish people have a complex genetic history shaped by mass migrations from the Middle East and Spain, with blue eyes and fair skin arriving through a later migration from Eastern Europe, new DNA evidence indicates. The evidence was found in the bones of four people buried in Ireland: a brown-eyed, black-haired female who lived on a farm some 5,200 years ago, discovered buried in a small village in Northern Ireland, and three men who lived between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, found on Rathlin Island, just off the Irish coast. When researchers analyzed the woman’s genome, they discovered a strong similarity to people from Spain and Sardinia, who are believed to have originally migrated to Europe from the Middle East. The genomes from the three Bronze Age men revealed a different genetic background, with about 30 percent of their DNA closely resembling populations from modern-day Russia and Ukraine. These blue-eyed males also had a genetic variant linked to a hereditary iron-overload disorder, haemochromatosis, which is so prevalent in Ireland that it’s also known as Celtic disease. Researchers said their findings show that the modern Irish were largely shaped by the 1,000 years of migration from Eastern Europe. “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,” study author Dan Bradley tells The Guardian (U.K.). He said the migrants may have even brought “the introduction of language ancestral to western Celtic tongues.

Taken from the January 15th edition of the Week Magazine.