Scottish Bones

Did one of those DNA swabs a few weeks back, sent it to Ancestry DNA, got the results;very much as expected with a few surprises. One seems to be that my Scottish ancestors moved from Scotland to Ireland around 1725 and Ancestry suggests the Highland Clearances as the probable reason. After that, they went to Ireland and Northern Ireland, and departed from those places when things began to get tough there. I thought our family were Irish diaspora coming to Scotland, but it seems we were Scottish diaspora going to Ireland first, or at least as far back as the Ancestry timeline goes, which frankly, is no great distance. Looks as though we were highlanders. There's some interesting clan stuff I need to sort out if I want to do this right, but it looks like a lot of effort, and I am basically lazy.

Uploaded the zipfile to Gedmatch; an awful lot of very interesting stuff there, more on that in a later post. A very close match there leads me to, of all things, a keeper of the family tree of a clan Dad told me we were connected to. Shall I contact the person? Still thinking about it.

European Bones

According to Ancestry I am:

38% Iberian peninsula
31% Scotland/ Ireland with an emphasis on Ulster
22% Western Europe,which I don't quite understand, but OK.

With less confidence it claims I am 2% Great British, 2% Caucasus and 2% European Jewish, and less than 1% Africa North, Europe South, and Asia South. The small GB component is slightly compromised by the 22% Western European, which can include the South East of England. There's overlap there, and I haven't found anything on Ancestry to make it clearer. This kind of genealogy is still a Weird ScienceTM.

Gedmatch is pretty well regarded when it comes to filtering results. Unfortunately sometimes one needs to know what one is doing, so I'm staying away from any DNA calculators that require understanding from me, but some are very easy to apply. The Eurogenes K36 admixture proportions is very popular. It divvies me up nicely:

Population
Amerindian -
Arabian -
Armenian -
Basque 7.03
Central_African -
Central_Euro 1.53
East_African -
East_Asian -
East_Balkan 4.76
East_Central_Asian -
East_Central_Euro 4.12
East_Med -
Eastern_Euro 4.29
Fennoscandian 4.58
French 6.10
Iberian 26.17
Indo-Chinese -
Italian 7.57
Malayan -
Near_Eastern -
North_African 0.79
North_Atlantic 13.21
North_Caucasian 2.89
North_Sea 10.78
Northeast_African -
Oceanian 0.16
Omotic -
Pygmy -
Siberian -
South_Asian 0.52
South_Central_Asian 0.25
South_Chinese -
Volga-Ural 1.13
West_African -
West_Caucasian 1.38
West_Med 2.75


So there's the Basque. But there's other stuff too that repeats on other tests; the Caucasus and the Balkans, France, central Europe... I find it odd that the Ancestry test finds me with very little south European (in which their map includes the area of Italy) when my mother's surname can denote a strong connection to the country. Gedmatch makes more sense from that point of view. I am interested in a possible Jewish connection and the Eurogenes Jtest gives me an Ashkenazi 'score' of 4.6% - there's no test for Sephardic Jews at all! Bit of a blow! The author warns that the test is not definitive, and recommends others, but they aren't free and it takes more spitting into tubes so I'll think about it.

Me, I'm a European with some interesting bits and pieces from elsewhere, and that's a bloody grand thing to be, apart from the fact that we are a basically a warring collection of tribes who FUBAR'ed everything around us. Theresa May can stick her 'citizen of nowhere' quote right where the sun doesn't shine. I'm a citizen of the world, as are we all. No-one can take that away from us, it's in our blood.

Very Old Bones/The Woman on the Red Sofa

Is it a symptom of popculture overdose that I can't see the word 'Bone' without smirking a little? Beavis and Butthead would be proud! If it's 90s, does it still count?

For a moment, I try to imagine time, not as linear, but as events happening at once across a flat plain of existence. There's a woman sitting on a red sofa. She is a magical creature, she can fly, she can breathe underwater, she can get to far-away places very quickly, she can communicate at great distances, she eats a lot, she reads a lot, she's very safe, she has machines that clean up, cook, bake, wash. She doesn't really understand the chart she's looking at but the instructions are simple; Look for orange blocks across the screen, the more of them, and the less striated the better.

She has already learned that the most easily accessed information divides her ancient heritage between Early Neolithic Farmers and Western Hunter Gatherers, with a surprisingly large Natufian component, but now her dna is being compared to fossil findings. One can never be too keen or too certain because it's all stories, and these pinpricks of information are very old and obscure.

45,000 years ago, a man dies by the Irtysh river in the area of Ust-Ishim, West Siberia. By the 21st century his left femur reveals him to be one of the early modern humans to inhabit the area, belonging to the same group of early humans as the Mal’ta boy, a four-year-old living 24,000 years ago along the Bolshaya Belaya River near today’s Irkutsk, and the La Brana man, a hunter-gatherer wandering Spain about 8,000 years ago. Seems that Ust-ishim man belongs to the first wave of humans to migrate out of Africa into Eurasia, before/ at the time when that population forked out to the east into Siberia and to the west in Europe. Orange bars thick and largely unstriated across the chart, a lot of matching DNA chromosomal information, more than she shares with, say, the man from La Brana or the boy from Mal'ta.

12,500 years ago, somewhere in Montana, a baby boy dies. His skeleton is discovered in 1968. He is paleo-Indian, a child of the little known Clovis culture, thought to be the first inhabitants of the New World. The theory suggests that these people crossed from Siberia into Alaska via the Bering Strait. Orange bars with a few more striations, but still much more present than absent in the chromosome set.

8,000 years ago and a cave in Luxembourg, where a Mesolithic hunter gatherer known now as the Loschbour man lives and dies. Lots of orange again, a few choppier bits. He looked like this:

Dating back to between 7.2K and 3.2K years, remains from Neolithic to Iron age to Bronze Age are discovered on the Hungarian plains. Here we find the genome where lactose tolerance develops, a singular advantage on a planet where most adult humans cannot easily digest milk. The graph shows strong solid blocks of orange colour. The woman on the red sofa is surprised to say the least, but if her DNA matches can show up in Montana and Siberia, why not Hungary?

7,000 years ago, in Stuttgart dies a neolithic farmer of the Linear Pottery Culture. Here are her people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Pottery_culture) and here she was buried with 200 others, along with examples of the pottery that made them famous. Strong orange blocks again, with fewer striations.

3.7k years; ancient Eurasian DNA found in Sweden, 3.2k years; similar discovery in Russia, genomes from the Eurasian Bronze age.

Then the oranges become much more striped, the graph choppy, and the story, already vague, seems to fade out. Or there is much more but the woman on the red sofa can't take in any more right now. One thing though;

Of all these she is the only one to have the slightest opportunity of recording their connected story or even regarding it, albeit in an uncomprehending way. All their lives they had their own magics and tales. Part of hers is to know a little part of theirs. Yes it's history, but it's also her story, and a part of everybody's story. Any who read this might consider that they may well be related to the dead man in the river, the baby boy in Montana, the hunter in the cave, the farmer with her pottery, the woman on the red sofa. Our similarities are much greater than our differences.

And with that, the graph reader leaves it and returns to her own time, her own work, and the stories she makes for herself.