A genetic study has shed some light on the origins of the Irish race.
According to geneticists from Trinity College, Dublin, and archaeologists from Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland’s early population may have come to the country from as far away as the Middle East and Eurasia.
Dan Bradley, lead researcher and a genetics professor at Trinity College, Dublin, and his team sequenced the genome of an early farm woman who lived near modern-day Belfast about 5,200 years ago, as well as three Bronze Age contemporaries from about 4,000 years ago.
The skull of the Neolithic farmer woman, uncovered at a burial site near Belfast, revealed her DNA was a mix of hunter gatherers and early farmers from as far afield as the Middle East. She looked like modern Southern Europeans, with black hair and dark eyes.
Meanwhile, the three Bronze age men whose genes were sequenced from remains found on Rathlin island off Northern Ireland had 30% genetic make-up “from the peoples originating above the Black Sea”.
Descendants of people from the Pontic Steppe – a Black Sea region stretching across modern Ukraine, Russia and Georgia – may have migrated to Ireland more than 4,000 years ago in the Bronze Age, bringing the gene for blue eyes.
Farming originated in the Middle East 7500 years ago.
However, no country has evolved on its own i.e. no country can claim to have a 'pure race'. Race is a cultural concept, not a biological one.
A high degree of genetic diversity exists within populations because individuals from different populations have always intermingled and mated with each other. Given that populations have interbred for most of human history, most anthropologists reject the idea that “pure” races existed at some time in the distant past, according to Microsoft Encarta Encyclopaedia (2002).
According to New Standard Encyclopaedia (1971), “There are no pure races in existence, and no traces have been found of pure races in the past. This is because crossbreeding between different people has gone on since before the dawn of history.”
