No Englishness Gene

Now we know where the Irish and the Welsh got their strong will and determination, read on:

Facing the past

Are we descended from the Vikings, Saxons, Romans or Celts? For centuries, many believed our physical features revealed our origins. But are the British simply a breed apart?

Investigation by Richard Girling

So: there is no gene for Englishness, Irishness or Scottishness. And yet we all came from somewhere and, in a society increasingly disconnected from its roots, we are ever more desperate to find out where. This means reaching back through the millennia, identifying our earliest likely ancestors and tracking their progress through history. As it happens, wherever they go, migrants leave a distinct genetic footprint - the Y chromosomes that are passed down unaltered from father to son across the generations. By matching these between existing populations, scientists have uncovered a small but vital piece of evidence. The modern people closest to the ancient Britons, whose tribal lands also included England, are those of Ireland and Wales. By comparing their Y chromosomes with others, we can start to make connections.

Mark Thomas, of UCL's Centre for Genetic Anthropology, explains: "When we look at the Y chromosomes in Wales and Ireland, we find a very close match with the Basques." Other genetic evidence, he says, "strongly suggests that the Basques are the descendants of the Palaeolithic inhabitants of western Europe prior to the arrival of farmers between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago". It is reasonable therefore to conclude that the Basques took refuge in the Iberian peninsula when the freeze was at its maximum, then moved northward behind the thaw to become the first people to recolonise Britain after the last Ice Age.

Did they then survive to become the Romano-British and later be overrun by the Saxons? Or were they displaced earlier by other, more sophisticated newcomers? "We do not know," says Chris Stringer, the head of human origins at the Natural History Museum, "whether they were supplanted by later influxes of farmers, and by Bronze and Iron Age peoples, or whether they simply embraced the new technologies as they developed. This is a matter of fierce debate."

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