The genetic uniqueness of the Irish.

Being Irish, is about being different. Unless you actually are Irish, this is hard to appreciate.

The Irish have lived for thousands of years, relatively isolated, on the Western fringes of Europe. This has led to a curious situation: the Irish genome is not like other "Caucasians", in Europe, indeed, the Irish genome is turning out to be something very surprising indeed.

Brendan Loftus of University College Dublin has just finished sequencing the genome of an Irishman, chosen, by genotyping, as being "representative of the Irish". Surprisingly, this Irishman's genome has turned out to have over 400,000 NOVEL single DNA base mutations, as the New Scientist reports this week. This is an unexpectedly high number of unique differences. Indeed, so distinctive is this genome that Loftus said: "The Irish genome inhabits a hitherto untapped region of European genome variation".

So, there you have it. The feeling that I had always had, that the Irish were different from other white races, including the "British", turns out to be genetically proven. It is not just my own particular little family that is a bit unusual, therefore...but the whole Irish race, for one reason or another.

This study tallies well with another study that showed that Irish people from the West of Ireland (where my family is from), showed Neolithic haplotype markers which means that the genome has certain characteristics found 10,000 years ago, in the stone age.

I am sure that there are more genetic surprises in store for those studying the Irish genome. I will keep you posted.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 6 and Tiarnan, 4, this month, please go to:
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The relative value of cultures.

What is the value of the modern way of life? Is it any better than that of those ways which preceded it, in the depths of time? I think not.

The way we do things now is a temporary stage; what we value and what we are, is a passing phase; we shall, in time, be surpassed and others will look on us, as primitive. We are not the great "end" of all things that we think we are.

These thoughts are brought to mind by a strange story floating around the internet today. An uncontacted tribe, that has never met with modern men before, has been spotted, from the air, on the border between Brazil and Peru. This tribe live in a "Stone Age" manner. Their houses are huts built from trees. Their weapons are bows and arrows. Their clothes are scanty. Yet, their muscles are strong and lean and they seem physically adept. They have lived, for untold generations, without contact with modern civilization. Imagine, therefore, how they felt when they saw a plane pass over them? Their reaction was swift: out came the bows and arrows - and up they shot, into the air, fruitlessly. No doubt, to them, the plane is some strange beast, a fearful thing to be downed, if it can be - and, in a way, they are right.

What would modern civilization bring to this isolated tribe? Disease, despondency, disillusion, would be their gifts, from us. How would a Stone Age tribe feel to be confronted by a world of jet aircraft, personal computers, mobile phones - and machine guns? The culture shock would be catastrophic. Then there are all the diseases they have never known - diseases which are minor to us, could decimate them. They could be wiped out by the common cold.

I hope that the sighting of the plane is the only contact they will have with us. Let them live in peace as they have for thousands of years. Let them be as they are. No doubt they have their own language, culture and way of life: let them live in their accustomed manner without contact with modern men. Our curiosity about them, which may lead us to contact them, can only destroy everything that they are. I hope that they are left in peace.

Yet, peace may not be their future. Loggers are clearing vast tracks of Amazonian land. When such loggers encounter primitive tribes, the best such tribes can hope for is to move elsewhere. Not infrequently, however, one hears that they are killed, for inconveniently living on land that others want.

Their culture is no less important than ours; their lives no less precious. They should be left alone in their traditional lands. Let the loggers log elsewhere - or don't log at all.

I wish the nameless tribe well - and all uncontacted tribes around the world. Let us be mature enough to give them the space they need to live in peace.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and five months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and ten months, and Tiarnan, twenty-seven months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind, niño, gênio criança, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

The origins of the Irish people

My post on “Irish roots go deep into History” attracted one very intense response from a man who argued against it. I am not going to post his remark, because it is so misleading. He had the temerity to tell me which paper I had supposedly taken the data from – a completely different paper, by different authors, that completely omitted the evidence that the authors of the paper I had referred to, had uncovered. He seemed to think I was either misreading what I had supposedly read, or misrepresenting it: not so, to both.

The paper I referenced in my article is called: Y-Chromosome Variation and Irish Origins, published in Nature, by Dr. Emmeline W. Hill, Dr. Mark A. Jobling and Dr. Daniel G. Bradley. The work was done at Trinity College, Dublin, in Ireland, by the Department of Genetics, there.

The commenter stated that the Irish were of Medieval origins. This is, in fact, an old misconception that was formed without knowledge of the Haplogroup 1 distributions and what they imply. His view cannot explain why there is a gradient of Haplogroup 1 across Europe. It cannot explain why this most ancient of DNA is so dominant in Western Ireland. The only conclusion is that the Irish are descended of the pre-Neolithic hunters who lived in Europe before the farmers came from the South-East. Were this not so, there would be no way to explain why Irish people bear the pre-Neolithic DNA, Haplogroup 1, in such a high proportion (up to 98.3 % of them in Western Ireland).

So, my post, "Irish roots go deep into history." stands uncorrected. Every statement made in it is justified by the study of Dr. Emmeline Hill and colleagues, above.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and ten months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and three months, and Tiarnan, twenty months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Irish roots go deep into History

How old are the Irish? By this I do not mean how old an individual Irish man or woman is, but how old the race is.

From time, to time, I have wondered about the origin of the Irish: what makes them distinct from other Europeans - indeed, are they distinct from them?

To look at, an Irishman is very easily picked out, if you know what to look for. The fact that there is a particular typical appearance suggests a unique set of genes which distinguish them from the other nationalities and races of the world. I have always thought this, by observation alone.

I have also opined, to others that, as an Irishman, I was of an older race than the Europeans to whom I spoke. I don't know why I felt this, I just did. They, of course, shrugged off, or laughed off the suggestion, depending on personality - and one, in particular, argued vehemently against it for a good twenty minutes, as if personally offended by the idea that the Irish might be of more antique stock than other Europeans.

The funny thing is, I was right and all those who laughed, scoffed, shrugged off or argued against me, were wrong. The Irish are the oldest race in Europe according to recent genetic research.

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin completed a genetic map of 200 Irish people and compared the Irish samples to over 8,000 other samples from around Europe. What they found stunned them and overturned all the ideas people had had about the Irish (except for me and mine I might add). The genetic testing proved that Irish people with Gaelic surnames (like my family, for Cawley is a rewrite of a Gaelic name), from the West of Ireland (where we are from) are NOT descended from the same group of people who populated the rest of Europe. In fact, the genetic testing proves that these Irish people - true Irish, if you like - are descendants of a far older race - of the pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers before the farmers came from the South-East of Europe. The Irish are, indeed, an ancient race - the oldest in the Caucasian world. The Irish are a remnant of the pre-Neolithic hunters that existed before the agricultural revolution swept the world bringing new ways, and new genes with it. The thinking is that the invasion of large numbers of agricultural people from the South East pushed the original hunters (who for economic reasons are necessarily much smaller in numbers) to the margins of the world. They found shelter in the chilly, unwelcoming West of Ireland, where they lived in genetic isolation from the rest of the world for the next ten thousand years. You see an Irishman of today, from the West of Ireland, which had little or no contact with the rest of the world (and if you ever go there you would see the same forces at work today), is an inheritor of an ancient genetic lineage. His (or her) genes are not the ones found in the rest of the farmer descended Europeans, but are those of Ancient man. They have the genetic makeup of Stone Age Hunters. At the very latest these would have been Early Mesolithic hunters - but the work suggests an origin of "over 10,000 years ago" - which is outside the Mesolithic and would, I suppose, put it into the Upper Paleolithic (the period of 30,000 B.C to 10,000 BC)

The marker used in the study is quite distinct and this research is not in the least controversial. The researchers at Trinity College, Dublin, looked for Haplogroup 1, which is a genetic marker present in the oldest group of humans to ever enter Europe. Their genetic map was telling. They discovered a gradient of Haplogroup 1 throughout Europe, the lowest prevalence being in Turkey, at only 1.8 %, showing that the Turks have very little genetic influence from the most ancient of men. The highest prevalence of Haplogroup 1 is found in the West of Ireland with prevalences reaching as high as 98.3 % of all Irish men carrying the gene, in Connaught. This means that these true Irish men are derived almost entirely from Stone Age stock, with almost no admixture of more recent genetic lineages from other races/areas of mankind. This result could only have happened under conditions of extreme and persistent genetic isolation over a ten thousand year period. It is astonishing, really, when you think about it - but that is what happened to the Irish: isolated from the rest of the world, for ten millenia (at least in the West of Ireland). The results, however, are very interesting - for it means that the Irish have preserved, in their blood, the genetic inheritance of the Stone Age (Middle and Old Stone Age) hunters.

The Haplogroup 1 is present on the Y chromosome inherited by males from the father. The average prevalence of Haplogroup 1 across the whole of Ireland was 78.1% - but this diluted number includes those descended from the British, Scottish and Normans/Vikings - who are almost exclusively present in the East of Ireland. Those descended from Irish alone show the Stone Age marker at almost 100% prevalence.

It is funny that what I had always felt to be the case, turns out to be true. The Irish are truly a race apart - and older, more ancient than any other Caucasian group, you will ever meet.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and ten months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and three months, and Tiarnan, twenty months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)