Ever wonder how it is that there are "Black Irish?" - the Irish with dark hair and eyes? The ancient legends tell us that there were people who came from the sea - the sulkies - the sea lions, which you might remember from the wonderful film called "The Secret of Roan Inish." But there is now a scientific explanation...
EXCERPT FOR THE ARTICLE LINKED TO ABOVE:
Just over 5,000 years ago, there lived an Irish farmer with black hair and dark eyes. Her DNA spoke of ancestors mostly Middle Eastern in origin, and she would have looked more like a southern European woman than a red-haired Irish lass.
But just 1,000 years later, her world was full of blue eyed easterners. This quick transition to Ireland as we know it, genetically speaking, is likely due to a massive migration that occurred sometime during those 1,000 years. The evidence comes from a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen's University Belfast sequenced the genomes of four ancient citizens of Ireland to unlock the secrets of their origins....
Study author Dan Bradley, professor of population genetics at Trinity College Dublin, explained that recent technological and methodological advances in ancient DNA analysis allowed his team to produce full genomes for the four skeletons used in their research. They were surprised to see how different the Neolithic woman, who was found in Belfast in 1855 and lived over 5,000 years ago, was from the three male skeletons analyzed, who were found off of Rathlin Island in 2006. With just 1,000 years separating them, their genomes shouldn't have looked so strikingly different - which suggests that some major migration really must have occurred.
(The major migration was likely from an area now in the UKRAINE!)
