Yes, I thought along those lines too, when I first saw a similar map – although the West Irish hotspot made me think more generally Celtic than specifically Brythonic. Given the (lesser) Basque hotspot, it may not be solely Brythonic/Celtic however – it may be most or all mostly-undisturbed holdovers of pre-Roman Western European populations.
As @Paul_King and I have just been discussing – Brittany (particularly its far west), Wales, Cornwall and the west coast of Ireland (particularly around the county of Mayo).
We have no evidence for (and reasonable evidence to the contrary of) the claim that the Franks came from either Central Asia or Anatolia.
We have no evidence that the Franks had any particularly high levels of R1b (and in fact that there is no hotspot around Paris, where they had their greatest influence, speaks to the contrary).
We have no evidence that the Franks had any particularly strong genetic influence on the Huguenot heartland of Southern France – the Franks conquered vast territories including France (excluding Brittany), the Low Countries, Northern Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria, so their genetic influence would have been spread very thin everywhere except in their own heartland around their capital of Paris.
There is no evidence that the Huguenot heartland of Southern France had any particularly high levels of R1b and evidence to the contrary (as there is no hotspot in the area).
There is no evidence that the Huguenots emigrated in sufficient numbers to significantly influence the genetic makeup of the areas they settled.
There is no evidence that the Huguenots settled in any numbers in the areas of known R1b hotspots.
From all this I would suggest that there is no evidence in support of the Frank/Huguenot hypothesisWHATSOEVER.
A better hypothesis would be that R1b entered into Europe with the Corded Ware culture in the late Neolithic period.
Thanks. I tagged you because I knew you’d point out what part of my hypothesis was the least likely. I’ve been poking around the internet a lot. Some things of note - County Mayo was devastated by the potato famine, and today has almost a third of the population it did at that time. I was curious what happens to y chromosome lineages. Found this - I think it just illustrates how quickly a lineage could get fixed or almost fixed by drift in a population downturn. Galton–Watson process - Wikipedia Wales had a huge influx of coal miners during the industrial revolution and has been pretty stagnant since. Other sources relate that Brittany/Wales/Ireland have a lot of gene sharing, based on autosomal patterns, even in the modern era.
All that said, it’s possible Protestant migrants to these areas could explain the pattern but not extremely likely. As much as I think Huguenot migration explains a lot of the pattern of R1b, I don’t think it explains all of it. But I do think that Norman invasions can much more easily explain Ireland.
From Wikipedia:
In AD 1169 when one of the warring kings in the east of Ireland, Dermot MacMurrough, appealed to the King of England for help in his fight with a neighbouring king, the response resulted in the Anglo-Norman colonisation of Ireland. County Mayo came under Norman control in AD 1235. Norman control meant the eclipse of many Gaelic lords and chieftains, chiefly the O’Connors of Connacht.[20] During the 1230s, the Anglo-Normans and Welsh under Richard Mór de Burgh (c. 1194 – 1242) invaded and settled in the county, introducing new families such as Burke, Gibbons, Staunton, Prendergast, Morris, Joyce, Walsh, Barrett, Lynott, Costello, Padden and Price, Norman names are still common in County Mayo. Following the collapse of the lordship in the 1330s, all these families became estranged from the Anglo-Irish administration based in Dublin and assimilated with the Gaelic-Irish, adopting their language, religion, dress, laws, customs and culture and marrying into Irish families. They became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”.
Normans bringing R1b into the British Isles means Jeanson’s clock is off by at least a few centuries. However, I’m not too surprised by that. As I was looking through the Robertians/Capetians, I was doubtful that one of them from the 15th century was responsible for all the subhaplogroups. (I like the clock though because you can’t figure out the timeline without having a starting point.) I find it VERY interesting that the Robertians/Capetians and the line Rollo/William the Conqueror were involved in each other’s lives. It was a smaller world back then All it takes is the right affair in the 10th or the 11th century and R1b in western Europe is French.
Not necessarily. I believe the math of ancestry would indicate that all of these people groups could have had ancestors at Troy. Or at least could have had common ancestry that led to spreading the myth.
If all paternal lines are affected equally, nothing changes. If the effect was asymmetric, some of might die out. Either way it is irrelevant to your Frank/Huguenot hypothesis, or even the question of how R1b got into the west of Ireland in the first place.
(Also see my 2 points below.)
Citation for this influx? Size of the influx (proportionate to the size of the total Welsh population of that time)? Source of the influx? Evidence that the source of the influx had high level of R1b?
Lacking this there is no evidence that this influx had any causal effect on the Welsh R1b, let alone that this claim in any way supports your Frank/Huguenot hypothesis.
It is even possible, due to proximity, similar cultures, and the Cornish mining heritage, that many of them might have come from Cornwall (also an R1b hotspot) – whose mines became unprofitable in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
I’d go a lot further than that, but I’m glad you at least accept that it is “not extremely likely”.
It is hard to see that it explains any of it – see my points 4-6 in my last post.
Except that the Normans did not bring R1b “into the British Isles”! We know this because:
The Normans were an admixture of (majority) Northern French and (minority) Norse genetic influences – neither of which was (even close to being) an R1b hotspot.
They would have had ther highest levels of genetic impact on the south coast of England that is closest to France (probably Dorset through to Kent), with lesser impact beyond that. When you (eventually) get as far as Wales, Ireland and Scotland, it would only have been the nobility that was Norman.
I don’t know who you mean by the “Robertians”, and calling the House of Capet “Capetians” is an awful mangling – would you call Liz, Chuck, Willy & Co “the Windsorians”? I think not.
I don’t find it in the least bit surprising! Royalty allied, married and went to war with each other – that’s how monarchies worked. The reason James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England was because Henry VIII’s sister Margaret married his great-grandfather James IV. The reason for the Hundred Years War was that intermarriage gave Henry IV a claim on the French throne, etc, etc.
Emphatically NO Valerie! You fail to distinguish between royal genetics and population genetics. Just because the royal genetics changes doesn’t mean that the population’s genetics does. England hasn’t had an English king in nearly a millennia – it has had Normans, French (Plantagenet), Welsh (Tudors), Scots (Stuarts), Germans (Hanover & Saxe-Corburg Gotha/Windsor) and Greek (Mountbatten-Windsor). Do you really think that the genetics of the English population miraculously changed each time to match?
Yes necessarily.
Except we are talking genetics not genealogy – and there is no evidence that Troy had any genetic impact on the Franks, Huguenots, etc, etc – let alone that Trojans carried the R1b gene.
Here, you are getting into the realm of Russell’s teapot! The number of things that “could have” happened, but almost certainly didn’t, is infinite.
I will conclude by stating that everything in your post was either unsubstantiated or irrelevant Valerie (and I suspect the same thing goes for every post you have made to this thread).
I find this to be extremely annoying.
I would therefore ask you, before you post anything further, about how X brought R1b to Y, to ask yourself:
Do I have hard evidence that X carried R1b (to a greater degree than the rest of Western Europe did on average)?
Do I have hard evidence that X migrated to Y in sufficient numbers to make a significant difference to Y’s genetic makeup)?
If the answer to those two questions aren’t both yes, then I would ask you not to post the claim.
These questions would have excluded, Franks, Huguenots, Trojans, Coal miners, Normans, etc, etc from unnecessarily cluttering discussion.
To date, it is not so much that Jeanson and you have proved to be wrong, as that both your claims have proven to be so badly malformed as to be “not even wrong”.
Tim has listed reasons why the Huguenot migrations can’t explain the pattern even in part. Even the migration destinations are wrong (mainly England and the Netherlands).
The Normans don’t make a lot more sense. The Normans didn’t migrate en masse. You’d have had lords and presumably their retainers, outnumbered greatly by their Irish subjects. Connacht seems to have had less Norman influence than the rest of Ireland, which is also rather a problem for the idea.
Ireland, Scotland, Wales and northwestern England are dominated by R1b-L21, which is also found in northwestern France(Brittany), the north coast of Spain (Galicia), and western Norway.
Which is really in agreement with the idea that Celtic ancestry is more responsible for the distribution.
Addendum:
I’ve seen the Norway hotspot explained in terms of slaves brought back from the Brittish Isles. I would also expect that when Norse warbands in the British Isles suffered losses, they may have recruited local youths to replace them (who would thereafter intermingle with the mobile Norse gene pool). Also Caithness (the North Eastern-most county in Scotland), until 1266, and the Orkneys, until 1472, were part of the Kingdom of Norway, likely leading to some further intermingling. And it is likely that trade across the North Sea would have have continued thereafter, leading to a small level of further intermingling.
Iceland has similar interaction:
Genetic studies in Iceland reveal about 19% of the males and 62% of the females have Irish/British Isles DNA.
Vikings brought back a lot of thralls from Britain, Ireland, and perhaps Brittany. Could that be it? Or, rather than Celts, could the haplogroup be a remnant of older European populations, with more recent arrivals being diluted the farther west they went? That would explain the Basque component.
Yes, and I’d added that suggestion more-or-less simultaneously (given moderation timings ) as an addendum above.
I would agree.
I suspect the Celts, Basques, and probably a few other smaller groups of in tact pre-Roman and pre-Germanic-influx populations are all the genetic inheritors of earlier prehistoric culture(s) which brought R1b to Europe. The strongest candidate seems to be the Corded Ware Culture of the late Neolithic.
You’re forgetting we’re talking about men. You don’t need a migration en masse. You need powerful men who have motivation to have male heirs, at least initially. Normans in Ireland - Wikipedia
And from what I can tell it doesn’t appear they had less influence in Connacht but that they mixed with the population like anyone else.
That’s how Wikipedia and other websites refer to them. It’s not something I made up.
Hmm, I’ve looking up common Norman surnames, they’ve all been turning up majority R1b (sometimes others mixed in - a little bit of infidelity in all lines)
You’re missing the point of the math. Randomness (and selection even more) drives one lineage closer to fixation quickly in a downturn. When looking at the y-chromosome, the population changes in a geographical area matter more than any historcal pattern of people groups. All that is necessary is positing some Norman lineages got there. Which is obviously the case based on the Wikipedia article I shared above.
Again, we’re talking about the Y chromosome. Much different than the genetics of a population as a whole. Intuition would tell you that if there was a powerful male line that persists to the present day, there are lots of other male descendants that faded into the general population. Some I’ve looked up: Mallet, Montgomery, Burke, Darcy, Fitzgerald. What I was suggesting is that if a Robert, ancestor of the Capetians (which is likely subhaplogroup U-106) also had a son that had descendants in Normandy, it explains the pattern of other subhaplogroups. The population was small enough a millennium ago that the math can lead to that many R1b descendants without needing the explanation of an even older native population.
I’ll see if I can answer some more specific questions later.
You mean like Henry VIII? Look what good that did him (and he infamously tried really, really hard), but only produced a single male heir, who died without issue at only 15. Male lines die out all the time.
How many males of Norman patrilineal descent (as opposed to males of Anglo-Saxon descent, who had been recruited into the Norman lords’ armies) actually settled in Connacht? If you don’t know the answer to this question then you have no evidence to support your contention.
Firstly, I never claimed that Normans weren’t majority R1b, only that they weren’t a ‘hotspot’. Probably due to Normandy’s proximity to Brittany, it has a slight majority of R1b. This is however well below the levels that we see in West Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, or even the Basque Country.
Secondly, surnames aren’t necessarily ancestry. It is not uncommon for surnames to change for a variety of reasons. Not infrequently we see this happen for social advantage. We see this with non-English names being anglicised in England and the US to this day. It would be easy to see an Anglo-Saxon, (Cornish, etc, etc) man taking a Normanised name in order to ‘get ahead’.
Also, how extensive is your survey? How high a majority? How many people in Connacht have Norman names? It seems highly unlikely that you have evidence for each link in the chain that you would need for this to be a plausible idea – and, as I’ve previously pointed out, I am getting oh so very tired of all your implausible ideas.
No Valerie. You are quoting me out of context.
I said immediately thereafter:
And it is still irrelevant.
And Russell’s teapot reappears again, with another utterly unlikely “could be”. Yes, it is possible that “one lineage” might have been brought closer to fixation by an extended, multi-generational, downturn, it is astronomically unlikely that the one lineage you’re interested in was brought to 94%+ fixation within a mere four year period (the Irish potato famine only lasted from 1845-49).
I would point out to you Valerie, that you have neither history nor “math” to back up your claims – just wishful thinking!
You take “Genetic Drift” and “Irish Potato Famine”, fail to examine either even superficially, and confect a perfectly ridiculous claim. The only thing that this convinces me of is that you’re an even worse at genetics and history than even Jeanson!
Did I say that we weren’t? We are talking about “the Y chromosome” of the population not just the Royal Family!
Therefore it is irrelevant whether there was “the right affair in the 10th or the 11th century” – because that would change the Y-chromosome of only the Royal Familynot the population! The Y-chromosome of the Royal Family likely changes every time there is a new Royal Dynasty, hence a new one with each of:
I’m really really not interested in what “answers” you come up with Valerie, unless and until you can provide hard evidence to back up each step in your claims.
Agreed, but at this point, it appears that @thoughtful has put more effort into defending Jeanson than Jeanson did before coming up with this silly story.
In terms of brute “effort” I’d probably agree with you, but in terms of hard evidence and coherent argument, I’d say it is a dead heat (with neither of them having ventured beyond the starting blocks).
And the Irish lords would have been equally determined - and there were quite a few in Connaught. Which did indeed have less of a Norman presence.
Not to mention that we have similar concentrations in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, but not England, although that was also invaded by the Normans and was the centre of their power for much of the time…
I think you will find an even larger majority of R1b amongst the Irish.
But then again R1b has been common in Europe since the Bronze Age.
So, no, the Normans are barely better than the Huguenots - too few and not concentrated in the right places - or even having a sufficiently high frequency of the relevant haplogroups. The map of R1b-L21 distribution makes that even plainer - it’s certainly not radiating out from Normandy - if there’s any effect it’s a diminishment. The strongest concentrations are to the West or Northwest.
Jeanson didn’t come up with this silly story. It’s all me. I’m defending my own ideas.
Yes, I meant the former, not the latter.
Connacht’s population was 1,418,859 in 1841.[7] Then came the Great Famine of the 1840s, which began a 120-year decline to under 400,000. The province has a population of just under 590,000 according to the preliminary results of the 2022 census.[8]
I’m not suggesting that subhaplogroup originated in Normandy. Instead that it originated in some Norman who settled in England, and whose lineage then resettled in Ireland, Brittany, etc. Resettled again in the U.S…there’s almost a millennium worth of time for people to move around.
No Valerie, you didn’t. You were not looking at the probability of some random lineage being brought to fixation, but of the one lineage you are assuming is the Norman one carrying R1b – hence not “one lineage” (at random) but “the one lineage you’re interested in” (of a Norman with R1b). This lowers the probability considerably.
This is merely numbersnot “math”, let alone evidence. So Valerie, if I’m “missing the point of the math”, perform the “math” of a population genetics calculation of the probability that a human population decrease from 1,418,859 to under 400,000 in 180 years will bring a Y-chromosome to fixation.
If you can’t, then you have presented no evidence to support your claim – just some random and largely irrelevant numbers.
But as you have no evidence for “suggesting” this, we are perfectly justified in rejecting this suggestion without further examination!
The fact of the matter is that you don’t have the first idea how plausible your hypotheses are – you’re just flinging any old thing at the wall in the vain hope that something might stick.
This has gotten very, very repetitive Valerie. It also builds an increasingly compelling picture of you being wholly incapable of critically analysing your own hypotheses.
If it’s just one person, why assume that they’re a Norman? And why should we even think it possible that it originated so recently? It all seems just a fantasy invented to try to defend young-Earth dogma. That doesn’t make Christianity look any better to me - it makes it look worse.