Product Description

Exploring the genetic roots of Britain and Ireland

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #143907 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 306 pages

Synopsis
Bryan Sykes, the world's first genetic archaeologist, takes us on a journey around the family tree of Britain and Ireland, to reveal how our tribal history still colours the country today. In 54BC, Julius Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain. His was the first detailed account of the Celtic tribes that inhabited the Isles. But where had they come from and how long had they been there? When the Roman eventually left five hundred years later, they were succeeded by invasions of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Did these successive invasions obliterate the genetic legacy of the Celts, or have very little effect? After two decades tracing the genetic origins of people from all over the world, Bryan Sykes has now turned the spotlight on his own back yard. In a major research programme, the first of its kind, he and his team at Oxford University set out to test the DNA of over 10,000 volunteers from across Britain and Ireland with the specific aim of answering this very question: what is our modern genetic make-up and what does it tell us of our tribal past? Where are today's Celtic genes? Did Vikings only rape and pillage, or settle with their families?

And what of the genetic legacy of the Saxons and the Normans? Are the modern people of the Isles a delicious genetic cocktail? Or did the invaders keep mostly to themselves forming separate genetic layers within the Isles? And where do you fit in? As his findings came in, Bryan Sykes discovered that the genetic evidence revealed often very different stories to the conventional accounts coming from history and archaeology. "Blood of the Isles" reveals the nature of our genetic make-up as never before and what this says about our attitudes to ourselves, each other, and to our past. It is a gripping story that will fascinate and surprise with its conclusions.

Customer Reviews

Cynical, anti-English and Wrong
To question the delusion of a 'celtic' identity these days is to attract not just hotility but, as certain writers have found to their cost, even death threats.

With huge incomes to support and vast armies of porridge-brained fashionistas yearning to discover an oirish ancestor or two (akin to what seems an exponential rise in the number of desperate whites claiming 'native American' blood) this is unsurprising.

Fortunately for the industry academics aren't very brave, and untold riches await those willing to play along, thus tending to a 'consensus' guaranteeing even greater unpopularity for critical reviews such as this.

Myself I hate to dispel people's fancies, even those lovingly encouraged by reptilian money-grubbers such as this author, and I just know I risk the displeasure of 'celts' evefrywhere, but you'll forgive me if I take 'Blood of the Isles' with a generous pinch of salt.

Politically correct nomenclature should have been warning enough. But even before that there is the title: wistful, romantic, cynically contrived to lead readers toward the check-out expecting something vaguely 'irish', something vaguely 'scottish', something vaguely ....'celtic'?

'Celtic of any sort,' observed J.R.R. Tolkein, is 'a magic bag, in which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come.' Yet here again we have a 'serious' academic, one eye on sales, peddling outworn drivel dressed up as science.

There weren't any 'celts' in these islands. Even the word is made up. Certainly little exists to distinguish them from similar peoples any more than we can fully distinguish Saxons from Friesians. None of that bothers commercially driven academics like Sykes. Apologizing - how like a modern Englishman - for everything from the holocaust to the wicked Saxon plan to annihilate their 'celtic' neighbours merely add weight to a sense of the commercial priorities at work.

Sykes is correct in one sense. He just gets the wrong era. Evidence confirms that genes from about 200,000 Anglo-Saxon immigrants supplanted almost completely those of 'native' Britons ten times their number. And they did it to plan, through strictly enforced apartheid.

Our ancestors brought their own women. Tribally different they nevertheless spoke similar dialects. The paucity of 'celtic' loan words in English, or in place-naming, is proof enough of this insularity, of a profound transformation wrought by the presence of these invaders, just as it is affirms our German heritage.

Culture warriors deliberately mis-label what is actually German - the famous 'celtic cross', to take one example. As to the 'British' they were progressively confined to Wales after the invasion, where they remain. Within just 15 generations, according to a London University study, Anglo-Saxon genes accounted for more than half the male DNA in the population of what is now England. It went on, 'In the modern population the DNA is even more heavily Germanic in origin.' Up yours Channel 4.

Sykes is correct to identify a common ancestry. It just isn't 'celtic'. Scythian is one possibility, though all remain arguable. It is the author's anti-English tone, adopted presumably to curry favour with the 'celtic' lobby here and in America, which raises suspicions.

On page 278 Sykes warns a trifle condescendingly, "However we may feel about each other the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots know (that we share a 'celtic' past), but the English sometimes think otherwise. But, just a little way beneath the surface, the strands of ancestry weave us all togetheras the children of a common past. . . . It is our own genetic ancestry that is the most important. It is the thread that goes back to our own deep roots that means the most".

Nonsense. Whatever the irish, welsh and scots 'know' it most certainly isn't that they are 'celtic'. What they know, the boyos, or pretend to, or have learnt, is how to identify themselves in opposition to a neighbour they envy and hate. 'Celtic' identity is - always was - political, a mythopoeic aspect of regional, primarily irish, revivalism, of which an all too disreputable feature these days sees distinct, singular cultures appropriated into a single timeline in order to 'prove' longevity.

Ireland's southern population, for example, did not arrive until the 2nd century AD. That recent histories fail to reflect this merely exemplifies a political agenda at work in which 'research' establishes a prior moral claim to these islands in opposition to the English.

Sykes writes for tourists. Proof positive of Dr Johnson's dictum that 'no-one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money' this is a hack publication - populist, easy to read, and in its pandering to fashionable prejudice about as valuable.

We are told people distrust science these days. I do hope so. Pretensions to objectivity alone sustain science's mesmeric hold on the public imagination. What the average citizen fails to spot is the brazen politicking the ideology helps to conceal.

Remember dumping fridges because CFCs were destroying the ozone layer? I never quite knew how since CFCs are about eight times heavier than air. Remember the 'imminent' ice age of twenty years ago, which has now given way to global warming, or the hysteria surrounding second-hand tobacco smoke, accepted as harmless by medical authorities everywhere since the 1950s?

Maybe you prefer the 'out of Africa' theory of human origins? Imagine how many research grants depend on singing from that particular multiculturalist hymn sheet. Of course if Eskimos go back way before Europeans like they say I'm going to look a fool when all those sub-zero temperatures turn them into white people. Any day now.....

Sykes understands our inclination to go 'baaaah' whenever we are told things we like to hear. He knows that with our critical faculties atrophied after years of TV we can't tell our backsides from a pork chop. I just wish he hadn't cleaned up at my expense. English people who share my point of view should actively discourage their compatriots from lining the pockets of an enemy.

Thin, rushed, poorly presented
I expected much better of this book having read Syke's previous "Seven Daughters of Eve." I read Sykes because he's a famed geneticist, but he pads most of the book with straight chapters on British history that any 3rd rate historian could have penned. When it comes to the meat of the issue, the DNA of Britain, he hedges and dumbs down so much that you suspect he's not confident at all of his findings. One frustratingly obvious example is when he labels a particular strain of male Y- chromosome DNA "Wodan" and never explains what it is. You assume it's a reference to a Germanic strain, but Sykes doesn't bother to tell us through 200-plus pages. His information is so annoyingly sketchy and incomplete I suspect he rushed the book into print to satisfy the advertising needs of his DNA testing business. Overall, the biggest frustration with Sykes' work is his refusal to explain with satisfaction why, if we all descend from people who lived in southern Europe during the last ice age, how he can distinguish "Celtic" DNA from "Anglo-Saxon" DNA in Britain. Couldn't the Paleolithic clan have migrated to Germany, and then later to Britain? If so, how can he say who's Celtic and who's Anglo Saxon. A mess of a book. Just read Norman Davies "The Isles" and consider yourself lucky.

Blood Transfusion Needed
Popular science writing does not have to be dumb. Steve Jones , Richard Dawkins ,
Matt Ridley, Richard Fortey and others can tackle technical/scientific subjects and still
produce something enjoyable to the general reader without sacrificing all the scientific "meat".
This book , although enjoyable , is thin stuff compared to the output of the above writers.
Sykes is perfectly entitled to produce a "Blue Peter" version of a fascinating topic but I
can't help thinking that a chance has been missed. As others have noted , the rampant egotism
and commercialism further taints the appreciation of what might have been a feast. Mr Sykes
should not patronise the reading public by assuming that the addition of cosy anecdotes and
mythological waffle will compensate for the absence of real substance.