A United Kingdom? Maybe

Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands.

Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country8217;s western and northern fringes.

But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. The implication that the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh have a great deal in common with each other, at least from the geneticist8217;s point of view, seems likely to please no one.

The genetic evidence is still under development, however, and because only very rough dates can be derived from it, it is hard to weave evidence from DNA, archaeology, history and linguistics into a coherent picture of British and Irish origins. That has not stopped the attempt. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians8217; account is wrong in almost every detail. In Oppenheimer8217;s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today8217;s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.

In all, about three-quarters of the ancestors of today8217;s British and Irish populations arrived between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, when rising sea levels split Britain and Ireland from the Continent and from each other, Oppenheimer calculates in a new book, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story.

Oppenheimer said genes 8220;have no bearing on cultural history.8221; There is no significant genetic difference between the people of Northern Ireland, yet they have been fighting with each other for 400 years, he said.

8211;NICHOLAS WADE