As a co-founder of this R1b-CTS4466 Plus Project (with Finbar O Mahony and Elizabeth), it is heartening to see such thorough scholarship of some its members (ref. the message below), but let¡¯s ensure it is not lost in e-mails.
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Publishing in book form aside, the pukka way of retaining it is production of peer-reviewed papers in journals. With or without this, publishing via sites like Academia would retain it. Closer to home, presentation as articles deposited in our project¡¯s forum files or inclusion in a (long) dedicated section on the R1b-CTS4466 Plus main website would be an option, in either case with all references to sources professionally cited. The advantage here is much easier access to edit and update.?
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Deposition in the forum files will have limited access to public gaze, but while the authors are likely to further develop the articles in response to members¡¯ comments or their own further studies this may suit them well. It should be understood that the author would have ownership and thus sole write access for updating and republishing purposes.
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Elizabeth, perhaps this is something you can organise, foster or delegate (but not to me!). I¡¯m posting this publicly rather than privately as it might resonate with some of our members.
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Kind regards = Nigel McCarthy
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Sent from for Windows
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More and more Ogham stones have been documented since the 1940s, and more continue to be discovered. It is thought that there are about 400 in Britain and Ireland, the majority (330) are found in Ireland. ?
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The main concentration of Ogham activity is in the south, particularly the southwest, with a clustering in Kerry, stretching out along the southern coast, up through Waterford, Wexford and up to south Wicklow.
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In Cornwall and Devon, together, there are a dozen stones. England has a single stone known. There are 8 on the Isle of Man. There are 6 in Gaelic D¨¢l Riata Scotland, but 29 found in areas of former Pictish Kingdoms, mainly along the east-coast of Scotland, the Orkneys, and the Shetlands. Uniquely the Pictish stones appear are in a non-Irish in language, the rest are exclusively in primitive Irish, with accompanying Latin alphabet script found in Wales.
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Undoubtedly Waterford-East Cork has an old dynastic link with Wales and it is suggested by many commentators, including David Stifter from Maynooth, that ¡®this connection suggests itself as a channel of transmission for the art of writing between those two countries¡¯. However the direct of travel is impossible to ascertain. The concentration in southwest Ireland might well suggest a west-east source of travel.
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Stifter also points out that scholars in the early and middle part of the 20th century, including Carney, were inclined to see in Ogham an Irish invention of great antiquity, going back to the 1st century A.D. (e.g. Carney 1975) or even earlier. Whereas the current thinking is that they are a phenomena that belongs to the early 5th Century (Sims-Williams). Harvey argues, given that the majority of Ogham stones belong to the ¡®orthodox¡¯ phase of Ogham stone creation, and are overwhelmingly written in primitive Irish, any time between the 1st and 5th century is possible, before the transition to old Irish in the 6th Century during the ¡®Great Upheaval of the Phonological System¡¯.
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Radio carbon dating is not effective on stone, and neither have the sites been satisfactorily archaeologically investigated. However the archaeological evidence of the Silchester Stone (dating to around 496) supports a late Antiquity origin. It is also noted that the emergence of Ogham could coincide with the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. Swift argues that Ogham was devised as a vernacular counterpart to Latin literacy - a prerequisite for embracing the Christian tradition.
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Therefore the emergence of ¡®orthodox¡¯ Ogham stones in the 4th Century or so (to split the difference) does not coincide with any particular shift in language, which might be expected if Ogham was associated with external settlement into Ireland.? That being said, however, it is known that Irish, and primitive Irish, was spoken in areas of Irish settlement in Britain, most particularly Wales (especially Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Gwynedd, and Anglesey). As such it is not surprising to find that British Ogham stones have Irish inscriptions. Nevertheless of the 50 or so Ogham inscriptions that are known from the area of Roman Britain only five stones are monolingual Irish. The others are bilingual and usually contain Latin or Old British equivalent versions of the Irish text. This is suggestive of an intermingling of cultures in Britain which is absent in Ireland, and perhaps illustrates that the emergence of Ogham script in Britain is a result of Irish immigration into Britain in Late Antiquity, and not vice versa at an earlier stage.
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As such, Ogham stones are far too late to be suggestive of any significant settlement into Ireland from Wales after the 1st Century, and Ogham probably emerged in Ireland far later than 250AD. Indeed the opposite might indeed prove the case ¨CIron Age commemorative standing stones (if that was indeed their purpose) seem to be an Irish phenomenon if one employs the metric of crude statistical clustering.
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It is arguable that the script itself may have been devised on the island of Britain, and imported into Ireland. Ireland did not exist in splendid isolation. The archaeological evidence, particularly from sites such as Newgrange, clearly establish that from the 1st millennium, there was significant interaction with Roman Britain. The late Professor O¡¯Kelly of UCC used to describe the discovery of Roman coins at Newgrange as evidence of ¡®Roman tourists in Ireland¡¯. Subsequent archaeological surveys have found evidence of Roman trading posts in Co. Dublin. As such it is undoubtedly certain that the Irish had come into contact with the Latin alphabet.
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It is commonly accepted that Ogham script was probably invented by someone, perhaps in Britain. Stifter argues that the uniformity of the writing system from the earliest times, without evidence for a period of experimentation, points to the inventor being a single individual, perhaps familiar with Latin writing and the Latin grammatical tradition, but it is impossible to specify a place. The motivation for the invention may have been to give the Irish language a cultural status of equal prestige alongside Latin.
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Stifter also makes a convincing argument that Ogham, as a phenomenon, is probably continuously associated with the south of Ireland. He points out that the written manuscript tradition of Old Irish sets towards the end of the classical Ogam period (roughly from the middle of the 7th Century onwards) are written in Latin script, and the first centres of manuscript writing in Old Irish were located in the north-east of Ireland (e.g., Bangor, Armagh). Whereas Ogam activities continued in the south and southwest of the island for some time afterwards, which he identifies as a curious dichotomy. Though of course some Ogham manuscripts do survive, and the intermingling of Ogham and Latin text is a feature of the Irish manuscription tradition.
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I think the core of John¡¯s argument is that the A151 subclade is most associated with the U¨ª Liath¨¢in and Irish migration into Wales and the Ogham tradition followed with them. It might be no co-incidence that the O¡¯Connells of Derrynane are an A151 cluster,? given the concentration of Ogham stones in territory of the Corca Dhuibhne. I may be misrepresenting his position, and if so apologies for that.
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EXTERNAL EMAIL: This email originated from outside of NUI Galway. Do not open attachments or click on links in the message unless you recognise the sender's email address and believe the content is safe.
R?OMHPHOST SEACHTRACH: Th¨¢inig an r¨ªomhphost seo as ¨¢it ¨¦igin taobh amuigh de O? Gaillimh. N¨¢ clice¨¢il ar naisc agus n¨¢ hoscail ceangalt¨¢in mura n-aithn¨ªonn t¨² seoladh r¨ªomhphoist an tseolt¨®ra agus mura gcreideann t¨² go bhfuil an t-¨¢bhar s¨¢bh¨¢ilte.
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The Book of Invasions (written? in the 11th century) says the Partholonians, the second group to settle in Ireland, died from a pestilence.? You can¡¯t help but wonder if a plague/pandemic (a real one) occurred during that 40 BC to 250 AD period and was incorporated into the myths.?
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Might our FGC11134¡ gents have survived?? Or might a second wave of that haplogroup arrived later?
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John, does Stout indicate if this lull affected the whole island equally?? I know you shared with me privately last month that Stout believed that Ogham was developed in west Wales rather than southern Ireland.? I¡¯m getting that book¡
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Elizabeth
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A potential contributor to a SNP bottleneck might be the phenomenon known as the 'Late Iron Age Lull'?
Discussed briefly (since it antedates his main focus) by Dr Matthew Stout in his 2017 book entitled Early Medieval Ireland 431-1169, he points to a marked downturn in human agricultural activity in Ireland from around 40 BC to 250 AD as evidenced by pollen analysis. He suggests that this must have been associated with a marked decline in population, further supported by a 'gap' in building construction over the same period. This does not seem to have been associated with a deteriorating climate - indeed the corresponding period in Britain is known as the 'Roman Warm Period'.
It certainly could provide both a SNP bottleneck but also a marked incentive for some to 'investigate' opportunities on the eastern shore of the Irish Sea?
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On final point, if the archaeological evidence doesn¡¯t point to an Iron Age invasion, or if the linguistic evidence doesn¡¯t point to any significant interruption or linguistic revolution in primitive insular Goidelic, then there is a problem ¨C the sequence of events doesn¡¯t fit. The only solution to this problem of such a large continuous snip block is a significant bottleneck in CTS4466, with the modern snip block perhaps representing the survivors. As such, if the modern Irish tree branch has been interrupted by a significant bottleneck, then that implies that the first CTS4466 man in Ireland was a lot older than 250AD. The MRCA of the modern group is just descended from a branch line that survived, the collateral lines perished and as such are absent on the modern phylogenetic tree. If so, it really isn¡¯t possible to date when CTS4466 arrived in Ireland to any accurate degree. ???
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I suspect I¡¯m not delivering any earth shattering news ¨C the conclusion is obvious.
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EXTERNAL EMAIL: This email originated from outside of NUI Galway. Do not open attachments or click on links in the message unless you recognise the sender's email address and believe the content is safe.
R?OMHPHOST SEACHTRACH: Th¨¢inig an r¨ªomhphost seo as ¨¢it ¨¦igin taobh amuigh de O? Gaillimh. N¨¢ clice¨¢il ar naisc agus n¨¢ hoscail ceangalt¨¢in mura n-aithn¨ªonn t¨² seoladh r¨ªomhphoist an tseolt¨®ra agus mura gcreideann t¨² go bhfuil an t-¨¢bhar s¨¢bh¨¢ilte.
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On another point, if CTS4466, particularly R-A541, Irish Type II, is the dominant snip marker in the Southwest of Ireland, 250AD might seem a little recent to establish a founder effect. The other possible chink in the armour is language ¨C Ogham stones might be identified with CTS4466, but we know they were written in primitive Irish and not in P-Celtic Brythonic, as might be expected if CTS4466 came from either Wales or Gaul.
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I take your point though, yFull estimates the TMRCA of A541 to 1750 ybd.
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Best,
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Neil
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From: O'Brien, Neil
Sent: Monday 6 September 2021 17:24
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [R1b-CTS4466-Plus] Y-DNA Warehouse Tree Tech Demo
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If we¡¯re agreed that CTS4466 probably didn¡¯t form on the island of Ireland, but in Wales ¨C or perhaps further afield, 250AD would be a significant date. It would mean that the arrival of the clade into Ireland coincides with the Irish Iron Age, and most Irish archaeologists have long argued that there is no evidence for any significant population incursion into Ireland in the Iron Age. Mind you, they said the same about the Bronze Age too¡¡¡ ??
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EXTERNAL EMAIL: This email originated from outside of NUI Galway. Do not open attachments or click on links in the message unless you recognise the sender's email address and believe the content is safe.
R?OMHPHOST SEACHTRACH: Th¨¢inig an r¨ªomhphost seo as ¨¢it ¨¦igin taobh amuigh de O? Gaillimh. N¨¢ clice¨¢il ar naisc agus n¨¢ hoscail ceangalt¨¢in mura n-aithn¨ªonn t¨² seoladh r¨ªomhphoist an tseolt¨®ra agus mura gcreideann t¨² go bhfuil an t-¨¢bhar s¨¢bh¨¢ilte.
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The thing about the age estimates is that you only count SNPs that fall inside the regions where there has been work to study the rates of mutations.? While there are 20 equivalent SNPs only 15 are used for dating the branch.
As far as the 1700 years that Elizabeth was asking about being different¡ that¡¯s in the same ballpark I¡¯m pretty sure I¡¯ve always been. ?1950 - 1700 = 250AD.
James
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This time/SNP thing intrigues me greatly (as I assume it does others). Let¡¯s do a little kindergarden math:
Elizabeth notes that James has?CTS4466 formed 3,000 ybp and its¡¯ TMRCA at 1,700 ybp.
There are 20 SNPs in the CYS4466 block making the time between forming and the TMRCA yield an average SNP rate of (3000-1700)/20 = 65 yrs/SNP.
There are two Lee¡¯s near me who, with their 2 private variants, are some 37 SNPs below CTS4466¡¯s TMRCA. If we assume that this takes us all the way to the ¡®present¡¯, then using James¡¯s value of 1700 ybp for that time frame, we get another estimate: 1700/37 = 45.9 yrs/SNP. Of course, the two Lee¡¯s likely do not lead us up to the present; there are more SNPs to be discovered, thus making the ¡¯37¡¯ larger and the yrs/SNP smaller.
Then if we do these together, we get 3000/57 = 52.6 yrs/SNP. And that¡¯s a max number. So 50 yrs/SNP is perhaps a better guess.
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lilwayne