What’s in a name?

The subject matter under review was human genetic variation for Europe. As part of the presentation, there were pie charts, and there was a map of the continent. “Not only did they not have charts on Ireland, they didn’t even have Ireland on the map,” he said, laughing.
Certainly, it was true that this particular aspect of genetics had been understudied in Ireland. And no research had been done with the most modern DNA techniques.
But Bradley had the spur he needed and it wasn’t long before he made a splash. In 2000, a paper he co-wrote for Nature magazine was reported by the New York Times and scores of other media outlets around the world.
Using DNA analysis, Bradley and his researchers at Trinity had found evidence that suggested that 98 percent of men in Connacht, the westernmost province, were descended from the original hunters and gatherers who inhabited Ireland before farming reached there about 6,000 years ago.
The newer picture links the Irish and other nationalities, including the Scots, the Welsh and the Basques, along the edge of Europe. “It points toward a Western Atlantic genetic heritage, which is probably a relic of something a very long time ago,” he said.
Bradley said that he and his doctoral students at the Department of Genetics, Smurfit Institute, had a dual motivation in carrying out their work. “We’re all Irish, and everybody has an interest in their own region’s history,” he said. “Second, maybe there’s something interesting about Ireland. It’s out here on the edge of Europe, maybe it could contribute something to the bigger picture.”
The bigger picture begins on the savannas of Eastern Africa. Everyone on earth today is equally distant from the early modern humans of Eastern Africa,” writes Steve Olson in “Mapping Human History.”
The generations that have passed since then are in evolutionary terms, Olson says, the “blink of an eye.”
Bradley believes that genetic interrelatedness of humans is a good place to start any discussion on the subject. “It’s often quoted, but you can take two chimpanzees living on neighboring mountainsides and they’ll be more different than any two humans taken from different parts of the planet,” he said.
But his main interest covers a fraction of the time since human beings first ventured from Africa — the 9,000 or 10,000-year period that Ireland has been inhabited, and also more recent developments, whether 1,500, 1,000 and 500 years ago.
Much of the research in this area uses the Y chromosome, which remains virtually unchanged when it’s passed from father to son. And Ireland is not only a place where family names have been passed on generally from father to son for about 1,000 years, but also a country where a great deal is known about the geography of surnames.
So, Bradley and three PhDs students, Brien McEvoy among them, last year started a names project, examining intensively 12 Irish surnames. They took the DNA samples, using cheek swabs, of 50-100 for each of the them.
The hope is that when the results are tabulated and analyzed this year it will deepen the genetic research they’ve already been doing. But it’s also an academic study on surnames themselves that might help us understand better Irish family names: whether, for instance, subordinate kinship groups took on surnames and the extent of adoption and fostering in times past.
Among the names studied are the most common — Murphy, Kelly, O’Sullivan, Ryan, Byrne, etc. But some strongly regional names are also on the list, McGuinness among them, which has attracted a degree of media interest. Patrick Guinness of the brewing family is a generous supporter of the project, Bradley said. And one newspaper has pointed to the number of politicians who have some variant of the name. There’s Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, former Ulster Unionist MP Ken Maginnis, Alban Maginness of the SDLP, as well John McGuinness, a Fianna Fail TD from Wexford. Add to those Hollywood actor Liam Neeson, whose name is one of the many derivative.
Not all these may prove to be linked, because “branches” of the same family sometimes are not connected in any way. However, Bradley argued, if two men do have a matching Y chromosome it does point to a relationship, even it goes very far back, that’s stronger than that between two men selected at random in the Irish population.
“Having said that it’s important to realize that the Y chromosome is only a marker of one of all the lineages that make us up,” said Bradley, who’s married with a son and a daughter.
It’s one, though, that he’s explored in his own case. The fact that his department did a research project on Irish Bradleys, who are mainly concentrated in Counties Donegal, Tyrone and Derry, where he himself is from, he puts down to a “little bit of egocentricism.”
Although some Bradleys in Ireland may be descendants of people from Yorkshire and other parts of Britain, most are not. In Ireland Bradley, like Reynolds and Buckley, is generally traced to an Anglicization that took an existing English surname.
His assistant McEvoy confirmed his “Irishness,” and that of most of the Bradleys they’ve tested.
“It looks like an Irish Y chromosome,” he said. “But these haplotypes [distinct sequences in DNA] are older than the idea of Ireland. You find them in Wales and Scotland. They’re more of a western periphery variant, which is typical of Ireland, than a central, North-central European variant.
All of this fits in with Bradley’s thesis about the continuity of genetic heritage on the island going back to the earliest times. And it tends to support what is known about the beginning of the Celtic influence in Ireland, which is dated to 500 BC.
“The archeological evidence does not support the idea of a large scale invasion, nor does genetics,” Bradley said. “There was certainly no wholesale replacement of who had been here by so-called Celts. There’s very little to suggest anything other than ideas coming here.”
The Anglo-Norman invasion and the Ulster Plantation have had their impact on genetics. This was shown even back in 1964 by George Dawson, the former professor of genetics at Trinity, with his analysis of blood group O, which is higher in the West of Ireland, Western Scotland, Wales and the Basque region. Blood group A is higher in eastern parts of Ulster and Ireland generally.
“There hasn’t been enough intermarriage to eradicate the genetic signature of past migration into the north,” Bradley said. “You can still see Catholic areas have slightly different blood group frequencies to Protestant areas.”
And the fact that the Anglo-Norman was “quite substantial” is also backed up by genetic evidence.
One of the most intriguing genetic differences is that separating Western and Eastern Britain. “Wales to Lincolnshire is not a large distance, but actually in Y chromosomes, it’s quite a strong difference — a strong gradient across a short region which points to something dramatic in the past in more or less what we call England,” Bradley said.
There are two candidates: first, 400 years of Roman rule might have had a major impact on the genetics in that region; the other is there was a population event linked to the Anglo-Saxons invasion about 500 AD from Northern Jutland which was traumatic and bloody.
Growing up in Northern Ireland has made him sensitive to the issue of identity, Bradley said.
“Genetics doesn’t confer identity, nor does it deny it,” he said. It shouldn’t be used to exclude people, but nor should it be underestimated.
And commercial developments in genetics and genealogy might be of benefit to people in this area. An American called Murphy might know little about his distant ancestor from Ireland, but if he can trace his Y chromosome to the Munsters Murphys, “then it’s real to him,” he said.
His background also helped his career choice.
“I had a mathematical inclination, and genetics is a math-laden subject, and a natural interest in biology — linked to a country/farm upbringing and genetics is a biological subject,” said Bradley, who began studying the subject as an undergraduate at Oxford two decades ago.
His work on human genetics in recent years has made the work even more interesting.
You can’t interest the proverbial guy in the pub talking about two enzymes, he said, but start a conversation about where the Irish came from — that’s another story.
“It’s fascinating and very rewarding,” he said.