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The majority of Irish men are descended from farmers who came to the country 6,000 years ago, not from an older line of hunter-gatherers as previously believed, a study has found.<\/p>\nThe majority of Irish men are descended from farmers who came to the country 6,000 years ago, not from an older line of hunter-gatherers as previously believed, a study has found.<\/p>\n
Researchers at Britain\u2019s University of Leicester have discovered that 85% of Irish males are descendants of farmers who migrated to the country from Turkey and surrounding Mediterranean areas, bringing agriculture with them.<\/p>\n
The information contradicts previous theories that suggested the primary genetic legacy of Irish males is from hunter-gatherers who survived in Spain and Portugal during the last Ice Age.<\/p>\n
The researchers also found a different pattern in female genetic material, suggesting the farmers, when they arrived in Ireland, appealed to women more than the indigenous hunter-gatherers.<\/p>\n
Patricia Balaresque, first author of the study, said: \u201cMost maternal genetic lineages seem to descend from hunter-gatherers. To us, this suggests a reproductive advantage for farming males over indigenous hunter-gatherer males during the switch to farming. Maybe, it was just sexier to be a farmer.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, examined the diversity of the Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son. It focused on the most common lineage in Europe, which it found to be present in 85% of Irish men.<\/p>\n
The authors used different lines of evidence to shape the latest theory: the pattern of distribution of the chromosome\u2019s lineage in men, the diversity within it, and estimates of its age.<\/p>\n
These all suggested that the lineage spread with farming from the Near East. Jobling said: \u201cThis particular kind of Y chromosome follows a gradient, gradually increasing in frequency from Turkey and the southeast of Europe to Ireland, where it reaches its highest frequency.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Britain, the lineage trait is in 60%-65% of the population, and in parts of the Iberian peninsula it\u2019s almost as high as in Ireland.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are saying that most of that original hunter-gatherer male population in Ireland was probably replaced by incoming agricultural populations,\u201d said Jobling.<\/p>\n
The invention of farming was perhaps the most important cultural change in the history of modern humans.<\/p>\n
Increased food production led to the development of societies that stayed put, rather than wandering in search of food. This led to population explosions.<\/p>\n
Times Online<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The majority of Irish men are descended from farmers who came to the country 6,000 years ago, not from an older line of hunter-gatherers as previously believed, a study has found. Researchers at Britain\u2019s University of Leicester have discovered that 85% of Irish males are descendants of farmers who migrated to the country from Turkey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":16667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,922],"tags":[2183,2608,2607],"class_list":["post-16663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uk","category-world","tag-britain","tag-irish","tag-turkish-farmers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}