In the 1970’s the historian Dr Ian Grimble presented a series of programmes for the BBC ‘Who are the Scots?’. It traced the emergence of a Scottish nation from its very beginnings.

Today we have scientific methods to delve into the genetic ancestry of populations and in a recent blog post for the UHI Institute of Northern Studies, Andrew Jennings examines Who Are the Orcadians ? in “A Genetic Palimpsest”.

“The genetic history of the Orkney Islands presents a compelling narrative of paradoxes. Situated at the “edge of the world,” the archipelago has been a nexus of both profound, multi-millennial genetic isolation and successive, large-scale migration events. Recent genomic studies utilizing both ancient and modern DNA have illuminated this complex past, revealing a population history defined by three primary demographic phases.”

What we can learn from archaeogenetics is that those first farmers in Orkney, the Neolithic peoples who built the giant stone circles at Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness and lived in settlements like Barnhouse and Skara Brae, were not totally replaced in The Bronze Age as happened in other parts of the British Isles by migrants from continental Europe, but the male line persisted. The communities established in Orkney became isolated and by the Iron Age “had forged a distinct Orcadian Pictish population, genetically differentiated from its mainland contemporaries.”

The period is covering thousands of years and many generations. Then what happened next was the arrival of the Norse who also eventually settled. The Pictish Orcadian Christian culture was replaced by those migrants from the North, but the genetic markers remained as inter-relationships took place.

“The modern Orcadian genome is a direct product of this layered history—a palimpsest demonstrating clear genetic continuity with its bottlenecked, drifted Iron Age ancestors, which was then permanently overprinted by a major Norse genetic influx.”

Andrew Jennings has included an excellent summary in this table

Everyone who has settled in Orkney, at whatever time period, was a migrant. The Neolithic Orcadians can be traced genetically eventually back to Anatolian Neolithic farmers (present day Turkey and round about there).

The next huge wave of migrants can be traced back to people who inhabited the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (that’s Eastern Europe from the Black to the Caspian Sea).

Andrew Jennings explains that :

“a large-scale influx of immigrant women from the continent, who largely replaced the existing Neolithic female gene pool.”

And the genetics go on to demonstrate that:

“the indigenous Neolithic male lines not only survived the massive genomic replacement but continued to thrive, persisting for “at least a thousand years” after the end of the Neolithic period.”

The islands of Orkney would have had a small population and it became more isolated – or at least they weren’t engaging in inter-relationships with people from outside their islands in any significant way.

“The primary evolutionary force acting on the Orcadian gene pool from that moment until the Viking Age was not migration, but the profound effects of genetic drift within a small, isolated population.”

And for the next 4,000 years that was the way of it in Orkney, and then the Norse arrived. Andrew Jennings states that this was different from the ‘replacement’ that occurred in The Bronze Age and instead “was an admixture event, where a large new Scandinavian population mixed with the established, local, and highly-drifted Iron Age (Pictish) population.”

Andrew Jennings concludes:

1. The Substrate (Neolithic): An initial population of Early European Farmers whose genome was almost completely erased autosomally. They left behind a fascinating “ghost” lineage—the paternal Haplogroup I2a —that uniquely defined the subsequent Bronze Age population.
2. The Foundation (Bronze/Iron Age): The true genetic foundation of modern Orcadians. This population was established in the Early Bronze Age from a ~95% Steppe-ancestry migration. However, this founding population was small and immediately entered a period of isolation, which led to 3,000 years of “extensive” and “strong” genetic drift. This isolation moulded this population, creating the genetically distinct Orcadian Picts.
3. The Overprint (Viking/Modern): This “substantial genetic continuity” from the Iron Age Picts was then met by a final, massive wave of “extensive admixture with Scandinavians”.

Click on this link to read in full, A Genetic Plimpset – Population Continuity, Replacement, and Insularity in the Orkney Islands from the Neolithic to the Modern Day, by Andrew Jennings and published in the UHI Institute of Northern Studies Blog.

Fiona Grahame

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