Just a Drop in the Gene Pool
This just in: Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, has announced in his new book, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story, that the results of a comprehensive DNA survey of the British Isles lead to an inescapable and unsettling conclusion. The English, the Irish, the Scots, and the Welch? Genetically, they're all the same.
What's more, their primary ancestors are a Basque people who crossed over to the isles at the end of the last ice age. The subsequent invasions by Celts, Angles, Romans, Jutes, Saxons, Normans, etc., etc., etc., etc., hardly made a ripple in the gene pool.
As someone who finds the whole concept of "racial purity" somewhere between historically ludicrous and morally odious, I can't help but smile at this news. As a writer who has grown deeply weary of all the pseudo-Celtic magickal krappe that has saturated the field in recent years, I might even crack a smirk. But right off the top of my head, I can think of a half-dozen Irish chauvanists I know who tonight will be crying in their Guinness over this terrible turn of events.
"Say it ain't so, Seamus!"
What's more, their primary ancestors are a Basque people who crossed over to the isles at the end of the last ice age. The subsequent invasions by Celts, Angles, Romans, Jutes, Saxons, Normans, etc., etc., etc., etc., hardly made a ripple in the gene pool.
As someone who finds the whole concept of "racial purity" somewhere between historically ludicrous and morally odious, I can't help but smile at this news. As a writer who has grown deeply weary of all the pseudo-Celtic magickal krappe that has saturated the field in recent years, I might even crack a smirk. But right off the top of my head, I can think of a half-dozen Irish chauvanists I know who tonight will be crying in their Guinness over this terrible turn of events.
"Say it ain't so, Seamus!"
posted by ~brb at 7:58 AM
