Pictish ancestry

[DevonCruwys]

A certain prominent genealogical DNA-testing organisation claims to have discovered a Pictish DNA marker and they will test you for Pictishness if you cross their palms with enough silver. I once read a very detailed rebuttal of this claim online, but it seems to have been pulled as I can no longer find it.

You might be thinking of the blog post from Roberta Estes:

http://dna-explained.com/2013/08/24/you-might-be-a-pict-if/

[hdw]

.......... I know that the managing director of the company in question threatened to sue anyone who criticised his company and its methods, and that's why I'm choosing my words with great care.

He would find it much harder to sue now, the libel laws were reformed at the beginning of the year

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25551640

That's in England and Wales. Scots Law is different.

Harry

[hdw]

A certain prominent genealogical DNA-testing organisation claims to have discovered a Pictish DNA marker and they will test you for Pictishness if you cross their palms with enough silver. I once read a very detailed rebuttal of this claim online, but it seems to have been pulled as I can no longer find it.

You might be thinking of the blog post from Roberta Estes:

http://dna-explained.com/2013/08/24/you-might-be-a-pict-if/

That's not the article I was thinking of, but it says some of the same things.

Harry

[supermoussi]

The articles just linked to are all inaccurate and I would not recommend anyone waste time reading them.

BritainsDNA never have offered a Pictish test, they just offer a Paternal line Y-DNA test comparable but more up to date than National Geographics Geno 2 test. They both determine a man's SNPs which can be used to learn more about their ancestry.

The Pictish tag only comes in because in order to  make the results more understandable to non-DNA experts they have categorized some of the SNP results into labled groups like Pictish etc just as FTDNA use the term "Jewish DNA" or "Niall of the 9 Hostages DNA" which are equally oversimplifed. Why is it you are not attacking FTDNA over this? If it really is accuracy you are interested in then please write some threads/articles on FTDNA's oversimplifications. If you do not then you are clearly biased.

Regarding the "Pictish" SNP, if you scroll down to the "Haplogroup Frequencies Graphic" graphic on the Chromo2 test example ( http://www.britainsdna.com/demos/chromo2 ) you will see the bubble with R1b-S530 Pictish 4.9% alongside many others.

My own take on it is that it is early days in testing but results from all testing companies do point to it being very "Scottish-centric" and looking like it has been in Scotland for a long time. Whether that makes it a "Pictish" marker is another issue as different people define the Picts as different things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picts

I am not Scottish but know that a lot of Scots do consider them to be of Pictish blood so perhaps that is all that is what the label is saying. The Pictish Kingdom merged with other Kingdoms in 900AD. As it was one of the largest parts of what went on to become Scotland you would expect a lot of modern day Scots to be descendants of them.

As I said, it is early days yet but I am sure we will learn more about these S530 men in the next few years.

If any man is interesting in testing there are 3 options I would recommend at this point in time

1) If you just want to test for this single SNP (only recommended for people who have already tested R1b+) the internationally respected Thomas Krahn's DNAFingerprint is the way to go (single SNP tests cost between £3 to £8). http://www.dna-fingerprint.com/

2) The entry level test most will be interested in at present is BritainsDNA Chromo2 Raw test @£129 http://www.britainsdna.com/demos/chromo2

3) The ultimate option is a Full Y Genome test which will be the only Y-DNA test you will ever take and tests STRs as well as SNPs such as FullGenomes £700 test https://www.fullgenomes.com/

[DevonCruwys]

Roberta's post is accurate and I would recommend that everyone reads it. The claim to have discovered a Pictish marker comes from ScotlandsDNA/BritainsDNA themselves. They issued a press release about their "research" which was picked by a number of newspapers:

http://www.scotlandsdna.com/files/press-release/Press%20Release:%20Who%20are%20the%20Picts%20[ScotlandsDNA%2025-03-2013].pdf

There is, to my knowledge, no paper published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal to back up these claims. Modern DNA cannot serve as a proxy for Picts, Vikings, etc. If there are any inaccuracies in Roberta's post perhaps Supermoussi could highlight them here so that we can discuss them.

Thomas Krahn's company DNA Fingerprint was in fact taken over by Family Tree DNA. Thomas now has his own company called YSeq which offers single SNP testing:

http://www.yseq.net/

Single SNP testing is still offered by Family Tree DNA.

In addition to the options mentioned by Supermoussi it should be noted that the Genographic Project offers a similar test to Chromo 2. While Chromo 2 is currently the preferred deep ancestry test for people of British ancestry it's not necessarily so good for other ethnicities. There is a new Geno chip in the works and no doubt a new Chromo chip as well so people need to do research before ordering to decide which test is best for them at the time. In addition to the Full Genomes comprehensive Y-DNA test there is also a mid-priced Y-sequencing alternative from Family Tree DNA known as the BIG Y. Neither product tests the full Y-chromosome and there is always the possibility that bigger and better Y-SNP tests will become available in the future.

For comparisons between the SNP tests offered by all the different companies see the ISOGG SNP testing comparison chart:

http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Y-DNA_SNP_testing_chart

[hdw]

Kevin D. Campbell's article about the geographic spread of R1b in the British Isles was published in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy in 2007, and despite being 7 years old, it's still worth a read.

http://www.jogg.info/31/campbell.pdf

Campbell takes haplotype data from the Oxford Genetic Atlas Project (OGAP) and tries to relate it to data in Brian Sykes's "The Blood of the Isles". He has a blank map of the British Isles, on different areas of which he imposes OGAP numbers, characterising the Fife, Tayside and Grampian areas of east and north-east Scotland as OGAP4. On page 9 he writes:

"It would not be too much of a stretch to label OGAP4 the quintessential Scottish haplotype and the single closest identifier to whatever is considered the indigenous Scottish population. Sykes and Oppenheimer both write that the Picts were as close as anything to the indigenous population of Scotland."

Harry

[Skoosh]

A good read on this subject, "The Scots a Genetic Journey", Alistair Moffat & James F Wilson, Birlinn.

Skoosh.

[supermoussi]

The internet allows us to find much infomation. Unfortunately much of it is written by self-appointed experts and malcontents!

Your link is broken. Here it is (hopefully)

http://www.scotlandsdna.com/files/press-release/Press%20Release:%20Who%20are%20the%20Picts%20%5BScotlandsDNA%2025-03-2013%5D.pdf

The headline does say "Who are the Picts?" but then if you go on it says "R1b-S530 is ten times more common in men with Scottish grandfathers than it is in men with English grandfathers! 10% of over 1,000 Scottish men tested carry R1b-S530 while only 0.8% of Englishmen have it. *** This difference is highly statistically significant and so can be applied to the general population and it is clear evidence of a very Scottish marker"


This and other data imply this marker flourished in what is now Scotland (in the absence of any evidence of large scale immigrations into Scotland during that time period); date estimates make it several thousand years old, which pre-dates the group of people that became what is known as the Picts but a lot of people bearing this marker would likely have been among the Picts from 0-999 A.D.  It is early days yet so future data may change things but at the moment it does look to have strong Scottish bias.

Maybe a better name would be "a marker suggestive of some of the people that inhabited the area now known as Scotland a thousand or so years ago"? Hmmm then again, maybe not

*** N.B. I believe the reason for not publishing people's results is that the participants of the survey were promised their results would be used for analysis only and that their personal data would not be made public.

[Skoosh]

http://www.pictishstones.org.uk/pictishstones/pictishstoneshome.htm

Skoosh.