Beneath the skin of who we think we are

Today as we launch a groundbreaking project to trace the real roots of God’s own county, leading academic and historian Alistair Moffat reveals why he’s on a mission to test the 
DNA of thousands of Yorkshiremen and women.

On any summer Saturday crowds of Kurgans, Arabians, Norse Vikings, Anatolians and Pioneers politely applaud the efforts of visiting teams at Headingley and roar approval when a home batsman smashes a boundary. On winter Saturday afternoons, Ancient Caucasians, Cave Painters, Foragers and First Farmers file through 
the turnstiles at Elland Road, Hillsborough and Bootham Crescent. As the horses thunder past the stands at Wetherby, Catterick and Doncaster, or onlookers shudder at bone-crunching tackles at Craven Park, Fartown or Belle Vue, Levantines, Germanics, Siberians and Alpines all celebrate sporting Yorkshire.

But who are these people? Surprisingly they are not characters in a sci-fi fantasy or an invasion of beings from another planet. These are the men and women of Yorkshire named by their DNA markers. All of them, without exception, are immigrants, all of them descendants of people who came from somewhere else in the 11,000 years since the end of the last ice age.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

After the land was at last released from the frozen grip, people slowly came back to Britain, and to Yorkshire to repopulate the dales and riverbanks, the folded vales and the western hill country. They ended epic, immense journeys in Yorkshire, stories lost in the darkness of the past – until now. DNA can shine a bright light into the mists of the deep past. And it can definitively answer fundamental questions – who are the people of Yorkshire and where did they come from?

From an initial analysis of a pilot sample of 85 people, drawn from Sheffield in the south to Whitby in the north, and from Hull in the east to Skipton in the west, we have discovered many surprises and surprising diversity. It appears that the DNA of Yorkshire is both distinctive and fascinating. No-one who lives in this great nation-state of a county needs to be told that it has a powerful and proud identity. Or that it is profoundly different from the rest of Britain. But it looks as though DNA testing will supply a definitive and scientific confirmation for what the men and women of Yorkshire have always known in their bones.

In partnership with the Yorkshire Post, Yorkshire’s DNA is today launching a ground-breaking new project. By encouraging people to take tests and thereby adding hugely to our small sample, we aim not only to tell the story of an individual’s own ancestry in the deep past but also to establish exactly what it means when someone declares that they are from Yorkshire. All who take part in this project will discover something precious – their identity.

The scientific means to do this were made possible in 1953 when Francis Crick and James D Watson discovered the molecular structure of DNA. Deoxyribonucleic Acid is quite simply the building block of life. It is the basis of heredity, a biological blueprint for reproduction because it carries the patterns for constructing proteins, what builds and grows our bodies, the machines that run the cells that make up our organs.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Every living organism has DNA, from bacteria such as anthrax to a whale, from the tiniest aphid to a giant redwood tree. For example, we all share 40 per cent of our DNA with turnips, and rugby league fans might occasionally have seen forwards who share 100 per cent of their DNA with a root vegetable.

This code for creating life is read in letters by scientists. A is for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine and T for thymine, all of them biochemicals that make up the DNA molecule. We each inherit no fewer than six billion letters of DNA from our parents, three billion from mum and three billion from Dad. Occasionally in reproduction tiny errors of copying are made and these are called markers. And they are what make this project possible.

Markers such as Anatolian and Arabian can be located and dated. Where these two arose, in Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula, is where they are most common and where they have had most mutations. And through a measurement known as the molecular clock, the age of each marker can be estimated. Some, like that of the Pioneers, are old while others, like First Farmers, are much younger. In all 20 different markers have so far been found in Yorkshire. There will be many, many more and they will unlock the unknown, a history hidden inside the bodies of those who live in this vast, sprawling and tremendously diverse county.

Men and women both carry what is known as a mitochondrial DNA marker. It is what women pass on to their children, but it dies with men. Only men have a Y chromosome DNA marker and they inherit it from their fathers. That means that women require only one test to discover their deep past and men need two. But both require something very simple, the ability to spit into a plastic tube.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

After the ice, after the glaciers had groaned, splintered and melted, many of the early arrivals in Yorkshire came from Europe. The mitochondrial DNA marker of the Pioneers and the YDNA marker of the Pretani (named for the earliest recorded name from Britain – the Romans replaced the Greek P with a B) approached from the south and the east, and most them walked all of the way from Europe and beyond.

If anyone stood where the promenade at Scarborough is now and looked east, they would have seen land, the farther shore of a lost sub-continent. In 8,000BC and for three millennia after that, the southern basin of the North Sea was dry land. Many of the men and women living in modern Yorkshire are the descendants of the inhabitants of these lost hills and valleys, an Atlantis to the east now submerged under the waves of the North Sea.

When the massive, kilometres-thick ice-domes over Scandinavia crushed the crust of the Earth under them, the land to the south rose in an effect known as a fore-bulge. Between the Danish, German and Low Countries coasts and Eastern Britain there existed a vast sub-continent. To the north of it rose a range of hills, which now forms the Dogger Bank, the shallowest part of the North Sea, and the scientists who discovered it and are mapping its geography have called this submerged landscape Doggerland. The Humber flowed into one of its wide estuaries, it had an inland freshwater sea called the Outer Silver Pit and it was home to many communities of hunter-gatherers. For the first 4,000 years of its prehistory, Yorkshire might reasonably be seen as Western Doggerland.

Even our small pilot sample has found a handful of Doggerlanders in Yorkshire and more will emerge as the numbers of people tested swell. Other mysteries wait for light to be shed. Not far from Scarborough, at Starr Carr, archaeologists have found one of the earliest and most intriguing sites in British prehistory. On the banks of a large long-gone lake (dubbed by scholars as Lake Flixton), a community of deer-hunters lived there some time around 8.700BC. Amongst many artefacts, a set of what were called antler frontlets were found. These were the upper part of the cranium of an adult red deer with the antlers attached. Each had holes bored in the bone of the cranium so that the frontlets could be worn as a head-dress. As fires flickered in the darkness on the shore of Lake Flixton, the wearers may have danced and chanted just as the North American Plains Indians did to honour their staple prey, the buffalo. We are convinced that the DNA of the deerhunters of Starr Carr can be found in modern Yorkshire, maybe even around Scarborough.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Much later in the historical record more mysteries wait in the wings of Yorkshire’s immense history. The powerful Celtic confederacy of the Brigantes dominated the Pennines during the second half of the first century AD as the Romans advanced northwards to form the province of Britannia. Will we discover the DNA of the warriors who were defeated by the legions at Stanwick, or the collaborating supporters of the Queen of the Brigantes, Cartimandua, who betrayed the British resistance leader, Caratacus? Will we find the shadowy Celtic kindred of the Ladenses who gave their name to Leeds or the DNA of the Parisii in the East Riding, a people who may have migrated from Northern France? Will we find the people of the lost kingdom of Elmet?

The kings of Anglian Deira, of Viking York and the Danelaw all await their followers, the settlers who crossed the North Sea with them, and their DNA will almost certainly be found in the modern population of Yorkshire. What DNA does is to convert the blunt facts, dates and battles of political history into something much more substantial – and personal. All of these will have left a considerable inheritance in the genes of the men and women of Yorkshire. How dense was Viking settlement? Were they Vikings or Northern Germans? Already we have the glimmers of answers.

DNA not only rewrites history, converting the usual parade of the usual suspects, kings, queens, saints and the notorious, into a people’s history, it also lights up the lives of individuals.

It can take personal stories back into the deep past, and many thousands of years can lie behind an ordinary birth certificate. It can also tell new stories to families. For example, a grandfather who pays for a test will also discover the Y chromosome DNA of his sons and grandsons, and he will have the same DNA as his full brothers. And it can be surprising, sometimes turning family lore on its head.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Those who believed themselves to be Anglo-Saxons may discover an ancient Celtic heritage, Vikings may turn out to be Pretani, Pioneers may be First Farmers, the women who brought the techniques of prehistoric farming to Yorkshire.

This fascinating project promises those who take part only one thing – revelation. No-one who has not been already tested can know what their DNA marker is or what it can tell them about the darkness of the deep past. And once thousands have taken part, a new history of Yorkshire, a people’s history, will have been written.

To find out more about the project to trace Yorkshire’s DNA go to www.yorkshiresdna.com. On November 1 
at West Yorkshire Playhouse the 
first results of testing will be revealed along with a guest lecture about the project. To book tickets call 0113 213 7700.

Very distant cousins – Brian Close and Gervase Phinn put their Yorkshire DNA to the test

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Two sons of Yorkshire, contrasting characters united by the love of their home-place – and, it turns out, united by DNA. Brian Close and Gervase Phinn have had their mitochondrial DNA tested, what they have inherited from their mothers, by Yorkshire’s DNA, and it seems that they are very, very distantly related.

DNA has nothing to do with the reputations or talent of individuals but it is striking how these results appear to be appropriate.

Brian Close’s granite-hard resolve, and his sheer durability are the stuff of sporting legend. Having played cricket for England from 18 to 45, his raw courage in facing down the West Indian fast bowling, in an age before batsmen wore body protectors, in his last test innings, was extraordinary.

Brian’s mtDNA is just as durable. Through his motherline, he carries the marker of The Pioneers, the women who recolonised Northern Europe at the end of the last ice age. But his marker, classified as H, is much older and its origins very distant from Yorkshire. Brian’s ancestors in his maternal lineage came from the Zagros Mountains of Western Iran and the Altai Mountains on the borders of Kazakhstan and Mongolia. And his mtDNA marker is ancient. It arose in theseremote mountains around 40,000 years ago.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Gervase Phinn’s autobiographical novels tell another side of Yorkshire’s story. In contrast to Brian’s grit and stubbornness, books such as The Other Side of the Dale, talk of humour and sympathy, a softer side to the life of the great county.

And his DNA appears, completely unscientifically, to reflect that. Gervase carries the marker of the Western Refuges, the caves in Southern France and Northern Spain where his ancestors in his motherline outwintered the bitter cold of the last ice age. Inside these remarkable caves (350 have been found so far) there are paintings of the prehistoric animals of Southern Europe: wild cattle, mammoths, bison, deer and even wooly rhinoceros rumble through the darkness, picked out by Gervase’ ancestors in vivid reds, yellows and browns. In several caves eerie signatures have been found. Artists placed their hands flat against the wall, filled their mouths with pigment and sprayed it to leave a stencil. The hand of prehistory.

Gervase’ marker is as ancient as Brian’s, but what makes his more specific to a place is that it is in a sub-group of H, Brian’s marker. He carries H1, the DNA of the Western Refuges and it means that they are very, very distantly related.

Their ancestors, the Pioneers and those from the refuges, probably arrived in Yorkshire very early, perhaps among the first people to see emerge from the ice, the first to inhabit the virgin wildwood and to fish the rivers and lakes. There exists cave art at Cresswell Crags, south-east of Sheffield, a clear legacy of the cave painters.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

But the most important legacy lives inside every Yorkshireman and woman.

In their DNA, they all carry immense stories of the deep past, of identity and origins.

As more and more people are tested, that story will become richer and more colourful.

Brian and Gervase will have their Y chromosome DNA tested, what they inherited from their fatherline, and another set of hidden stories will be revealed, stories only DNA can tell.

Related topics: