DNA researchers trace the origin of the Picts in Scotland
A new international archaeogenetic study in which researchers at Stockholm University contributed with studies of ancient DNA shows that the Picts, who lived in Scotland during the early Middle Ages, were a heterogeneous group with local genetic roots.
Scotland’s Picts have long been viewed as a mysterious people with their enigmatic symbols and inscriptions, accentuated by representations of them as wild barbarians with exotic origins. In the medieval period, the Picts were considered immigrants from Thrace (north of the Aegean Sea), Scythia (eastern Europe), or isles north of Britain but as they left few written sources of their own little is known of their origins or relations with other cultural groups living in Britain.
But a newly published study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Aberdeen and Liverpool John Moores University and including researchers at Stockholm University is helping to shed new light on the origins of the Picts. The results reveal a long-standing genetic continuity in some regions of the British Isles, helping to build a picture of where the Picts came from and providing new understanding of how present-day genetic diversity formed.
Photo: Elisabeth Niklasson, University of Aberdeen
Dr Linus Girdland Flink of the University of Aberdeen, senior corresponding author of the study, said:
“Among the peoples present during the first millennium CE in Britain, the Picts are one of the most enigmatic. Their unique cultural features such as Pictish symbols and the scarcity of contemporary literary and archaeological sources resulted in many diverse hypotheses about their origin, lifestyle and culture, part of the so-called ‘Pictish problem’."
“We aimed to determine the genetic relationships between the Picts and neighbouring modern-day and ancient populations. Using DNA analysis, we have been able to fill a gap in an understudied area of Scotland’s past. Our results show that individuals from western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Northumbria display a higher degree of Identity-By-Descent (IBD) sharing with the Pictish genomes, meaning they are genetically most similar among modern populations.”
This genetic make-up was distinct from areas of southern England where there is a greater relative degree of Anglo-Saxon heritage.
Dr Adeline Morez from Liverpool John Moores University, lead corresponding author of the study, adds: “Our findings also support the idea of regional continuity between the Late Iron Age and early medieval periods and indicates that the Picts were local to the British Isles in their origin, as their gene pool is drawn from the older Iron Age, and not from large-scale migration, from exotic locations far to the east."
Studies in Stockholm of the DNA of the Picts
Researchers at Stockholm University participated in the study by ensuring that DNA from the Picts could be extracted and also contributed other comparison DNA to the study. Anders Götherström, professor of molecular archeology at Stockholm University and research leader at the Center for Paleogenetics, is one of the Stockholm researchers behind the study.
“This is another study that opens up our understanding of Iron Age and Medieval genetics in Northern Europe. The Iron Age and the Middle Ages were for a long time overshadowed by the Stone Age among archaeogenetic studies, but we are successively filling in knowledge gap after knowledge gap in these time periods,” says Anders Götherström.
Read study in PLoS Genet 19(4) Imputed genomes and haplotype-based analyses of the Picts of early medieval Scotland reveal fine-scale relatedness between Iron Age, early medieval and the modern people of the UK.
Read more on University of Aberdeen web.
Last updated: April 28, 2023
Source: Communications Office