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The first ancient Irish human genomes have been uncovered by scientists. They disclose a lot about Celtics, the origin as well as the culture of the Irish.

Ireland is not only an interesting country but also a source of fascination for geneticists. It has a number of European genetic gradients with "world maxima for the variants that code for lactose tolerance, the western European Y chromosome type, and several important genetic diseases, including one of excessive iron retention, called haemochromatosis", although the origin of this heritage is not familiar to anyone, according to scienceworldreport.

In a new probe, scientists sequenced the genome of an early farmer woman, who was residing near Belfast about 5,200 years ago, along with the genomes of three men who hailed from a later millennium, about 4,000 years ago in the Bronze Age, after metalworking was introduced.

"There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe from above the Black Sea into the Bronze Age Europe and we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island, and this degree of genetic change invites the possibility of other associated changes, perhaps even the introduction of language ancestral to western Celtic tongues" said Dan Bradley, one of the researchers, in a news release.

Black hair, brown eyes, and faces like the southern Europeans characterised the early Irish men. But genetic variants in the three Bronze Age men displayed "blue eyes alleles" as well as the most significant variant for the genetic disease, haemochromatosis.

"Genetic affinity is strongest between the Bronze Age genomes and modern Irish, Scottish and Welsh, suggesting the establishment of central attributes of the insular Celtic genome some 4,000 years ago," said Lara Cassidy, one of the researchers.

The study reveals that a huge shift took place into Ireland. The early farmer's ancestry was a "majority" that started in the Middle East, in which region agriculture was invented. But the Bronze Age genomes sourced their ancestry from ancient sources in the Pontic Steppe.

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.