Bryan Sykes

Bryan Sykes is Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He published the first report on retrieving DNA from ancient bone (Nature, 1989), and has been involved in high-profile cases dealing with ancient DNA, such as those of Ötzi the Iceman and Cheddar Man, as well as those by people claiming to be members of the Romanovs&mdash;the Russian royal family. His work also suggested a Florida accountant by the name of Tom Robinson was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, a claim that was subsequently disputed.

Sykes is best known for his popular science books and as the founder of Oxford Ancestors, a genealogical DNA testing firm.

British clans
He has elaborated on British clans in his recent book, Blood of the Isles, where he has argued that neither Anglo-Saxons nor other population groups had much impact on the genetics of the inhabitants of the British Isles with the exception of the Iberians, and that British ancestry can be traced back mainly to Spain instead.12

In his book Blood of the Isles (2006), he states:

Page 280.

"...the presence of large numbers of Jasmines’s Oceanic clan, says to me that there was a very large-scale movement along the Atlantic sea board north from Iberia, beginning as far back as the early Neolithic and perhaps even before that. The number of exact and close matches between the maternal clans of western and northern Iberia and the western half of the Isles is very impressive, much more so than the much poorer matches with continental Europe."

Pages 281-82.

"The genetic evidence shows that a large proportion of Irish Celts, on both the male and female side, did arrive from Iberia at or about the same time as farming reached the Isles."

"The connection to Spain is also there in the myth of Brutus………. This too may be the faint echo of the same origin myth as the Milesian Irish and the connection to Iberia is almost as strong in the British regions as it is in Ireland."

"Picts….. They are from the same mixture of Iberian and European Mesolithic ancestry that forms the Pictish/Celtic substructure of the Isles."

Page 283.

"Here again, the strongest signal is a Celtic one, in the form of the clan of Oisin, which dominates the scene all over the Isles. The predominance in every part of the Isles of the Atlantic chromosome (the most frequent in the Oisin clan), with its strong affinities to Iberia, along with other matches and the evidence from the maternal side convinces me that it is from this direction that we must look for the origin of Oisin and the great majority of our Y-chromosomes. The sea routes of the atlantic fringe conveyed both men and women to the Isles."

Japanese clans
Sykes is currently using the same methods he used in The Seven Daughters of Eve to identify the nine "clan mothers" of Japanese ancestry, "all different from the seven European equivalents."