Portumna

One of the oldest texts composed in Ireland is the Leabhar Gabhla, the Book of Invasions. It tells a semi-mythical history of the waves of people who settled in Ireland in earliest times. It says the first settlers to arrive in Ireland were a small dark people called the Fir Bolg, followed by a magical super-race called the Tuatha de Danaan -- the people of the goddess Dana.
Most interestingly, the book says that the group which then came to Ireland and fully established itself as rulers of the island were the Milesians—the sons of Mil, a soldier from Spain.&nbsp;
For a long time the myth of Irish history has been that the Irish are Celts. The assumption was made that they were Celts who migrated from Central Europe.
Keltoi was the name given by the Ancient Greeks to a 'barbaric' people who lived to the north of Greece in central Europe. While early Irish art shows some similarities of style to central European art of the Keltoi, historians have also recognized many significant differences between the two cultures.
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The Celts
The latest studies of Irish DNA tell us a very different story.
Modern DNA research into male Y chromosomes has found that the the R1b haplogroup reaches very high concentrations in Western Ireland and the Basque country in northern Spain. Recent research also suggests that the Irish are very closely related to people in North West France (Brittany) where a Celtic language has traditionally been spoken and in Western Norway.
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Brittany
A bear bone found in Alice and Gwendoline Cave, County Clare dates the earliest human settlement of Ireland to 10,500 BC. The bone shows clear signs of cut marks with stone tools and has been radiocarbon dated to 12,500 years ago. During the Paleolithic Age, humans grouped together in small societies and existed by gathering plants, fishing, and hunting or scavenging wild animals.
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Bear bone with carvings carbon-dated to 12,500 years ago
During the past 12,500 years of inhabitation, Ireland has witnessed some different peoples arrive on its shores. The ancient peoples of Ireland—such as the creators of the Céide Fields and Newgrange—are almost unknown. Neither their languages nor the terms they used to describe themselves have survived.&nbsp;&nbsp;
With a lot of cutting-edge science, researchers at Trinity College, in December 2015, published a study telling adding more intrigue and mystery to the Irish story.
By studying the 5,000-year-old remains of a female farmer buried near Belfast, and the remains of three men buried 3,000 and 4,000 years ago on Rathlin Island in County Antrim, archaeologists and geneticists say they now know where the modern Irish people originally came from.
The remains of the Stone Age female farmer show that she resembled modern people from Spain and Sardinia, suggesting she had roots there.&nbsp;
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Sardinia
However, her ancestors ultimately originated from the Fertile Crescent, the once-lush region of the Middle East where humans first practised agriculture. Those migrants brought cattle, cereals, and ceramics, along with their black hair and brown eyes.
It is worth remembering that in ancient times the sea was one of the fastest and easiest ways to travel. When the land was covered in thick forest, coastal settlements were common and people travelled around the seaboard of Europe quite freely.
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Lebanon, Fertile Crescent
The remains of the Bronze Age male farmers show a different group of migrants entering Ireland one to two thousand years later. Those farmers came from the Pontic Steppe of Southern Russia.&nbsp;
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Black Sea
With them, they brought metalworking culture, the genetic disposition for blue eyes, and the gene for a blood disorder so often found in Ireland that it’s known as the Celtic Curse: hemochromatosis.
The Pontic-Caspian steppe, extending from the Danube estuary to the Ural mountains and has played a crucial part in European and Asian history. This is where the horse was domesticated, chariots invented, and one of the earliest places where the Bronze Age flourished and from which it expanded.
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The shores of the Danube Valley 
From approximately 4000 BCE Steppe people moved westwards to establish themselves around the Danube valley and the Carpathian basin, then little by little deeper into Europe which is thought to have brought Indo-European languages and culture to Europe and contributed significantly to the modern European gene pool.
Nowadays, approximately two-thirds of European men belong to the Y-chromosomal haplogroups R1a or R1b, two patrilineal lineages that have now been confirmed by ancient DNA tests to have arrived in Europe with the Indo-European migrations from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe during the Bronze Age.&nbsp;
Using a technique called whole-genome analysis, scientists at Trinity College Dublin studied the DNA from all four bodies to establish a history of ancestral migration and settlement.
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There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe from above the Black Sea during the Bronze Age and we now know that there is no doubt it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly Island, Ireland.
The research shows that cultural changes such as the introduction of agriculture and metalworking likely arrived because of large-scale migrations rather than the adoption of new ways by the indigenous people of Ireland, namely the hunter-gatherers.&nbsp;&nbsp;
DNA research isn’t just for looking back thousands of years. With a vial of saliva and a little cutting-edge science, you can discover whether your grandparents or great-grandparents really did hail from Ireland or any one of 26 distinct ethnic populations.
What we can take from all of this is that, although the Irish today feel part of a single group united by cultural and national identity, this culture and identity is ultimately founded on waves of migration connecting the island to the wider world of European peoples and beyond.&nbsp;
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