Si, si senor - the Brits are Spanish

LONDON - Don't tell the locals but the hordes of British holidaymakers visiting the Costa del Sol this summer were, in fact, returning to their ancestral home.

A team from Oxford University have discovered that the Celts, Britain's indigenous people, are descended from a tribe of Iberian fishermen who crossed the Bay of Biscay 6000 years ago.

DNA analysis shows they have an almost identical genetic "fingerprint" to inhabitants of coastal Spain, whose own ancestors migrated north to the British Isles between 4000 and 5000 years BC.

The discovery, by Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, will herald a seachange in scientific understanding of Britishness. Previously, people of Celtic ancestry, who make up 80 per cent of today's population, were believed to have descended from warrior tribes of Central Europe.

Sykes, who is soon to publish the first ever DNA map of the British Isles, has found that "Y" chromosomes taken from Celtic inhabitants of England, Ireland and Wales are identical to the coastal Spanish.

"What seems to have happened, looking at archaeological evidence, is that about 6000 years ago Iberians developed ocean-going boats that enabled them to push up the channel," he said.

"Before they arrived, there were some human inhabitants of Britain, but only a few thousand in number. These people were later subsumed into a larger Celtic tribe. Effectively, this means that most people in the British Isles are actually descended from the Spanish."

Sykes, the world's first genetic archaeologist, spent five years taking DNA samples from 10,000 volunteers in Britain and Ireland, in an effort to produce an exhaustive map of genetic roots.

Research on their "Y" chromosome showed that all but a tiny percentage of the population descended from one of six clans, who arrived before the Norman conquest.

- INDEPENDENT