About 20 percent of all Scots have Iraqi blood, according to a new book and television series examining the pre-history of what is now Scotland. The remaining four in five Scots are descended from bands of hunter-gatherers who came from England and northern Europe after the Ice Age. -These revelations purports to dispel the myth of the Scots as a mongrel race made up of Romans, Angles, Vikings, Normans, and other arrivals.
A documentary series Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland Before History claims that the mythical land of Atlantis existed in what we now know as the North Sea, and that many Scots spoke Old Welsh before Gaelic. Alistair Moffat, the writer and producer of the series, expects that many people will be surprised by the findings. Mr. Moffat also noted that the original name "Scotland" meant the Land of the Pirates.
New research into Scottish DNA by Professor Bryan Sykes of the Oxford Ancestors Project apparently backs the revelation that some Scots have an exotic set of Iraqi ancestors. Tracing the movement of early farmers in the centuries around 4000 BC, it showed them coming from Iraq and ultimately to prehistoric Scotland.
You can read more about this story on the Scotsman.com web site at http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=51752005
