The Orcadians

A new study of the peopling of Earth finds that Europeans did participate in the formation of North East Siberian peoples such as the Yakut and also in the creation of the Northern Chinese group.

In our inferred scenario there is little gene flow between East Asian and Europeans and the Yakut is the only East Asian population to have two European donors; the Russians and the Orcadians. The Russian contribution is not surprising because the Yakut live in North East Russia. The Orcadian contribution is particularly noteworthy because removing these donors reduces the log-likelihood of generating the Yakut chromosomes by 2.5 times more than removing donors from any other population. The Orcadians are also the only other European population to donate to other East Asians, namely the Han from Northern China and the Hezhen, who are also amongst the most Northerly East Asian populations in the sample. On this basis we hypothesize that there has been an episode of gene flow from Europe to East Asia.

Now, Northern Chinese do look much like Europeans, but who are the Orcadians? I had never heard about them. it appears they are Picts from the Orkney Islands.

The word Pict means "painted people" and probably referred to the Pictish custom of either tattooing their bodies or embellishing themselves with "warpaint". However, their Irish term, Cruithni, meaning "the people of the designs", seems to parallel the Roman name so it may be that Picti was an adaptation of the name they called themselves. The toponymic elements "Pett" and "Pitt" are a common feature of placenames in Pictish territories. The Norsemen, when they arrived in Orkney, described the inhabitants at "Pettr". Nowadays they have been diluted with Norse, Scottish, etc. blood are considered Scotts. The pic shows Cindy Crawford. She looks Orcadian to me, doesnt she?