Are you REALLY Celtic?

[gilmore]

... Look, there's going to be another one of those shows on PBS soon where they do DNA screenings on prominent African Americans and give them the lowdown on their actual genetic roots. Last time they got Henry Louis Gates, probably the pre-eminent African American scholar of our time, to sit down and told him that according to his DNA he was something like 70 per cent Northern European. Everybody is a hodge podge of ethnicity and I say jolly good because that means that you can't have a bad attitude about anybody because they may very well be more closely related to you than you think....

Well, no, it told him that his was 50% European and 50% African. And that was by autosomal DNA testing, which is not at all very reliable as to percentages after 3-4 generations. At any rate, that fact was something that was not at all surprising to him, according to the way the program was edited anyhow, by the paper trail.

If you will go back and read the article in the first post in this thread, it was British doctors in WWII who defined Celtic for their big toe study purposes as soldiers who were Welsh, Scots or Irish.

[Ruanaidh]

The modern name for the condition of having the second toe longer than the big toe is called "Morton's toe". In the classical world it was called the "Greek foot" in contrast to the "Egyptian foot" where the big toe was longer.