Ancestry

I've talked a bit here and there about my Germanic and Celtic ancestry, which is seven-eighths of my ancestry; the typical British type, which is a combination of Anglo-Saxon over a Brythonic substrate and some overt Scottish mixed in as well from more than one line. I don't talk very much about the last one-eighth of my ancestry, which is Portuguese, specifically from a group of Portuguese Protestant converts who came to America to escape Catholic persecution from the Island of Madeira. Madeira has no aboriginal inhabitants, so the Portuguese were the first settlers, and most of them come from the Minho region. Looking back on my family tree, most of the lines dead end before getting back to the Portuguese mainland, but I do indeed find one line from Aveiro (which is farther south than the Minho region) and the oldest who has a geography associated with him was one Gonçalo Gomes Ferraz, born in 1320 in Porto, formerly Portus Cale, or Portucale, supposedly the origin of the name of Portugal itself, and a regional capital of the Minho region since before Roman times. I can actually go a bit further back; the earliest Portuguese ancestor I can identify is Martim Ferraz, born in 1210, but there is no associated location with anyone earlier than Gonçalo. 

Curiously, since I contrast this with the Celtic and Germanic portion of my heritage, this region was from prehistoric times a bastion of Celtiberian influence, and part of the territory of Gallaecia, named for the Gallaecian Celtic tribes. (Although semi-legendary, this interpretation isn't crazy, and oral histories suggest that the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland come originally from this area.) Of course, after the Punic Wars, all of the Iberian Peninsula was annexed by the Romans and remained as part of their empire for about half a millenium. After this ~500 years, as the Roman Empire started to lose its fringe territories to barbarians, the Hispanic areas were invaded by the Suebians, the Vandals and the Alans. The portion where my ancestors come from was settled by the Suebians, and their kingdom of Suebian Gallaecia lasted until the Moorish conquest. It was also one of the fairly early areas to be liberated from the Moors, and became part of the Visigothic (or post Visigothic, most likely) Kingdom of Asturias. Mostly the Vandals and Alans were in central and southern Hispania, although the Suebian kings did end up conquering much of the Iberian peninsula at one point. Briefly. 

It's curious that while I tend to think of my Portuguese ancestry as contrasted with my Germanic and Celtic ancestry, the region from which my Portuguese ancestors come from is mostly known for its Celtic and Germanic inhabitants. Although it's unclear to what degree they were Romanized; certainly they were done so linguistically, probably very culturally (at least before the Middle Ages) and the real question is how much were they Romanized genetically, of course. And especially during the Suebian and later Visigothic Asturian reigns, there was probably a significant difference between the kings and nobles and the common people both culturally and genetically. Nobody argues that Portuguese people tend to look significantly different than British people, and the mixture of ancient populations in different proportions is probably the cause. North Spanish, which is the closest I can find for the Asturias/Minho region are about 60% Neolithic farmer ancestry, 30% steppe herder ancestry and 10% Mesolithic hunter gatherer ancestry. The English ratios, in the same order, are on average 45%, 41% and 14%, while the Scottish are 28%, 49% and 23%. "Regular" Spanish is 77%, 23% and 0%. That's the highest farmer ancestry proportion in Europe of the samples shown, with the exception of the Sardinians, who are 88%, 5% and 7%. The southern European "Mediterranean" phenotype is clearly almost the same as it was in the Neolithic, while much of the northern European "Nordic" look comes from the combination of the steppe herders and the earlier Scandinavian hunter-gatherers, who have proportionally much smaller admixtures of farmer DNA. In any case, my Portuguese ancestry is probably much heavier in farmer DNA than my British and Scottish, and my father, who was only one-fourth Portuguese himself, still had a very Portuguese-like phenotype himself. I don't; I'm taller, whiter, have brown rather than black hair and green or hazel rather than brown eyes.

Now keep in mind, I'm not saying that farmer DNA is bad DNA or anything. Just that it's usually pretty detectable, or at least you can posit with some certainty that someone has a fair bit of it, just by looking at them, and I don't look like that. But even the British and Scottish have a not insignificant percentage of farmer DNA mixed in. Most likely from wives taken from the Globular Amphora or other post Funnelbeaker culture peoples by invading steppe herders in the Eneolithic and early Bronze Age. And keep in mind that no population today has a really significant enough chunk of hunter-gatherer DNA to sport their likely phenotype. The Estonians have the highest proportion of any recorded modern population, 37%, but most have a quarter or less. 

In any case, in spite of my specific British Anglo-Scottish ancestry, or the specifics of my very specific Portuguese ancestry, I'm clearly a product of Western Civilization. And that is a three-legged construct, which includes 1) the Classical Graeco-Roman traditions, 2) the Germanic (and to a lesser extent Celtic) traditions of the barbarians, and 3) Christianity. I sometimes replace number 2 on that list with the specific developments that occured within the Hajnal Line, but realistically, that ends up being a slightly smaller subset of the number 2 that I quoted anyway.