Scientists Sequenced the Picts' DNA — They Weren't Who Anyone Expected

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]In northeastern Scotland, in the rugged country between the fth of fourth and the moth, a confederation of peoples flourished between approximately the 3rd and 9th centuries AD, whose origin has been one of the most consistently unresolved questions in British archaeology. They are the Picts. Roman writers first named them in 297 AD as Pikti, the painted people, describing them as the unconquered tribes who lived north of the line that the Roman Empire had been forced to abandon as the limit of its British conquest. For the next 600 years, they dominated the politics and culture of northern Scotland. They defeated Roman expeditions, repelled Anglo-Saxon invasions, and produced one of the most distinctive carved stone artistic traditions in the medieval world.

[00:00:52]Their characteristic symbol stones featuring crescent and V-rod motifs, double discs, the so-called pictish beast, and dozens of other geometric and zumorphic symbols survive in over 350 examples scattered across modern Scotland. Then sometime in the 9th century AD, they vanished from the historical record. Their kingdom was absorbed. Their language disappeared.

[00:01:18]Their distinct cultural identity dissolved into the emerging kingdom of Alba, the medieval polity that would eventually become Scotland.

[00:01:27]For most of the past two centuries, the question of who the picss actually were, where they came from, what language they spoke, and what biological population they descended from has been fiercely contested in early medieval British studies. What the documentation actually shows is something else entirely. In April 2023, in the journal POS Genetics, an international research team led by Adeline Mores at Liverpool John Moors University and Lionus Girdland Flink at the University of Aberdine published the first comprehensive ancient DNA analysis of skeletons recovered from confirmed Pictish period burials at two major archaeological sites, London Links in Fe and the Black Isle in Easter Ross. The genomes were complete enough to map population genetic relationships with substantial precision. The results were not what any of the major competing theories had predicted. what the genetic data reveals about who the picss descended from, what their relationship to the surrounding Iron Age and early medieval populations of Britain actually was, and why the most carefully studied lost people of post Roman northern Europe have just had their entire population history rewritten in a single peer-reviewed publication. These are now the central questions of a consequential ongoing investigation in early medieval British archaeology. The picss were real. They were not who two centuries of scholarship said they were. What they actually were is for the first time beginning to come into focus. To understand why the pictish DNA findings matter, you first have to understand what the picss actually left behind and why the evidence has been so consistently difficult to interpret. The picss are one of the most documented and least understood peoples of early medieval Europe. They appear in Roman sources from the late 3rd century onward. They feature prominently in the historical writings of the venerable bead whose 8th century ecclesiastical history of the English people provides one of the most detailed external accounts of pictish society. They left behind king lists, carved stones, place names, and archaeological sites that have been studied continuously since the 18th century. And yet almost everything about them has been contested. The Roman accounts are hostile and fragmentaryary.

[00:03:55]Bead writing from North Umbrea in 731 AD was describing a neighboring kingdom from an outsers's perspective. The Pictish sources themselves, the king lists, and the few surviving inscriptions are tur and often difficult to interpret. The carved stones are spectacular but silent. Over 350 symbol stones survive, scattered across eastern and northern Scotland. They are classified into three types. Class one stones are insized with symbols on undressed boulders and are generally pre-Christian.

[00:04:30]Class 2 stones feature relief carving with Christian imagery alongside traditional symbols. Class 3 stones have Christian imagery without the traditional pictish symbols. The symbols themselves are remarkably consistent across time and geography. The crescent and V-rod appears on stones from Shetland to F. The double disc, the pictish beast, the mirror and comb. The same motifs recur across centuries and hundreds of miles. This consistency suggests a unified symbolic system, a shared cultural vocabulary that extended across the entire Pictish Confederation.

[00:05:11]But what the symbols mean, no one knows.

[00:05:14]Various interpretations have been proposed. The symbols represent clan affiliations. They represent personal names. They represent religious concepts. They represent a writing system whose key has been lost. None of these interpretations has been definitively established. The symbols remain undeciphered. A sophisticated visual language whose meaning died with the people who created it.

[00:05:40]The Pictish language presents similar problems. Very few examples of written Pictish survive. A handful of inscriptions, some in the Augum script borrowed from Irish tradition, provide fragments of vocabulary.

[00:05:54]Place names across northeastern Scotland, preserve what appear to be Pictish words. The linguistic evidence, sparse as it is, has led most modern scholars to conclude that Pictish was a peltic language related to Welsh, Cornish, and Cumbri, the Breatonic languages spoken across much of Britain before the Anglo-Saxon migrations.

[00:06:17]But for centuries, alternative theories persisted.

[00:06:21]Some scholars argued that Pictish was non-indo-uropean, a survival of the preeltic languages spoken in Britain before the arrival of Celtic peoples in the first millennium BC.

[00:06:33]Comparisons were drawn to Basque, the mysterious language isolate of the Pyrenees, suggesting that the picss might represent a similar pre-Indo-European remnant in northern Britain. Others proposed that the picss were not indigenous to Britain at all.

[00:06:48]That they had migrated from Scandinavia, from the continent, from some unknown origin that explained their apparent distinctiveness from the Celtic populations to their south. The uncertainty about Pictish origins reflected a broader uncertainty about Pictish identity. Were they fundamentally different from the other peoples of early medieval Britain? Or were they simply the northern continuation of the same Iron Age population that had inhabited the island for millennia?

[00:07:20]The historical sources offered tantalizing but contradictory hints.

[00:07:25]Bead in his ecclesiastical history claimed that the picss had originally arrived in Britain from Cyia, the vague term ancient and medieval writers used for the steps of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He reported that they had first landed in Ireland, been directed to Britain by the Irish, and settled in the north when the southern portions of the island were already occupied.

[00:07:48]Bead also claimed that the picss practiced matrinal succession, tracing royal descent through the female line, a practice that he described as unique among the peoples of Britain. Both claims have been extensively debated.

[00:08:03]The Cythian origin story may be legendary rather than historical, a conventional migration narrative of the type that medieval writers routinely invented for the peoples they described.

[00:08:15]The matrineal succession claim has been variously interpreted as accurate ethnographic observation, misunderstanding of specific dynastic situations or rhetorical invention. The truth is that bead writing in North Umbrea more than a century after many of the events he described may not have known much more about Pictish origins than modern scholars do. The mystery persisted because the evidence was insufficient to resolve it until the DNA.

[00:08:46]The 2023 study was the product of years of collaboration among archaeologists, geneticists, and bioarchchaeologists from multiple institutions.

[00:08:58]The skeletal material came from two primary sites. London links in F on Scotland's east coast is a long cyst cemetery dating to approximately the 5th through 7th centuries AD.

[00:09:13]Long cysts, stone-lined graves characteristic of early medieval Scotland were the standard burial form for pictish period populations in this region. The cemetery was excavated in the early 1990s and the skeletal material was preserved for future analysis. The Black Isle, a peninsula in Easter Ross on the northeast coast, provided additional material from the Rosemary Cave excavation. The site contained burials from the same approximate period, including one individual, Rosemary Man, whose skeleton showed evidence of extensive blunt force trauma to the head. Rose Marky man had been killed violently and then carefully buried. The forensic evidence suggested either ritual killing or execution followed by formal interment, a pattern that raised questions about pictish social practices that the archaeological record alone could not answer.

[00:10:09]The DNA extraction and sequencing were conducted using techniques refined over the past decade of ancient DNA research.

[00:10:17]The methodology was sophisticated. The researchers used imputed genomes reconstructing missing sections of the ancient DNA using statistical methods calibrated against modern reference populations. They analyzed both autotosomal DNA inherited from both parents and uniparental markers.

[00:10:39]Mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome data were used to build a comprehensive picture of pictish genetic relationships.

[00:10:47]The results were compared against a database of ancient and modern genomes from across Britain, Ireland, and continental Europe. The question was simple. Where did the picss come from?

[00:11:00]The answer defied expectations.

[00:11:04]The picss were not cythian. They were not Scandinavian. They were not continental migrants of any kind. They were not in any meaningful genetic sense distinct from the other peoples of Iron Age Britain.

[00:11:19]The genomes from London links and the Black Isle showed that the picss were most closely related to the Iron Age inhabitants of Britain, the populations who had lived on the island for millennia before the Roman conquest, before the Anglo-Saxon migrations, before any of the historical events that medieval writers used to explain pictish distinctiveness. The Picss were indigenous. They were not mysterious invaders from distant lands. They were not survivors of a pre-Indo-European substrate. They were the direct descendants of the same Iron Age British population that had inhabited northeastern Scotland since long before the historical period began. The genetic data showed no evidence of major migration into Pikland during the period when Pictish culture emerged. The population was continuous.

[00:12:09]The culture was distinctive, but the people were the same people who had always been there. This finding resolved some questions and raised others. The theories of exotic pictish origins, the cyian migrations, the pre-Indo-European connections, the Scandinavian affinities were definitively refuted. The Picts were genetically British. Their ancestors had lived in Britain for thousands of years before the pictish cultural complex emerged in the late Roman period. But if the picss were genetically continuous with the Iron Age population of northern Britain, why did they develop such a distinctive culture?

[00:12:50]Why did they produce an artistic tradition, the symbol stones, that has no parallel elsewhere in Britain or Europe? Why did they maintain a separate identity, a separate kingdom, a separate name for six centuries? The genetic evidence showed that pictish distinctiveness was not biological. It was cultural. The symbols, the language, the political organization, the artistic traditions, these were the products of cultural development within an indigenous population, not the importation of foreign customs by migrant groups. The picss were the same people as their Iron Age ancestors. They had simply developed a distinctive way of life that set them apart from their neighbors.

[00:13:36]The second major finding was equally significant.

[00:13:39]The disappearance of the picss in the 9th century had long been interpreted in various ways. The traditional narrative associated with the figure Sed Mac Alpin held that the Gaelic kingdom of Daliatada based in western Scotland and closely connected to Ireland had conquered or absorbed the Pictish kingdom around 843 AD. The resulting polity, the Kingdom of Alba, was Gaelic in language and culture. The Pixs had been replaced, their language forgotten, their identity erased.

[00:14:15]Some versions of this narrative suggested actual population replacement.

[00:14:20]They argued that the gales had not merely conquered the picss, but had displaced them through violence, forced movement, or demographic swamping.

[00:14:30]The DNA evidence contradicted this interpretation. The picss had not been replaced. They had been assimilated.

[00:14:38]The 2023 study found that pictish genetic signatures contributed substantially to the modern population of eastern and northern Scotland. The people living in these regions today are in significant part the biological descendants of the picss. The culture disappeared. The people did not. The transition from pictish to Scottish identity was a cultural transformation not a population replacement. The Pixs adopted Gaelic language and customs, intermarried with Gaelic populations, and eventually ceased to identify as a distinct group. Their genetic legacy persisted. Modern Scots, particularly those from the Eastern Highlands, Aberdeenshshire, Fif, and surrounding regions carry Pictish ancestry. The picss are not gone. They are still here, encoded in the DNA of their descendants.

[00:15:33]The study also revealed unexpected connections to other populations across the British Isles.

[00:15:39]Pictish genomes showed closest modern affinities to populations in western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and North Umbrea. Regions that shared the Atlantic Britain genetic pattern characteristic of Western and Northern British populations less affected by Anglo-Saxon and other continental migrations.

[00:16:00]This pattern suggested that the picss were part of a broader British genetic continuum that extended down the western coast and into Wales and Ireland. The distinctiveness of pictish culture did not reflect biological isolation. The picss were connected genetically and through trade, migration, and intermarriage to populations across the British Isles. Their cultural distinctiveness emerged within this connected world, not in isolation from it.

[00:16:29]The implications for understanding Pictish history are profound.

[00:16:34]The symbol stones, the distinctive artistic tradition that has fascinated researchers for centuries, were not the product of exotic migrants bringing foreign customs to northern Britain.

[00:16:46]They were the creation of an indigenous population developing its own cultural vocabulary.

[00:16:52]The symbols emerged from within pictish society from whatever social, religious or political pressures led this particular population to develop this particular form of visual expression.

[00:17:05]The question of what the symbols mean remains open, but the question of who created them has been answered. The picss created them and the picss were the descendants of the Iron Age Britain who had lived in northeastern Scotland for millennia.

[00:17:22]The archaeological context supports the genetic findings. Gordon Noble, professor of archaeology at the University of Aberdine and one of the co-authors of the 2023 study, has spent years investigating pictish period sites across northeastern Scotland through the Northern Pix project. His excavations have revealed a sophisticated society, not the primitive barbarians of Roman propaganda, but a complex polity with substantial agricultural production, metalwork capabilities, and monumental architecture.

[00:17:56]The hill fort at Berghead on the Mo coast was one of the largest defensive sites in early medieval Britain.

[00:18:04]The carved bullstones found there demonstrate the same artistic sophistication visible in the symbol stones scattered across Pikland. The monastery at Port Mahomeac, excavated by Martin Carver of the University of York between 1994 and 2007 revealed a Christian community that produced highquality metal work and parchment manuscripts from the 6th century onward.

[00:18:30]The picss were not culturally backward.

[00:18:33]They were participants in the broader Christian and artistic traditions of early medieval Europe while maintaining distinctive regional characteristics that set them apart from their neighbors. The genetic evidence confirms what the archaeological evidence had suggested. The picss were a sophisticated indigenous population whose cultural distinctiveness emerged from internal development rather than external influence.

[00:19:00]The violent death of Rosemaryy man adds another dimension to the picture. The skeletal evidence showed this individual had been killed by repeated blows to the head. At least five separate impacts were delivered with sufficient force to fracture the skull. The pattern suggested a deliberate killing rather than death in battle. After death, the body was carefully buried in the cave.

[00:19:27]The combination of violent death and formal burial is difficult to interpret.

[00:19:34]Execution followed by respectful interment, ritual sacrifice, the killing of a high status individual whose body still required proper treatment.

[00:19:45]The DNA analysis showed Rosemary Man was genetically similar to the other Pictish individuals in the study. An ordinary member of the Pictish population, not a foreign captive or an outsider. Whatever happened to him, it happened within Pictish society, to a member of that society. The violence was internal. The burial was deliberate. The meaning remains unknown.

[00:20:11]The 2023 study builds on a decade of revolutionary advances in ancient DNA research. The 2018 Ols paper in nature established the genetic framework for understanding British population history from the Bronze Age through the early medieval period. The 2022 Patterson and others paper in nature documented significant continental European migration into Iron Age southern Britain. Against this background, the Pictish findings stand out. While southern Britain experienced substantial genetic turnover during the Anglo-Saxon period, with continental migrants contributing significantly to the modern English population, northeastern Scotland remained genetically stable.

[00:20:57]The picss were insulated from the migrations that transformed southern Britain. Their genetic continuity reflects their political and geographic position north of the areas where Anglo-Saxon settlement was concentrated, protected by distance and by the military strength that allowed Pictish kings to maintain their independence.

[00:21:16]The battle of Dun Nectane in 685 AD when King Breed 3 Mbilly defeated the North Umbrean Anglo-Saxons under King Xfre marked the end of North Umbrean expansion into Pictland. The Pictish victory ensured that northeastern Scotland would not be absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon cultural and genetic sphere.

[00:21:37]The Abbermno stones in Angus may commemorate this victory. And one of the carved stones appears to depict a battle scene that some scholars have interpreted as representing Dun Nectane.

[00:21:50]The Pictish Kingdom survived for another century and a half after this victory, maintaining its independence until the gradual absorption into the kingdom of Alba in the 9th century.

[00:22:01]Throughout this period, the population remained genetically stable. The people who carved the symbol stones, who built the hill forts, who founded the monasteries, they were the same population that had inhabited this land since the Iron Age. The culture changed.

[00:22:19]The people persisted. The implications extend beyond pictish studies. The 2023 paper demonstrates the power of ancient DNA to resolve historical questions that documentary and archaeological evidence alone cannot answer. For two centuries, scholars debated pictish origins using the limited evidence available. the ambiguous statements of bead, the undeciphered symbols, the fragmentaryary linguistic data. The theories multiplied because the evidence was insufficient to eliminate alternatives.

[00:22:57]The DNA ended the debate. The picss were indigenous. They were not migrants. They were not exotics. They were the descendants of the Iron Age British population, developing a distinctive culture within their ancestral homeland.

[00:23:14]The same methodology can be applied to other historical mysteries. The origins of the Anglo-Saxons, the genetic impact of the Viking age, the population history of Ireland and Wales. All of these questions are being addressed through ancient DNA analysis with results that frequently surprise and sometimes overturn established scholarly consensus. The Pictish study is part of a broader revolution in how we understand the past. The questions that historians and archaeologists could not answer, geneticists are beginning to resolve.

[00:23:51]The Pikets left no written explanation of who they were or where they came from.

[00:23:57]They left their bones and their bones have finally told us what their symbols could not. The Hilton of Cadb Stone, one of the most spectacular Pictish monuments, depicts a hunting scene with horsemen and deer surrounded by intricate knotwork and symbol panels.

[00:24:15]The stone is now in the National Museum of Scotland, a testament to the artistic sophistication of the people who created it. Those people were not invaders. They were not survivors of a lost preeltic civilization. They were the descendants of the Iron Age Britain developing their own distinctive culture in the northeastern corner of the island. Sweno stone at Forest standing over 6 m tall depicts what appears to be a major battle possibly the conflicts associated with the transition from Pictish to Scottish identity in the 9th century.

[00:24:50]The people depicted on that stone, the warriors, the kings, the defeated were not being replaced. They were being absorbed. Their descendants still live in Scotland today. The pictish mystery has not been entirely solved. The symbols remain undeciphered. The language remains poorly understood. The social and political organization of the Pictish kingdom is still reconstructed primarily from external sources. But the fundamental question, who were the picss, has been answered. They were the indigenous population of northeastern Scotland. They were the descendants of the Iron Age Britain. They developed a distinctive culture that flourished for six centuries before being absorbed into the emerging Scottish identity. And they did not disappear. They became Scots.

[00:25:42]The DNA proves it. The picss were real.

[00:25:45]They were indigenous. They were the ancestors of modern Scots. And after two centuries of speculation, we finally know who they were. The symbol stones still stand across northeastern Scotland at Abbermno, at Glamis, at Magel, at dozens of other sites where the picss left their mark on the landscape. The symbols still resist interpretation.

[00:26:08]But the people who carved them are no longer a mystery. They were here all along. They are here still. The painted people never left. They simply became us.