The Scots: A Genetic Journey

Who do you think you are? The truth might well surprise you.. Find out more with Alistair Moffat in a superb new book and radio series.

History has always mattered to Scots, and rarely more so than now at the outset of a new century, with a new census appearing in 2011 and after more than ten years of a new parliament. An almost limitless archive of our history lies hidden inside our bodies and we carry the ancient story of Scotland around with us. The mushrooming of genetic studies, of DNA analysis, is rewriting our history in spectacular fashion. In The Scots: A Genetic Journey, Alistair Moffat explores the history that is printed on our genes, and in a remarkable new approach, uncovers the detail of where we are from (everyone of us is an immigrant), who we are and in so doing colours vividly a DNA map of Scotland.

The Scots: A Genetic Journey is available now from Birlinn.

BBC Radio Scotland broadcasts start 16 February at 15.30 for six weeks, repeated Sundays at 10.30am.

Episode one travels from Cramond, outside Edinburgh, where the oldest traces of human settlement were discovered in a car park, dating back to 9000BC, to East Barnes in East Lothian where the first signs of human migration after the Ice Age reveal that those pioneering people came up from the South, from as far away as Iberia.