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Entry: Hitchens' Haj Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/hitchens_haj#7527 Post contents: "Further-moor (sorry, couldn’t resist), the descendants of the Moors quite probably include some of our writers of Irish descent- of whom I am one - especially any with dark hair such as I inherited from my Grandmother (nee) Reilly. A good bit of the dark colour in the Irish gene pool came from Spaniards, including some who washed ashore after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588." This is probably a myth. Few survivors washed ashore, and most of them were killed. Of those that surived, most made their way back to Spain. There are some grounds for such speculation in relation to a city like Galway, which had long trading contacts with Iberia (it's actually easier to sail from Iberia to Galway than to Bristol), but that's over several centuries, not a few months in 1588. Still today, though, a native Galwegian can visit Madrid and occasionally see fellows who look like people he knows at home. More likely is that the bulk of the Irish population is descended from a population group that lived in Iberia during the Paleolithic era. Today's Spaniards are on average somewhat darker-featured today's Irish perhaps because the former country was invaded by forces from North Africa while the latter country was repeatedly invaded by various forces from Northern Europe, causing two formerly similar populations to gradually become more different. Sent at: 2008 07 06