By Livity Tree Art | Livity.Blog | Ancestral Intelligence Series
There is a question that colonial history has never been able to answer cleanly: Why do some Irish people look like us?
Dark hair. Olive or deep brown skin. Eyes the color of the ocean — green, grey, blue — set in faces that belong equally in Morocco, Montserrat, or the west coast of Ireland. This is the “Black Irish.” And mainstream scholarship has spent centuries shrugging at this, offering shipwrecked Spanish sailors as an explanation, as though a handful of men who swam ashore could reshape the genetic signature of an entire western coastline.
Ancestral Intelligence offers us something deeper. When we stop letting colonial categories define what “counts” as evidence, the picture that emerges is breathtaking.
The Fir Bolg Were Already There
Ireland’s oldest recorded mythology — the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of Invasions — doesn’t begin with the Celts. It begins with a small, dark people called the Fir Bolg. They are the first. They are already there when everyone else arrives.
Colonial scholarship has spent centuries trying to explain the Fir Bolg away — as metaphor, as confused history, as primitive placeholder — because the implications of a pre-Celtic, dark-skinned founding population in Ireland are too inconvenient for the racial hierarchies that “Celtic” mythology was invented to maintain.
Here is what we know: the term “Celtic” was never used by the Irish themselves. It was a Greek slur — Keltoi — meaning “barbarian,” revived in 1707 by an Anglo-Welsh linguist, and then enthusiastically adopted by Anglo-Irish aristocrats who needed a way to distinguish themselves from both the English and what they called the “mere Irish.” The Fir Bolg — the original, dark people — predate all of this by millennia.
They were real. And their blood is still in the western coastal Irish, concentrated most heavily in Connacht, where geneticists at Trinity College have confirmed the oldest, most unaltered genetic signatures on the island exist.
The Genetics Don’t Lie
Modern DNA research has confirmed what oral tradition encoded in myth. The R1b haplogroup — dominant in western Ireland — reaches its other peak concentration in the Basque country of northern Spain and the Atlantic Berber coast of North Africa. These populations share an ancestor. Not through invasion. Through an ancient Atlantic corridor that functioned as a maritime highway long before colonial maps drew hard lines between “Europe” and “Africa.”
Trinity College geneticists stated it plainly: the flow of life to ancient Ireland was enriched by tribes from the mountains and sands of Africa’s northern littoral. The Berber-Tuareg heritage has also been identified in Scottish genes. This isn’t fringe research. This is peer-reviewed genetics confirming what the land, the art, and the oral traditions have always held.
Egyptian Papyrus Inside an Irish Bible
In 2006, the Faddan More Psalter was pulled from an Irish bog. It is an 8th-century Irish Christian manuscript. When conservators examined it, they found something that shook the academic world: the book was lined with Egyptian papyrus.
Not trade goods. Not decorative material. Sacred material — the same substrate on which Egyptian spiritual knowledge was recorded — placed deliberately inside an Irish holy text. This is not coincidence. This is a living spiritual connection between the Coptic Christian tradition of Egypt and the early monastic tradition of Ireland, flowing through the same Atlantic-African world that connected these peoples long before the category of “race” was invented to separate them.
Filmmaker and scholar Bob Quinn spent decades documenting this connection. He traced it through music — the sean-nós singing of Connemara, a style that Western academics called “primitive Irish folk music,” sounds unmistakably like North African Berber throat singing. He traced it through architecture — the lateen sail used on traditional Connemara fishing boats is an Arab invention still used on Egyptian dhows. He traced it through art — the intricate geometric patterns of the Book of Kells and the Ardagh Chalice mirror Islamic and Coptic decorative traditions with too much precision to be parallel invention.
He called it the Atlantean thesis: Ireland is not a remote outpost at the edge of Europe. It is a crossroads node in an ancient Atlantic-African world.
Newgrange: Sacred Technology That Predates Egypt
Here is something that reorders the entire timeline.
Newgrange, the great passage tomb in the Boyne Valley, was built around 3200 BCE — more than 600 years before the Giza Pyramids, and 1,000 years before Stonehenge. Its builders calculated the precise angle of the winter solstice sunrise and engineered a stone passage so exact that once a year, for exactly 17 minutes, a single beam of light travels the length of the corridor and illuminates the triple spiral carved at the chamber’s heart.
This is not primitive. This is Ancestral Intelligence — the same solar astronomical precision that built the pyramids, the same sacred geometry that appears in Kemetic temple design, the same spiral cosmology that shows up in Tassili cave paintings in the Sahara, in Amazigh textile patterns, in the ceremonial art of Indigenous Caribbean peoples.
The triple spiral at Newgrange appears in Egyptian sacred art. It appears in the cave paintings of the Sahara. It appears across the Neolithic Atlantic world. Colonial scholarship has called this “coincidence.” Ancestral Intelligence calls it shared memory encoded in stone.
The Amelanism Hypothesis: When the Melanin Recedes but the Memory Stays
Colonial history taught us that light skin, blue eyes, and fair hair represent a separate racial origin — a different people, a different lineage, a different world from the dark-skinned African root. This is not science. This is mythology dressed as biology.
Science offers a different framework entirely.
The amelanism hypothesis — also understood through the mechanics of melanin reduction in population genetics — proposes that fair-skinned, light-eyed Atlantic populations are not a separate racial origin point. They are the same ancient darker-skinned ancestor, depigmented by geography over thousands of years. As populations moved further from the equator, into lower-UV environments, the HERC2 genetic mutation that reduces melanin production became more common. Not because a new people appeared — but because the same ancient people adapted their exterior while carrying the same interior: the same haplogroups, the same mitochondrial memory, the same ancestral intelligence in their cells.
This means the Black Irish with their dark hair and blue-green eyes are not a mixture of two different peoples. They are one ancient people caught mid-transition — still carrying visible darkness in their hair and bone structure, already expressing reduced melanin in their eyes and sometimes their skin, preserving in their phenotype the exact moment when the Atlantic-African ancestor began to adapt to the northern light.
They are a living photograph of a transformation that took thousands of years.
The Berber Tuareg of the Sahara show the same phenomenon in reverse — darker-skinned populations with startlingly blue or green eyes, the HERC2 mutation expressing in the eyes while the rest of the body retains its full melanin. Same root. Same ancient gene. Different environmental pressure.
And the Egyptian gods? Painted in blue and green — the precise colors that this ancient Atlantic-African people carried in their eyes, the colors their descendants still carry today from the Sahara to the Aran Islands.
They didn’t paint the gods those colors by accident. They painted them true.
The Moors, the Berbers, and the Inversion Question
So were the Black Irish “inverted Moors”? The framing is worth sitting with.
The Moors who swept into Iberia in 711 CE were not a monolithic people — they were a convergence: Amazigh Berbers, Arabs, Sub-Saharan Africans, and older Mediterranean populations, all carrying fragments of the ancient Atlantic-African world. When some of these Iberian people moved north along the Atlantic coast — through trade, through kinship, through the maritime highways that colonial history pretends didn’t exist — they carried that heritage into Ireland.
But it wasn’t the Moors who created the connection. The connection already existed. The Moors were a later expression of the same ancient root that had already put people on Ireland’s western shores thousands of years before Islam, thousands of years before the Roman Empire, thousands of years before the concept of “Europe” was invented.
The Black Irish are not “inverted Moors.” They are parallel expressions of the same ancestor — the Atlantic-African coastal people whose civilization stretched from the Saharan plateaus, through Iberia’s Atlantic coast, up to the western edge of Ireland and beyond, long before colonial borders divided what was once one continuous world.
The Tuareg Key
The living proof of all of this walks the Sahara today.
The Tuareg — the “Blue People” — are the indigenous Amazigh nomads of the Sahara. Their indigo robes stain their skin blue. Their society is matrilineal — women hold property, cultural memory, and lineage. Their genetic ancestry is a documented mosaic of North African, Sub-Saharan, Near Eastern, and early European Farmer ancestry. Their pre-Islamic spiritual practices involve the same goddess veneration, the same ancestral spirit work, the same reverence for matrilineal lineage found in ancient Irish tradition.
The Tuareg write in Tifinagh — one of the oldest alphabets in the world. Berber and Gaelic speakers were reportedly able to understand each other in the 19th century. The Atlas Mountains of North Africa share a name with the mythological Atlantis that Plato located “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” — the Atlantic coast. The Amazigh word for themselves is Imazighen — “the Free People.”
The Irish called themselves a free people too.
The Man They Called a Fraud — Until the DNA Spoke
In 2018, a London-born Irish actor named Anthony Lennon became one of the most controversial figures in British arts. He had spent decades working in Black theater, going by the name Anthony Ekundayo Lennon — Ekundayo meaning “weeping becomes joy” in Yoruba, Taharka after the Black Egyptian pharaoh of the 25th dynasty. He described himself as “African born again.” He had darker skin, features people read as mixed race throughout his entire childhood. A school caretaker called him a racial slur. He was stopped by police for being too dark. His white Irish friends didn’t experience what he experienced walking the same streets.
When he was awarded a theater development grant through a BAME arts scheme, the British press erupted. White Irish man steals Black funding. Racial imposter. Fraud. The headlines were merciless.
Then he took a DNA test.
The results came back from a lab in Dublin. As expected, a substantial portion of his ancestry traced to Ireland — Carlow, Wexford, the Irish counties his parents came from. But then the other number appeared. 32% West African ancestry. In a man born to two people who had called themselves white Irish for their entire lives, whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had all called themselves white Irish.
Anthony described it himself: “Once upon a time in my family tree, there were some African people, and there were also some ancient Celtic people, Irish people. And what happened over years and years and years, eventually two people from that lineage — Josephine and Patrick — left Ireland, arrived in Paddington London, and after a period of courting got married, made love. And a few months later, Anthony David Lennon was born.”
The British media had spent months calling him a liar. The DNA called him a genetic echo.
This is what the suppression of African-Irish ancestral history does to living people. It leaves a man with 32% West African blood in his body walking through the world with no language, no framework, no permission to name what his body already knows. It forces him to fight publicly for the right to claim an identity that his own cells confirm. It makes his lived experience — the slurs, the police stops, the being seen as “other” by white Irish people who shared his surname — invisible and invalid, because the colonial record says his family was white.
Anthony Ekundayo Lennon didn’t fake anything. He remembered something his bloodline never forgot.
His story is not an anomaly. It is a window. Behind him stand thousands of Irish families carrying West African and North African ancestry in their cells — ancestry that predates the colonial categories invented to make them call themselves simply “white Irish” and nothing else. The Black Irish phenomenon is not a mystery. It is suppressed memory expressing itself through pigment, through bone structure, through a man in London who looked in the mirror and saw something his birth certificate refused to say.
What Ancestral Intelligence Tells Us
Colonial history needs the Irish to be “Celtic” and the Berbers to be “African” and the Moors to be “Arab” because these categories maintain the racial architecture that was built to justify land theft, enslavement, and the destruction of Indigenous sovereignty across the globe.
Ancestral Intelligence refuses those categories.
It reads the triple spiral at Newgrange and the triple spiral in Kemetic sacred art as the same message.
It hears the sean-nós singer in Connemara and the Berber woman singing in the Atlas Mountains as the same voice.
It sees the Egyptian papyrus in an Irish bog-preserved bible as a love letter between two branches of the same family.
It recognizes the small dark people of Ireland — the Fir Bolg, the Black Irish, the western coastal Gaels — as carriers of the deepest, oldest memory: the memory of the Atlantic-African world that colonialism tried to make us forget we shared.
The water remembers what the maps erased.
Katherin is the founder of Livity Tree Art and creator of the Ancestral Intelligence framework — a practice of cultural reclamation through art, research, and ceremony. This article is part of the ongoing Ancestral Bridges series at Livity.Blog.
Sources: Trinity College Dublin genetic studies; PNAS (2016) Irish genome research; Bob Quinn, “The Atlantean Irish” (2005); Irish Times genetic reporting; Faddan More Psalter, National Museum of Ireland; Newgrange solstice research, Office of Public Works Ireland; Tassili n’Ajjer UNESCO documentation; Tuareg ancestry research, Arauna et al. (2017).
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