What are the ethnic patterns of Scottish Y DNA?

[Fungsumanto]

So I was recently reading a bit about the archeology of the material culture in western Scotland that debunks the idea of an Irish invasion, and it got me thinking. What migration patterns would you expect of the 4 "main" ethnic groups that amalgamated to form the modern day Scots on a tool like snptracker? By main groups I mean the Britons, Picts, Gaels, and Anglos. I'm curious specifically because I'm trying to untangle the story of my haplogroup, and it's hard to compare my haplogroup's migration pattern to others when I don't know what the other migrations would look like. My particular haplogroup is R-FT128338, which seems Scottish, only I'm not sure how to read my results so I don't know how to go about figuring out which historic people group my haplogroup is associated with. If I had to guess I'd say it looks Brittonic, but others have said it looks Gaelic. Any advice or examples of your own haplogroup and it's associated group would be appreciated.

 

[Tamakore]

There may not be much archaeological evidence of an Irish invasion of Scotland, but there is linguistic, historical and DNA evidence of, at the very least, significant Irish migration to Scotland in the course of the first millennium AD.

My Scottish great-great-grandfather was born in Morayshire in the 1840s and his paternal line goes back to Banffshire in the early 18th century. His Y haplogroup was L21-M222. M222 is estimated to have begun 1,900 years ago in the far North West of Ireland. It is sometimes called the Irish Modal Haplotype. What I find interesting is that the North East of Scotland is associated more with the Picts than the Gaels, but my great-grandfather's M222 suggests that the Gaelic migration did reach that far. According to a memoir I've read, Gaelic was still being spoken in the North East in the 1920s.

SNPtracker is a great tool, but the haplogroup age estimates are not always accurate, so I take their chronology with a grain of salt.