30 December 2014

The DNA Cymru team will be at Parc y Scarlets, Trostre, Llanelli on Saturday, 3 January to raise awareness about the ambitious, far-reaching project to discover Wales’ genetic roots.

The DNA Cymru stall will be outside the supporters’ bar before the Scarlets v Ospreys match, a game which will be broadcast live on S4C’s Clwb Rygbi.

Have you ever wondered who are the Welsh? Do you ever think about where you have come from?

A new S4C series, DNA Cymru, which will start later in 2015, will present the journey of humanity from its origins in Africa to the earliest populations of the land we now know as Wales, right up to the inhabitants of today’s Wales.

In the series DNA Cymru, presenters Beti George, Dr Anwen Jones and Jason Mohammad will be explaining how the science of DNA can reveal genetic blueprints that stretch back beyond recorded history.

This exciting project is a partnership between S4C, CymruDNAWales, Trinity Mirror - publishers of the Western Mail and the Daily Post – and production company Green Bay Media.

The DNA Cymru project will undertake ancestral DNA Testing on a scale never seen before in Wales.

And the DNA Cymru stall at Parc y Scarlets will explain how the ancestral DNA testing works in order that you can trace your genetic inheritance beyond the written record to help you discover your ancient ancestry through YDNA (fatherline) and mtDNA (motherline) testing.

There will be an opportunity for three lucky rugby supporters to win a Free Ancestral DNA testing kit.

In the series, members of the public and celebrities such as Michael Sheen, Bryn Terfel, Iwan Rheon and Sian Lloyd will find out about their roots in the distant past.

Series producer Angela Graham of Green Bay Media explains, “We are attempting an unprecedented mass survey of Welsh DNA to throw light on movements of population in the past and to find answers to some historical puzzles.

“Two of S4C’s DNA Cymru presenters, Beti George and Dr Anwen Jones, will be at Parc y Scarlets to help explain some of the questions through the testing of ancestral DNA.”

Green Bay Media will be filming for the series at Parc y Scarlets as part of a filming project which will take viewers to the Rift Valley in Tanzania where humanity was born and to the Ice Age Refuges in the Pyrenees where life clung on despite extreme conditions.

See the series site on http://www.s4c.co.uk/cymrudnawales/e_index.shtml