THE rewriting of history has recently been an exercise of imagination and conjecture.

Now history is being written in DNA, not so much reinterpreting events as answering the questions: who the hell are we and how did we get here?

I'm not sure I want to know. DNA: dinnae. The results still invite interpretation, but at their best they debunk many racial origins theories and leave a lot of supremacists, Euro-haters and whatnot looking silly.

Researchers from Oxford University and the Wellcome Trust analysed the genetic codes of 2,000 white Britlanders and compared them to 6,000 citizens of 10 European countries. Presumably, they didn't take account of recent migrations because these are less historically interesting on account of not get being very historical.

The results were interesting for England, where they're all Jacques Tamson's bairns. Well, 45 per cent have had French input. That's one in the eye for George Osborne and his budget bilge about Agincourt.

I can't think what Nigel Farage will make of that either, never mind the unsurprising finding that the Welsh are the original Britons. But there are wheels within wheels here. The ratepayers of north and south Wales are genetically miles apart, for example, as are those of Devon and Cornwall.

Indeed, there's little uniformity on the Celtic Fringe, which refers to Scotland, Ireland, Wales etc and not to the hair implant of Hoops centre-forward Leigh Griffiths.

The latest news from the Dark Ages also reveals the Vikings didn't bung their DNA about as much as was thought, even in places that make a faintly dodgy thing about it. Despite tourist hype to the contrary, there was "clear evidence for only a minority Norse contribution (about 25 per cent) to the current Orkney population", the boffins wrote in the journal Nature.

Seventy-five per cent Pictish or Celtic then. Unless you think the Vikings sailed forth in their longships from Airdrie or Motherwell, that's something clear to anyone with eyes to see. What we're seeing in this Nordic fantasy malarkey is a desire on the part of people to be seen as tall, handsome and intelligent - rather than Scottish.

Other findings from the University of Oslo have suggested that Viking men were family-orientated and didn't pay British females much attention. Presumably, this refers to those who followed after the initial pillagers. They brought their wives with them, it says here, which may account for the Norsemen's great map-reading skills.

That said, it's also suggested that Scandic men were attractive to British women because they washed once a week. Well, maybe. According to the 10th-century Arabian traveller, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a highly civilised man, the Vikings blew their noses into communal bowls. Gross!

It's all fascinating stuff. And the good thing about DNA studies is that they can show much modern prejudice to be comical. Previous research has shown many Britons sharing Irish ancestry, which means some anti-Irish bigots in the Central Belt are probably full of Irishness themselves.

Folk waddling along behind Viking longships at spurious festivals are in all probability celebrating the people who blootered their ancestors. Most intriguing of all, if you've a passing interest in current affairs, is the way that many commentators hostile to Scotland have Scottish ancestry themselves.

There's Kelvin Calder MacKenzie obviously (grandfather from Stirling) but here's a surprising middle name: Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings. Don't know if that means anything, though Jeremy Paxman's Scottish ancestors were meaningfully revealed on television's Who Do You Think You Are?, while Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell has also claimed Caledonian genes.

Indeed, there's a long tradition of this. George Orwell dumped his real Scottish surname of Blair because it sounded "Scotch". Indeed, he refused to attend a meeting of the Pen Club because the hosts' name was Muir.

He thought the British Empire a device for giving trade monopolies to "gangs of Jews and Scotchmen".

What could be more Scottish than self-hatred? The anti-Scottishness of some people only proves their Scottishness.

The late, great Frank Zappa claimed: "You is what you am/(A cow don't make ham)." But I've a beef with that.

The more light thrown on our origins the less clear our identity. You don't need DNA to dig out an Orwell (who did at least change his tune after staying on Jura) or a MacKenzie.

But it'll do us all a great service if it shows that, in many cases, we are what we hate and we ain't who we thought.