Myths of British ancestry

Anthropos · Myths of British ancestry

Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands

Stephen Oppenheimer

The fact that the British and the Irish both live on islands gives them a misleading sense of security about their unique historical identities. But do we really know who we are, where we come from and what defines the nature of our genetic and cultural heritage? Who are and were the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the English? And did the English really crush a glorious Celtic heritage?

Everyone has heard of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. And most of us are familiar with the idea that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who invaded eastern England after the Romans left, while most of the people in the rest of the British Isles derive from indigenous Celtic ancestors with a sprinkling of Viking blood around the fringes.

Yet there is no agreement among historians or archaeologists on the meaning of the words "Celtic" or "Anglo-Saxon." What is more, new evidence from genetic analysis (see note below) indicates that the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, to the extent that they can be defined genetically, were both small immigrant minorities. Neither group had much more impact on the British Isles gene pool than the Vikings, the Normans or, indeed, immigrants of the past 50 years.

The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.

Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.

Many myths about the Celts

Celtic languages and the people who brought them probably first arrived during the Neolithic period. The regions we now regard as Celtic heartlands actually had less immigration from the continent during this time than England. Ireland, being to the west, has changed least since the hunter-gatherer period and received fewer subsequent migrants (about 12 per cent of the population) than anywhere else. Wales and Cornwall have received about 20 per cent, Scotland and its associated islands 30 per cent, while eastern and southern England, being nearer the continent, has received one third of its population from outside over the past 6,500 years. These estimates, set out in my book The Origins of the British, come from tracing individual male gene lines from continental Europe to the British Isles and dating each one (see box at bottom of page).

If the Celts were not our main aboriginal stock, how do we explain the wide historical distribution and influence of Celtic languages? There are many examples of language change without significant population replacement; even so, some people must have brought Celtic languages to our isles. So where did they come from, and when?

The orthodox view of the origins of the Celts turns out to be an archaeological myth left over from the 19th century. Over the past 200 years, a myth has grown up of the Celts as a vast, culturally sophisticated but warlike people from central Europe, north of the Alps and the Danube, who invaded most of Europe, including the British Isles, during the iron age, around 300 BC.

Central Europe during the last millennium BC certainly was the time and place of the exotic and fierce Hallstatt culture and, later, the La Tène culture, with their prestigious, iron-age metal jewellery wrought with intricately woven swirls. Hoards of such jewellery and weapons, some fashioned in gold, have been dug up in Ireland, seeming to confirm central Europe as the source of migration. The swirling style of decoration is immortalised in such cultural icons as the Book of Kells, the illuminated Irish manuscript (Trinity College, Dublin), and the bronze Battersea shield (British Museum), evoking the western British Isles as a surviving remnant of past Celtic glory. But unfortunately for this orthodoxy, these artistic styles spread generally in Europe as cultural fashions, often made locally. There is no evidence they came to Britain and Ireland as part of an invasion.

Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic culture in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after Roman times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that identifies the Hallstatt or La Tène regions or cultures as Celtic homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the "Keltoi," he placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the region of Iberia.

The late 19th-century French historian Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville decided that Herodotus had meant to place the Celtic homeland in southern Germany. His idea has remained in the books ever since, despite a mountain of other evidence that Celts derived from southwestern Europe. For the idea of the south German "Empire of the Celts" to survive as the orthodoxy for so long has required determined misreading of texts by Caesar, Strabo, Livy and others. And the well-recorded Celtic invasions of Italy across the French Alps from the west in the 1st millennium BC have been systematically reinterpreted as coming from Germany, across the Austrian Alps.

De Jubainville's Celtic myth has been deconstructed in two recent sceptical publications: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention by Simon James (1999), and The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions by John Collis (2003). Nevertheless, the story lingers on in standard texts and notably in The Celts, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in February. "Celt" is now a term that sceptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless.

This is too drastic a view. It is only the central European homeland theory that is false. The connection between modern Celtic languages and those spoken in southwest Europe during Roman times is clear and valid. Caesar wrote that the Gauls living south of the Seine called themselves Celts. That region, in particular Normandy, has the highest density of ancient Celtic place-names and Celtic inscriptions in Europe. They are common in the rest of southern France (excluding the formerly Basque region of Gascony), Spain, Portugal and the British Isles. Conversely, Celtic place-names are hard to find east of the Rhine in central Europe.

Given the distribution of Celtic languages in southwest Europe, it is most likely that they were spread by a wave of agriculturalists who dispersed 7,000 years ago from Anatolia, travelling along the north coast of the Mediterranean to Italy, France, Spain and then up the Atlantic coast to the British Isles. There is a dated archaeological trail for this. My genetic analysis shows exact counterparts for this trail both in the male Y chromosome and the maternally transmitted mitochondrial DNA right up to Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and the English south coast.

Further evidence for the Mediterranean origins of Celtic invaders is preserved in medieval Gaelic literature. According to the orthodox academic view of "iron-age Celtic invasions" from central Europe, Celtic cultural history should start in the British Isles no earlier than 300 BC. Yet Irish legend tells us that all six of the cycles of invasion came from the Mediterranean via Spain, during the late Neolithic to bronze age, and were completed 3,700 years ago.

Anglo-Saxon ethnic cleansing?

The other myth I was taught at school, one which persists to this day, is that the English are almost all descended from 5th-century invaders, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the Danish peninsula, who wiped out the indigenous Celtic population of England.

The story originates with the clerical historians of the early dark ages. Gildas (6th century AD) and Bede (7th century) tell of Saxons and Angles invading over the 5th and 6th centuries. Gildas, in particular, sprinkles his tale with "rivers of blood" descriptions of Saxon massacres. And then there is the well-documented history of Anglian and Saxon kingdoms covering England for 500 years before the Norman invasion.

But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated—culturally, linguistically and genetically—by invading Angles and Saxons derives from the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape. But the presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names doesn't mean that all ancient Britons were Celts or Celtic-speaking.

The genocidal view was generated, like the Celtic myth, by historians and archaeologists over the last 200 years. With the swing in academic fashion against "migrationism" (seeing the spread of cultural influence as dependent on significant migrations) over the past couple of decades, archaeologists are now downplaying this story, although it remains a strong underlying perspective in history books.

Some geneticists still cling to the genocide story. Research by several genetics teams associated with University College London has concentrated in recent years on proving the wipeout view on the basis of similarities of male Y chromosome gene group frequency between Frisia/north Germany and England. One of the London groups attracted press attention in July by claiming that the close similarities were the result of genocide followed by a social-sexual apartheid that enhanced Anglo-Saxon reproductive success over Celtic.

The problem is that the English resemble in this way all the other countries of northwest Europe as well as the Frisians and Germans. Using the same method (principal components analysis, see note below), I have found greater similarities of this kind between the southern English and Belgians than the supposedly Anglo-Saxon homelands at the base of the Danish peninsula. These different regions could not all have been waiting their turn to commit genocide on the former Celtic population of England. The most likely reason for the genetic similarities between these neighbouring countries and England is that they all had similar prehistoric settlement histories.

When I looked at exact gene type matches between the British Isles and the continent, there were indeed specific matches between the continental Anglo-Saxon homelands and England, but these amounted to only 5 per cent of modern English male lines, rising to 15 per cent in parts of Norfolk where the Angles first settled. There were no such matches with Frisia, which tends to confirm a specific Anglo-Saxon event since Frisia is closer to England, so would be expected to have more matches.

When I examined dates of intrusive male gene lines to look for those coming in from northwest Europe during the past 3,000 years, there was a similarly low rate of immigration, by far the majority arriving in the Neolithic period. The English maternal genetic record (mtDNA) is consistent with this and contradicts the Anglo-Saxon wipeout story. English females almost completely lack the characteristic Saxon mtDNA marker type still found in the homeland of the Angles and Saxons. The conclusion is that there was an Anglo-Saxon invasion, but of a minority elite type, with no evidence of subsequent "sexual apartheid."

The orthodox view is that the entire population of the British Isles, including England, was Celtic-speaking when Caesar invaded. But if that were the case, a modest Anglo-Saxon invasion is unlikely to have swept away all traces of Celtic language from the pre-existing population of England. Yet there are only half a dozen Celtic words in English, the rest being mainly Germanic, Norman or medieval Latin. One explanation is that England was not mainly Celtic-speaking before the Anglo-Saxons. Consider, for example, the near-total absence of Celtic inscriptions in England (outside Cornwall), although they are abundant in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany.

Who was here when the Romans came?

So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar's time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul "the language differs but little."

The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.

Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the genetic evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia.

A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

So, based on the overall genetic perspective of the British, it seems that Celts, Belgians, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all immigrant minorities compared with the Basque pioneers, who first ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.

Note: How does genetic tracking work?

The greatest advances in genetic tracing and measuring migrations over the past two decades have used samples from living populations to reconstruct the past. Such research goes back to the discovery of blood groups, but our Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA are the most fruitful markers to study since they do not get mixed up at each generation. Study of mitochondrial DNA in the British goes back over a decade, and from 2000 to 2003 London-based researchers established a database of the geographically informative Y-chromosomes by systematic sampling throughout the British Isles. Most of these samples were collected from people living in small, long-established towns, whose grandparents had also lived there.

Two alternative methods of analysis are used. In the British Y-chromosome studies, the traditional approach of principal components analysis was used to compare similarities between whole sample populations. This method reduces complexity of genetic analysis by averaging the variation in frequencies of numerous genetic markers into a smaller number of parcels—the principal components—of decreasing statistical importance. The newer approach that I use, the phylogeographic method, follows individual genes rather than whole populations. The geographical distribution of individual gene lines is analysed with respect to their position on a gene tree, to reconstruct their origins, dates and routes of movement.

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7817

SLG · Re: Myths of British ancestry

elidir

This is the fourth time I have tried to respond to this thread I lost all other posts for some unexplained reason when trying to post. any one else having the same problems?

Unfortunately I can't give a full response just yet as my other responses were long and I don't have the time to rewrite them but, for now, oppenheimer sound like a fanatasist. English spoken in the uk when the romans came! Reffering to roman england, celtic england, the use of an apparently unorthodox genetic methodology. It's a good read though I like a good yarn.

SLG

I occasionally lose posts when you click submit and it doesn't go through, then you press back and your post is gone. It's really annoying if you have writen a long post. If I'm writing a long post I'll usually copy it to a text document before I submit just in case.

elidir

Thanks for the advice SLG I shall do so from now on. Now, don't laugh, but I'll have to learn how to make a text document from a web page!

Clatch

Don't you have Microsoft Word Elidir? Or even Notepad. Then just highlight, copy, and paste into the reply box here. Hwyl.

SLG

If any of you are near Edinburgh and are interested in the debate (I would say folly) about classifying people into a race or racial heritage, you might be interested in the following.

---------------------------
THE RACE MYTH: MORE SINCERE FICTIONS IN THE AGE OF GENOMICS
By Dr Joseph Graves Jr, North Carolina State University

A public lecture hosted by the ESRC Genomics Policy & Research Forum
5 October 2006, 5.00pm - 6.30pm, followed by a drinks reception
Venue: The Playfair Library, Old College, University of Edinburgh, South Bridge

This is a ticketed event: please email genomicsforum@ed.ac.uk for tickets (maximum 4 per person)

elidir

Yes SLG he's an excellent writer on this subject and (if it's the same Joseph Graves) published a book some 5 yrs ago entitled " The Emperors New clothes" (Rutger's Uni. Press ISBN: 081352847X) about the race myth in biology; it's worth a read and I'm sure his lecture will be interesting.

Thanks Clatch, forgive this technological Luddite! now I am slightly less ignorant about computers.

Anthropos · Re: Myths of British ancestry

Anthropos

SLG · Re: Myths of British ancestry

elidir

Hi Anthropos,

I think that I will continue with my assertion, with all due respect, as referring to England as a pre Roman entity or country does constitute fantasy as no such place ever existed in this historic time. Neither did “Celtic England” or “Roman England”. So these references, I insist are fantastical as no such places have ever existed. For example:

"The orthodox view is that the entire population of the British Isles, including England, was Celtic-speaking when Caesar invaded."

There was no England when Ceaser invaded: therefore he could not have invaded England. Furthermore I have never encountered any orthodoxy that views any existence of: a country that was Celtic speaking called England: a Celtic speaking country called England when Ceaser invaded it; or even - a (or any) country called England that Ceaser invaded. This is fantasy.

"So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion?"

There were no Britons inhabiting England as England did not exist! And: Who are the “... Britons…” and why should that term have historic currency as an identity?

"But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated—culturally, linguistically and genetically—by invading Angles and Saxons derives from the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape."

Again, there were no ancient Britons in England - it didn't exist; and there was no "Celtic English landscape" as there was no Celtic England! And now who are the “… ancient Britons…”? - Ancient as opposed to modern Britons? What is the legitimacy of this apparent claim of continuous Britishness or is he emphasizing a distinction of difference? And there is well established evidence that many early Welsh kingdoms were overrun by the Germanics; Y Gododdin for example.

"Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the Home Counties north of the Thames."

Did Ceaser really refer to "...southeast England.", and: "...home counties..."? Were they also drinking tea, playing cricket and exhibiting a sense of fair play?

"People would have been speaking Anglo Saxon rather than English if his theory is correct, Oppenheimer actually says "a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion" and states that "the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion"." [Elidir quoting anthropos]

Actually with respect Anthropos, I don’t know what his theory actually means beyond what he states in this article using the language that he actually uses; I can’t interpret the words that he is not using nor deduce his meaning from those unused words, but he does actually say quite explicitly that ENGLISH may have existed before the Roman invasion, in the latter portion of the example you quote repeated below:

"...English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion".

He does not say Anglo-Saxon.

“…may have been ...” - indeed “…may…” - with the evidence he is right to include such a qualification: in light of this uncertainty can we be unfair in not accepting his underlying uncertainty as a legitimate hypothesis? Hardly! Also, the same objection applies to Anglo Saxon being spoken as this refers to a later linguistic identity; and one that is definitionally problematic in itself.

Additionally, there are no Celtic inscriptions in England (I don't know whether this is true but I do know of Celtic names such as Avon, which is also the modern Welsh word "afon" for river; Cumbria. And did not the Viking rename many areas of the north-east of modern England?): let us accept his assertion as evidence for an absence of Celtic language, then - by virtue of the same logic; where are the pre Roman English inscriptions, and why is their absence not proof against his remarkable belief of the existence of English 2000 yrs ago? Incidentally, English as a language only comes into existence after the Norman invasion and occupation of Anglo-Saxon territory: the English lexicon is one third French. It is etymological and philological fantasy to claim that English existed before this regardless of some loan word or cognate evidence as all languages have precursors and lexical provenances. To claim that English is of exclusively Germanic origin is philologically incorrect.

Apparently the word w-at-er (or something very similar) is found on Hittite tablets; and its meaning? Well - cognate with modern "water" in English: Now no one could claim a provenance for the English language all the way back to 2000 yrs BC on the basis of such vocabulary evidence; one could claim, as for all languages that words that are in modern languages have ancient provenances. But this does not extend a modern language back into ancient times which is what Oppenheimer appears to want to do!

"The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analyzed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion." [Referenced by elidir below as "main quote"]

"...a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England."

Not so, there was no England, and note the elision of "...Germanic like language..." with: "English" existing “...before the Roman invasion." .English was formed by the inclusion of Romance contributions to a Germanic language over a thousand years later, as stated above.

"...recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analyzed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster...".

It may be legitimate, at this juncture, to ask whether "People suitably acquainted with the science of evolutionary biology...” are also those ideally acquainted to disentangle evidence from, and construct theories in the field of philology and etymology?

The claim in the main quote above is so enormous that it requires the most robust and highest level of evidence and lots of it, but what he actually asserts is couched in the language of caveat, indeed under greater scrutiny it seems hardly asserted at all:

"...probably not..."; "...may have been..."; “…implied by…”: "...could already have been...", and again; “…may have been…”: this does not strike this reader as an argument of great weight, with all due respect (and one does not need to be a scientist to deduce this). If he exhibits such - well uncertainty – in his own hypothesis then it hardly seems convincing for others to accept it as evidence.

Does Ceaser actually imply that the Belgae are Germanic? And, if he did -why should he be considered an expert - Ceaser was not an anthropologist as I am not a geneticist. Again, note; Oppenheimer actually uses the word "English" not Anglo-Saxon and conflates it with Germanic. Incidentally there is (apparently) a dispute as to whether any language can be accurately referred to as Old English as it seems to pre date the actual English language and rather the reference should be to an "Angle" language which is the precursor of English: angle is conflated with "English". It seems logically false to define a precursor language as an older version of a language that emerges from it under the later huge influence of another language (Norman French) constitutional to its construction and emergence as English.

I hope I have expressed myself with greater clarity, and my apologies, Anthropos, for not presenting my argument as fully in my first response as I have here. I had some postings that frustratingly disappeared and I didn’t have the time to rewrite them. But I hope my position is now clearer and more clearly justified. It has to be said that geneticists who extrapolate from their discoveries to history and social and philological matters almost inevitably get it wrong and not just in their parlance or terminology but in their rush to publish conclusions or ramifications of their current studies they make the greatest claims they can partly because they cannot allow any possibility that they have missed any legitimate (or possible) conclusions that are subsequently posited by others in light of their research and give others the glory – scientists “ big it to the max” partly to retain or claim authorship of ideas that are pertinent to the results of their studies.

It is of course fair to say that in this Oppenheimer is not unique. It’s a big problem in science. Another caveat is that scientists are always looking for the big discovery-not a problem in itself, but it does encourage the production of novel claims that are often not substantiated by subsequent more sober analysis and research.

Genetics has a reputation for this ever since Crick and Watson’s undignified rush to greedily exploit Franklyn’s research data on the structure of DNA (viewed, apparently, without her explicit professional consent – itself almost a misconduct in my opinion) for their own personal and continued professional glory; to the absurd, and now, withdrawn claims of the discovery of genes for homosexuality, criminality and intelligence.

To finish:

"Celt" is now a term that skeptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless."

It may be unremarkable that skeptics consider what they do not agree with to be worthless. But I hope I am not falling for another truism in pointing out this fantasy view of English history and I think that my analysis has been fair although I was not attacking you for posting it (and I hope you don’t think that I was) as it was most stimulating and I can assure you that keeping an open mind is possible in tandem with robust analysis that is in disagreement with what is hypothetically asserted.

I actually disagree with the assertion above as Celtic has always carried a strong culturally situated criterion of identity but it is not surprising that some geneticists from the Anglo-American tradition of genetics overlook this issue as this tradition has a history of using genetics for race justification and eugenics. Joseph Graves' lecture will probably touch upon this and is relevant in that light. If I was there I would certainly raise the issue of population genetic methodologies and related statistical analyses as an instrument sensitive to methodological operationalism, for example.

I will agree with your last point of open-mindness (as it were) but I do so in the context of the contingency of scientific (as well as other) knowledge and their tendencies to change (or experience “paradigm shifts” in Kuhnian terms) as these issues are unresolved. There are well developed counter-arguments based upon results from different studies and other hypothesis will - no doubt - emerge as legitimate arguments in the future, one hopes that all geneticists utilize the skills and knowledge of specialists from other pertinent disciplines in coming to their conclusions regarding the historic and cultural inferences they can draw fromtheir research.

Myths of British ancestry

Re: Myths of British ancestry

Re: Myths of British ancestry

Re: Myths of British ancestry