Stephen Oppenheimer’s new book The Origins of the British is packed full of interest for Celtic and English studies.
There is indeed ample evidence of Celtic writing, which is interesting because of the assertion that the Celts never wrote anything down. In fact it seems they wrote all the time and in many languages, for example, the many Tessera Hospitale and inscriptions located all over south west Europe, written in Celtiberian, Latin, Lepontic, Gaulish, Iberian, Lusitanian, Greek, Galatian and Noricum, Brythonic, Goidelic and with possible links to Basque. The Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn provides ample evidence of the survival of Celtic writing dating back to at least 2400 BCE. Funny how so little has survived! I wonder what happened to it all?
Stephen Oppenheimer claims the origins of the Celtic peoples could date back to the Beaker Culture or before and date to the Neolithic around 5000 BCE which would wipe the Central European origin theory dated to 300 BCE off the map. His book outlines a much older ancestry and indicates that the ‘accepted dating’ is based on a misunderstanding by Herodotus which may have misled historians for a thousand years!
His tracing of recurrent patterns of colonisation of the Western British Isles along the Atlantic trade routes following the copper and tin trade echo the archaeology and begin to explain the east – west genetic split so evident from the DNA evidence. The Celtic languages could have come into the western British Isles in the Bronze Age.
I especially appreciate Oppenheimer’s emphasis that culture, language and people combine to make a ‘racial‘ package. This use of the term ‘blood‘ to indicate invasion is increasingly ‘politically incorrect‘ and so it should be! Of course culture and language can move independently of gene flow, as is easily evident in the modern world and grossly misleading when applied to the ancient world. Modern European countries simply did not exist until the Middle Ages redefined the map!
Oppenheimer reviews the colonisation of Europe as the ice sheets retreat, presenting a genetic blank sheet. About 17000 years ago, ice age cultures occupied refuges in south west Europe, Italy, Ukraine and the Balkans, which formed founding populations in these areas by about 16000 years ago in the Paleolithic period. The Magdalenian culture of southern Germany dates to this time, and it spreads eventually from Belgium to Poland. The north west corner of Europe develops the Creswellian Culture about 15000 years ago. These founding populations are seen to imprint the genetic landscape by providing the pre glacial mitochondrial DNA seen in 21% of modern populations, with 51% surviving from post glacial migrations, and a further 15% surviving from Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age migrations, which equals an astonishing 97% of modern populations! 75% of all British male Y chromosones also date to this time! This is called the ‘founder effect‘.
Oppenheimer gives a very detailed explanation of modern genetic research, so be warned! Basically, his tracing of the male Y chromosone indicates that these early peoples walked the coast lines from the various ice age refuges, the Basques and south west Europeans up the Atlantic coast around the Western British Isles = Celtic language groupings; and the Ukraine and Balkan Europeans along the edge of the retreating ice sheets directly across Europe and the land mass now under the North sea to Eastern British Isles = Germanic language groupings. Old English is therefore a fourth branch of the Germanic language group that has been spoken in England since the Bronze Age! This Celtic/Germanic split in the British Isles thereby predates the ‘Anglo Saxon’ invasions in the 5th century AD by about millenia!
Thus is our history turned upside down!
And remember, all the time we were still linked to Denmark before the North Sea flooded, so the passage of peoples between eastern ‘England’ and the ‘Viking‘ and ‘Germanic‘ populations was automatic and implies a homogeneous family from the outset, whereas the vast expansion of the forests in the Mesolithic and the inexorable rise in sea levels would entrench the routes between the old ice age refuges and stream the populations into habitual migratory pathways, confirming the familiar and familial and etching the Celtic/Germanic east west divisions in our islands even more deeply.
There is a lot more in this book, but the essential claim is clear. Our historians have lost us in their confusions and they have disappeared us almost completely! The histories of the last 2000 years are racist in essence and they reflect deep prejudices, poor scholarship and fashionable ideologies which change ‘like a pendulum’ as each new academic, celebrity or TV documentary strives for fame and headlines. They continue to contain gross inaccuracies which have been continuously whipped up by politicians and the media. Far from being a ‘mongrel race’ as a result of repeated ‘invasions’ by ‘genetically unrelated’ and ’superior’ historical ‘racial’ groupings, or of our need to be a ‘melting pot‘ (which we have been for 17,000 years) – our recent welcome immigrations in the last two centuries fit into the patterns of all so called ‘historic’ invasions = 6-9% (compared with Normans 3%, Vikings 13% – the rest too small to be measured!) it seems we have always been family with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Huguenots and everyone else that came along.
Far from being different ‘races’, we are in fact all the same family and we always have been. British DNA is fundamentally unchanged since the Neolithic! According to Oppenheimer’s survey of current genetic studies, 88% of the Irish, 81% of the Welsh, 79% of the Cornish, 70% of the Scottish and 68% of the English arrived here before the first farmers in the new Stone Age.
Historic ‘invasions’ can thus be seen to be typical of the sort of population movements that have been occurring in the British Isles for almost 17,000 years, with no one individual event contributing even a tenth of our modern genetic mix. And remember, these historic invasions have been by members of our own family, such that even geneticists cannot differentiate them from British populations. In fact genetic analysis of some of our most famous ‘invaders’ show that their homeland populations are more like the British than the British are, for example 25% of Iceland shows British DNA.
One little point. Oppenheimer never mentions the Romans. They occupied Britain for 400 years and during that time, they must have left some mark? Why does he not mention them? This is quite mysterious. However, I think we can guess. The Romans said they originated in Troy, and the penultimate city to thrive on that hill was destroyed by fire about the same time the Romans tip up. They certainly were new comers to the Italian peninsula in the 9th Century BCE of thereabouts, and as soon as they are a strong empire, they rebuilt the final stage of Troy which became a tourist destination in the 1st Century AD. So if we take their claims at face value, ’cause no one knows the truth because the Romans practiced cremation and so we have very few bodies to study. If their claims are true, then they would be from the Ukrainian and Balkan ice age refuge and already related to us. In fact, they would be cousins of the Germans. In fact, they would be ‘Anglo Saxon’! They might even be Vikings!! Using Oppenheimer’s reasoning, and using their physical appearance, short, dark etc, they could well have actually come from the Basque ice age refuge which would make them Celts!!! I do hope British history teachers and politicians get to see this book! It really is about time they stopped using us as political shuttlecocks! Especially as the Ice Age refuges disgorged peoples who went south, making us cousins of the Berbers and all the peoples across the north African coast, close family so long cut off from us by dangerous politicians and their dubious rhetoric!
When the ice caps retreated, Europe was populated by the peoples who emerged from the ice age refuges in Iberia, the Balkans and Ukraine. They travelled everywhere in Europe, and far from being ‘diluted’ by ‘invaders’ these populations have been mixing, merging and expanding for millenia, even though the genetic markers can still identify which refuge their ancestors emerged from. The ancestors of the people in the ice age refuges are also related as they all come from the Black Sea area where they have lived, mixing and merging for over 40,000 years before dispersing out to mix with earlier migrators to become Indo Europeans. Our ancestors are all related as they all emerged out of Africa.
So it is racist to set us all against one another and use family members to separate us for political gain. Our fates have been twisted together by time far more effectively than power elites can twist and manipulate us apart today, no matter that they have done so for 2,000 years.
That time is now over!
Oppenheimer has truly and fundamentally turned British history on its head.