09-24-2006, 04:59 PM
Email:
Read this article and you will begin to understand what inspired
British/European indologists to manufacture the Aryan invasion myth.
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article...ils.php?id=7817
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Issue 127 , October 2006
Myths of British ancestry
by Stephen Oppenheimer
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's books "The Origins of the British: A Genetic
Detective Story" and "Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World" are
published by Constable & Robinson  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?
   Â
    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
eradicatedâculturally, linguistically and geneticallyâby 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?
   Â
    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 parcelsâthe principal componentsâof
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
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Read this article and you will begin to understand what inspired
British/European indologists to manufacture the Aryan invasion myth.
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article...ils.php?id=7817
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Issue 127 , October 2006
Myths of British ancestry
by Stephen Oppenheimer
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's books "The Origins of the British: A Genetic
Detective Story" and "Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World" are
published by Constable & Robinson  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?
   Â
    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
eradicatedâculturally, linguistically and geneticallyâby 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?
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    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 parcelsâthe principal componentsâof
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
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