Longer than you'd think...
Posted by Tanos on Fri 22 Feb 08, 1:34 AM
Tags: books
How long have the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish been in the British Isles?
At school, we were told that the Celts had turned up with the Iron Age, maybe
around 300 BC and not long before the Romans came and conquered them in turn.
The peoples who built Stone Henge and left bronze axe heads had been wiped out
by the Celts, but when Imperial Rome gave up, the Celts - now called
Britons - were left to their own devices. Waves of Angles, Saxons and Jutes
from North Germany and Denmark then invaded, driving the Britons into
Cornwall, Wales, Brittany and Scotland - so only Anglo-Saxons were left in
England and they became the English. But it turns out that was all rubbish!
I watched the BBC's "Blood of the Vikings" series a few years ago and that
included using mass DNA to try to find out the mixture of Celts,
Anglo-Saxons and "Vikings" in the British Isles. One of the things I didn't
understand at the time was how one could tell that individuals had, say, a
Viking male line, when Scandanavia (and Germany) have essentially the same
set of DNA groups as the British Isles - just in noticeably different
proportions.
Over the past couple of months I've been reading forestry books and
Rackham's "Woodlands"
includes a particularly good discussion of how Britain was re-colonised by
trees after the last ice age, and I've now revisited the same question for
humans in two books, Blood of the
Isles by Brian Sykes, and
Origins of the
British by Stephen Oppenheimer.
Both of these books are founded on recent evidence from DNA, and Oppenheimer
additionally brings in detailed linguistic arguments and a close reading of
Greek and Roman texts (such as the comments by Caesar about the Germanic
nature of the Belgae tribe of northern France, Belgium and southern
England.)
From the separate analyses that they present, it seems clear that more than
three quarters of
the genetic lines of the British Isles go back to the
first peoples to repopulate the islands after the retreat of the ice
in the middle and new stone ages, and
that most of these people originally came from a refuge in the north of
Spain, from which most of Western Europe was repopulated. This is true of
England as well as the so-called "Celtic fringe", which wasn't itself
populated by the cousins of Asterix
the Gaul and they didn't come over from France in the Iron Age.
Oppenheimer goes further, and uses DNA evidence to argue that the Germanic
genetic heritage in England came over during this period too. That is, that
the larger number of lines associated with ice age refuges in Eastern
Europe, which are present in the continental homelands of the Anglo-Saxons
and England, didn't come over with Anglo-Saxon invaders, but much earlier.
With some linguistic arguments, he then claims that early forms of English
were present in England before and during the Roman occupation.
This would reduce the Anglo-Saxon invasions of England to a
swapping of elites rather than a period of Celtic ethnic-cleansing and mass
immigration, just as
the Norman invasion led to the replacement of almost all lords of the manor
with Normans, but didn't change the population itself or its language.
Even if only the DNA part of all this is right, then it's still striking: it
means the Celtic identity in much of the British Isles is cultural and not
the result of identifiable Celtic nations colonising the islands from the
continent. It also means there is little difference between most of the
people in the English
and Celtic ethnic groups, because they're all mostly descended from the same
ice age refuge in Spain, and shared these islands for many thousands of
years rather than since the Dark Ages.
Edited Tue 26 Feb 08, 11:39 PM by Tanos
(I welcome comments and feedback, although I don't guarantee to show them all
and they won't appear immediately. My contact
details page provides other ways of getting in touch.)
|
