'Myths of British ancestry' we are all Basques

Great article in Prospect Magazine about the ancestry of the British - it sums up all the Genetic studies that have been coming to contradictory conclusions over the last few years but promising to transform archaeology as we know it.

To summarize:

75% of our blood-line comes from Hunter-Gathers who probably spread into Britain by the Atlantic route from Spain - our closest relations are the Basques. The Basque language is non-indo European and is probably the descendant of the language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Europe.

Another wave of immigrants came over in the Neolithic.

The Celts had their origin in West and SW Europe - not at all in La Tene or the Hallstatt so-called homeland - which is the origin of the art style but not the people. The mistake derives from Herodutus who said the Celts came from the Danube - Herodutus thought the Danube was near the Pyrenees!

The Celtic homelands are therefore Iberia, France and the British Isles - there are few Celtic placenames east of the Rhine.

The Celts originated in wave of agriculturalists from Anatolia 7000 years ago traveling via Italy, France and Spain, up the Atlantic to British Isles. Interestingly enough this was partly predicted by Colin Renfrew's theory, and is suggested by the Trade routes suggested by the work of Pytheas of Marseille.

So the Celts have been here much before the mid first millennium.

The Southern British have close similarities, genetically to the Belgians much closer than to the Anglo Saxons.

Only 5% of the population comes from 'Saxon' blood lines - rising to 15% in Norfolk. English females have very little Saxon component - so this suggests that the Anglo Saxon incursion was a small scale elite invasion and was not genocidal.

But this still leaves the question of how come so few Celtic words survive in old English?

Oppenheimer suggests this is because German was the language of SE Britain before the arrival of the Romans - he suggests the Belgae were Germanic not Celtic, and Caesar shows there was an incursion into Britain by the Belgae, who had branches in Belgium and in Britain.

So he suggests before the Romans the East was German speaking and the West and North were Celtic speakers.

He also suggests that there were several incursions into Britain from Scandinavia from the Neolithic onwards.

To summarize most of us are of Hunter Gatherer stock, this is overlaid by continued incursions from the Celtic lands coming up the Atlantic, and further incursions from the East, across the North Sea.

Very, very interesting and brilliantly clearly written - this is a revolution for archaeology.


Special report: 'Myths of British ancestry' by Stephen Oppenheimer | Prospect Magazine October 2006 issue 127

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