Theory that \'Celts\' are a myth

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And who were the Brigantes anyway - and what about the Caledonians ... what about the Picts?

The Brigantes are attested in roman sources and from inscriptions but appear to be a confederation of tribes in the north of England rather than a single tribe. Early roman writers tell us of the Caledonians but later sources write of the Picts, whose language is unclear. Although there is no concensus, the tendency is to think that the Picts spoke yet another type of celtic language, but it should be stressed that this may be an incorrect view. The linguistic border between brythonic speaking peoples and those speaking the language of the Picts appears to be the Firth of Forth. The people of Caledonia during the roman period therefore would, on the face of it, appear to be Britons in the south and Picts in the north. Those in the south, more or less between Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall such as the Novantai, Selgoves and Votadini were probably very similar to northern tribes south of Hadrian's Wall such as the Carvetti, around modern day Carlisle.

I have become somewhat persuaded by some of the propositions of Stephen Oppenheimer regarding the more obscure parts of our history. I don't think anybody could accuse him of some kind of English/Anglo-Saxon based revisionism given his mixed background. He seems to me to approach the subject from a very neutral position. What I did take away from his book was something that chimed in with a view that I had long held - that the English (as well as the Welsh, Scottish, Irish & others) for the most part, may well have been resident for a great deal longer in these islands than traditional accepted orthodoxy holds.

Oppenheimer's book is based on a hypothesis which was out of date before the book was even published. It's a commercial product, not a contribution to science.

The hypothesis appeared in the peer reviewed genetic science with Jim Wilson's 'Genetic evidence for different male and female roles during cultural transitions in the British Isles' (2001). To establish a baseline or genetic reference point for the indigenous British male lineages, Wilson chose 94 samples from Anglesey. He noted the similarity between the mix of genetic markers in that Welsh sample and the mix of genetic markers in a sample taken from the Basque region. The genetic marker with the greatest frequency in each of these groups was a marker called R1b.

One school of thought at that time was that the Basques represented the ancestral paleolithic population of europe. As Wilson explained, this was based on three factors: the Basque language, an isolate remnant of the Vasconic group, a non Indo European language; blood type, highest frequency of O and rhesus cde and another hypothesis that claimed the female lineages in the Basque population contained the lowest input of post neolithic mtDNA. In other words, the hypothesis about the yDNA lineages of the Basques representing the paleolithic was not based on yDNA at all but on blood group, language and mtDNA. Wilson did warn however that "we know of no other study however, that provides direct evidence of a close relationship in the paternal heritage of the Basque and the Celtic speaking populations of Britain."

In 2005 Santos Alonso's "The place of the Basques in the European Y-chromosome diversity landscape" set out to investigate the "trend to consider the gene pool of the Basques as a 'living fossil' of the earliest modern humans that colonized Europe.". That study came to two important conclusions:

(1)"... the strong genetic drift experienced by the Basques does not allow us to consider Basques either the only or the best representatives of the ancestral European gene pool. "

(2)"Contrary to previous suggestions, we do not observe any particular link between Basques and Celtic populations beyond that provided by the Paleolithic ancestry common to European populations, nor we find evidence supporting Basques as the focus of major population expansions.

The problem is calculating the age of the R1b genetic marker. R1b is present in something like half the population of western europe. If it is an old genetic marker, it would explain why researchers like Richards concluded that agriculture and the neolithic was a development from the european paleolithic. If it is a younger genetic marker, it would explain why researchers such as Chikhi concluded that agriculture and the neolithic was the result of a mass migration of people into europe. Several other studies, including some of different disciplines, all pointed to population replacement with the onset of the neolithic, for example:

'Radiocarbon evidence indicates that migrants introduced farming to Britain' (Collard)
Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians. (Malmström)
Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter Gatherers and Central Europe’s First Farmers. (Bramanti)

but as long as one holds onto the view that the Basques were paleolithic and somehow untouched by events since the neolithic, there remained a contradiction.

Yuval Itan's 'The Origins of Lactase Persistence in Europe. (2009) shows that the Basques are heavily influenced by events since the neolithic. They have a very high frequency of the lactase persistent allele 13910 which is dated post neolithic. The frequency is in stark contrast to other southern europeans so, as with the language, it marks the Basques as different but now, younger than the paleolithic.

Balaresque's 'A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages' (2010) uses new dating on R1b and examines the microsatellite diversity of many european sub populations. She concluded: "The distribution of this lineage, the diversity within it, and estimates of its age all suggest that it spread with farming from the Near East. Taken with evidence on the origins of other lineages, this indicates that most European Y chromosomes descend from Near Eastern farmers."

Researchers like Wilson took haplogroup frequency data and compared the basket of haplogroups for one population with the basket of haplogroups for another population. What Oppenheimer did was to take Capelli's STR data and created his own groups. STR data are the number of repeat counts at certain loci or positions on the Y chromosome. For example:

13, 14, 13, 15, 23, 11
13, 14, 13, 15, 27, 10

are two examples of the STR counts at 6 loci for two people who both have the R1b marker. You can see that the first four are the same but the individuals differ on the last two. Capelli's data has something like 140 groups of 6 STR values, all within R1b. Oppenheimer reduces this list of 140 into 16 'clans'. In other words he looked at the two sets of STR data above and made a decision, is this one group or two? He doesn't say on what basis he reduces 140 down to 16. That means no scientist can repeat the experiment to verify the result. It's not peer science and, in my opinion, the book is more to do with generating interest in a view of history and an invitation to take the Oppenheimer Test at Ethnoancestry to see how you fit into Oppenheimer's view of history, [url:ygb1i610]http://www.ethnoancestry.com/oppenheimer.html[/url]. It's commercial, not science and Oppenheimer's book is not cited or referenced by the peer science.

The contention that English as a language was also developing independently of other Germanic tongues before the arrival of the Frisians etc. is also hugely interesting and worthy of greater investigation and discussion.

Peter Forster's work which Oppenheimer cites is published in a book of experimental techniques and he uses the algorithms of molecular biology to describe the evolution of language. As an experiment, his dates come with error bands and, in the case of English as a 4th germanic language, ie the date at which it separated from continental germanic, the error band is 6000 years. You can pick any one of a number of periods of history and associate the split with any one of a number cultures. Oppenheimer simply chose to associate it with the most distant in the past. Ringe and Warnow and Gray and Atkinson who use modern computational methods to date the splits in the branches of the Indo European tree come up with results which are much more in line with the dates that linguists suggest.


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