The Origins of the British: A Genetic Dectective Story: the Surprising Roots of the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh

by Oppenheimer, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780786718900
• ISBN10: 0786718900
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-07
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

History has long maintained that the Anglo-Saxon overtaking of the Iron Age Celts was the origin of the British people. Celtic Britain reconstructs the peopling of Britain through a study of genetics, climatology, archaeology, language, culture, and history and overturns that myth and others. The Anglo-Saxons, who supposedly conquered the Celts, contributed only five to ten percent of the British gene pool. The "Atlantic Celts," long believed to have migrated to Britain from Central Europe around 300 BC during the Iron Age, can be linked genetically to the people of Basque country. And linguistic evidence suggests that, besides Celtic languages, a Germanic-type language similar to Norse was also spoken in Britain long before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Oppenheimer explaines the surprising roots of the present-day cultural identities of the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh.

Author Biography

Stephen Oppenheimer of the University of Oxford is an expert in the use of DNA to track migrations. His Out of Eden rewrote the prehistory of man’s peopling of the world in a thesis since confirmed in Science, while Eden in the East: the Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia challenged the view of the origins of Polynesians as Taiwanese rice farmers.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Preface	xiii
Prologue	1	(18)
Part 1 The Celtic myth: wrong myth, real people
1 'Celt': what it means today, and who were the classical historians referring to?	19	(31)
2 Celtic as a language label	50	(45)
Part 2 Colonization of the British Isles before the Roman invasion
Introduction: Can language dating tell us when the Celts arrived?	95	(168)
3 After the ice	99	(38)
4 Ultimate hunters and gatherers: the Mesolithic	137	(36)
5 Invasion of the farmers: the Neolithic and the Metal Age	173	(70)
6 Who spread Indo-European languages?	243	(20)
Part 3 Men from the north: Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans
Introduction: The Saxon Advent	263	(68)
7 What languages were spoken in England before the 'Anglo-Saxon invasions'?	267	(26)
8 Was the first English nearer Norse or Low Saxon?	293	(15)
9 Were there Saxons in England before the Romans left?	308	(23)
10 Old English perceptions of ethnicity: Scandinavian or Low Saxon?	331	(13)
11 English continuity or replacement?	344	(40)
12 The Vikings	384	(22)
Epilogue	406	(37)
Appendix A: Introduction to genetic tracking	422	(9)
Appendix B: Our maternal ancestors: an overview of the European gene tree	431	(4)
Appendix C: Paternal trees of ancestry in Europe	435	(8)
Glossary	443	(12)
Notes	455	(37)
Bibliography	492	(15)
List of Illustrations	507	(9)
Index	516