The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (3 page)

The syndicated story then appeared on the newspapers’ own Internet pages, from where it spread in ripples to a wide spectrum of other websites. For example, a BBC news page announced that ‘Scientist mulls Anglo-Scottish split’.
⁴
A page run by a coven of witches found interest in the idea of the English–Scottish split; various genealogy web-groups conducted fierce discussions, to which I was invited to contribute, and did. A Fascist site calling itself White Stormfront took up the story, and one of their brave anonymous contributors depressingly volunteered that ‘the English have always been mongrels’. In fact, the latter was a true enough statement of ancient admixture, but made racist simply by choice of a derogatory noun. Over a hundred secondary reports and blogs arose in the following week, and my book sales rocketed on Amazon.

Mixed feelings? Certainly. Although pleased with the sales, I was annoyed and embarrassed by the errors and by the news editors’ titles, which scratched away at old cultural wounds. The use of the term ‘Celts’ in this way actually perpetuated
the old myths. Of course, I immediately wanted to correct the errors – although not in the newspapers. Instead, I contacted my editor Pete Duncan at Constable & Robinson. After I had unloaded my feelings to him, he challenged me to tackle the errors and myths in book form. I did, and here it is.

What amazed me most was the extraordinary public interest in the question of who are the Celts and the English. There are millions of people, both in the British Isles and in the English-speaking diaspora in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, who visit genealogy websites and are fascinated and eager for more information on their own origins, their ‘British roots’. It is easy to dismiss the exact geographic and temporal origins of the British Celts and the English as questions for the academics, but that is not how most of us see them.

Ethnic identity, Celtic vs English, highland vs lowland, is real for millions. Consequently, there is a huge media market ministering to such perceptions. But the problem of ancient rivalry is not easily confined to such simple labels. If we take just one of the most intractable ethnic feuds in modern British community life, that of Catholics vs Protestants, and then look at its representation in one of our best-known forms of ritual warfare, football, we find the Celtic term creeping in with fresh spin. At one time the football clubs Everton and Liverpool were identified as Catholic and Protestant rivals in Liverpool, a former Viking colony and one of England’s largest Irish colonies. Farther north, in Scotland, Glasgow still sports exactly the same rivalry and violently polarized allegiances, but between clubs named Celtic and Rangers.

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I should say from the start that throughout this book I use the term ‘British Isles’ (and, only very occasionally, ‘British’) in the traditional sense: to refer to all the islands in the immediate vicinity of Britain, including Ireland, Shetland and Orkney (and even more distant ones such as the Channel Islands which were included in the genetic dataset I have used). I appreciate that many Irish do not regard themselves as British, with good reason. My inclusion of Ireland as part of the British Isles is only to avoid repeating the geographic reality, and not to make any contemporary political statement. I also use ‘Britain’ in the Roman sense to refer to the ‘big island’ in place of the cumbersome political term Great Britain with its overtones of the Act of Union.

Many people regard the different regional populations of the British Isles as ‘races apart’. Words like ‘race’ have in general little validity or utility, but it is certain that Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and England all have different cultural histories. The idea of genetically putting Brits in their places was not completely off the top of my head and, although never attempted before in popular science writing, has been an interest of mine for some time. Five years ago, I attended a wonderful lecture on the prehistory of the peoples of the European Atlantic coast by archaeologist Professor Barry Cunliffe of Oxford University. I was so inspired by his passionate talk and novel angle on West European prehistory that I immediately set out to study the genetic and archaeological evidence. I continued that interest over the years, while subsequently writing a book on another
topic. Cunliffe illuminated a story of cultural continuity of the Atlantic coast peoples, stretching from the west of Scotland, down through Wales, Ireland and Cornwall, then across the Channel and south through Normandy and Brittany, right down to Spain and Portugal. The cultural unity and trade links of this coastal strip had somehow persisted as a binding force, from the Late Mesolithic, over 7,000 years ago, when the sea level had risen enough for colonists to penetrate between Ireland and Wales from the south, through to modern times.

This cultural continuity of the Atlantic coastal strip overlays the extraordinary millennial cycles of change and influence coming in from elsewhere in Europe. The coastal network was the main thrust of Cunliffe’s lecture, but I am a daydreamer, and several other gems attracted me while listening to his talk. These were two observations, probably related. One, more a realization on my part, was that when Britain and Ireland were first recolonized in the Late Mesolithic, they were still connected (until 8,500 years ago) by dry land across the North Sea to the Continent, thus geographically filling in Cunliffe’s image of the Atlantic coast’s cultural continuity. The second observation was that England had repeatedly missed out on the cultural fashions that periodically swept up the Celtic Atlantic coast from the south over the last 10,000 years. Rather, England tended to link culturally with north-west Europe, on the other side of the North Sea.

Even today, with the landbridge gone, the tip of Brittany is closer to Cornwall than to anywhere else in France or up the Channel. So, it seemed that, for cultural reasons, the natural route of explorers and traders from Spain, the French coast and the Mediterranean, through the ages, was towards the west coast
of Britain, not the east. The cultural-geographical link directly across the southern entrance to the Channel between Brittany and Cornwall, and on to Wales, Ireland and Scotland, remained intact whether it was the introduction of styles of megalithic monuments to Ireland, or Tristan’s to-and-fro seafaring peregrination between these places. He voyaged by sea to all these ‘Celtic’ countries of the Atlantic façade, in different versions of the original Dark Ages romance, while he wandered blindly towards betrayal of honour and trust, in his love for Isolde.
¹

Of course, my interest was pricked by the possibility that there might be real genetic parallels for the recurrent cultural movements into the British Isles. These, according to my reading of Cunliffe’s story, should have been from
two
sources, one up the Atlantic coast from the south and the other from north-west Europe, indicating that people may have migrated (or invaded) from these two directions. This was a hope both vain and sanguine, since dramatic movements inferred from the archaeological record always tend to have a much fainter and more conservative genetic parallel; and even conquests of the historical period may have represented no more than the imposition of an elite minority rather than a mass influx of a different nation (think of the Norman conquest – in the long run our conquerors became anglicized; we did not become French). In other words, fashion and culture move faster and more comprehensively than the people who carry them, and genetic traces of individual cultural sweeps may be disappointingly faint.

On the other hand, my hope was that the conservatism of inter-regional gene flow also allowed those same genetic traces to persist for thousands of years in the same communities. The one great advantage of the British Isles for genetic study over
continental Europe (or any other continent, for that matter), apart from their isolation, is that it was a landscape empty of people after the Ice Age. At its worst, half of Britain was covered in an ice sheet and the rest was polar desert. This left a clean genetic sheet, a blank slate, until about 15,000 years ago, with no confusing genetic traces remaining from any hunter-gatherers who may have lived there before the ice.

The reality of the genetic picture was potentially much more illuminating than I had hoped. At the time I attended Barry Cunliffe’s Linacre Lecture there were already enough genetic data in the literature to underwrite his cultural view of a unique and ancient Atlantic coastal community. Even by using just a crude marker system such as ABO blood grouping, a line could be drawn north–south along the Welsh border or its physical embodiment, Offa’s Dyke. The physical line separates the Welsh from the English, as Saxon King Offa had intended. But it also effectively points to the genetic links that non-English regions of the Isles have with one another – and ultimately, as I shall explain, more with Spain and the Basque Country than with the immediately adjoining European lands of north-west Europe.

Other more specific markers, such as mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the Y chromosome, gave clear confirmation of this two-source picture, but with subtle differences corresponding to characteristic male and female migratory patterns. MtDNA (only passed down through our mothers) is most useful for dating and recording initial colonizations and true migrations, for instance where whole communities move from one region to another. The Y chromosome (held only by males) in general gives a much sharper geographical pattern and is useful
in detecting male-dominated migrations such as conquering elite-invasions. There is slightly less consensus, at present, on the calibration of the male-chromosome clock. These male/female differences are valuable in illuminating the reasons for new cultural waves in the archaeological record.

One observation shines bright from the genetics. The bulk of informative male gene markers among the so-called Atlantic Celts are derived from down in south-west Europe, best represented by people of the Basque Country. What is more, they share this Atlantic coastal link with certain
dated
expansions of mtDNA gene groups, representing each of the main, archaeologically dated, putative colonization events of the western British Isles. One might expect the original Mesolithic hunter-gatherer colonists of the Atlantic coast, over 10,000 years ago, to have derived from the Ice Age refuges of the western Mediterranean: Spain, south-west France and the Basque Country. And that was indeed the case: shared genetic elements, both in the British Isles and Iberia, did include such Mesolithic mtDNA founding gene lines originating in the Basque region.

Perhaps more surprising and pleasing was the identification, among ‘Atlantic Celts’, of gene lines which arrived later, in the British Neolithic period, deriving ultimately from the very first farming communities in Turkey. The British Neolithic began over 6,000 years ago, but the archaeological and genetic evidence points to two separate arms, or pincer routes, of Neolithic migration into the British Isles from different parts of Europe, each with its own cultural precursors and human genetic trail markers. Most Neolithic migration more culturally
than genetically is apparent, but in this instance human migration is supported by genetic evidence.

One of these migrations may have come up the Atlantic coast and into Cornwall, Ireland and Wales, preceded in France by the arrival of a particular pottery type known as Cardial Impressed Ware. Cardial Ware had in turn spread mainly by sea, west along the northern Mediterranean coast via Italy and the Riviera, and then across southern France to arrive near Brittany by around 7,000 years ago. In parallel with this cultural flow, specific gene lines appear to have travelled along the northern Mediterranean coast, round Spain and directly through southern France to the British Isles. In the case of this real Neolithic migration, however, the Basque Country seems to have been partly bypassed. The other Neolithic migration went up the Danube from the Black Sea to Germany and the Netherlands (but more of that later).

What is truly remarkable about the Mediterranean coastal Neolithic spread, as sketched by genetics and archaeology, is that there is another parallel trail, one which may explain the origins of the Celtic languages. New evidence places the split that produced the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family rather earlier than previously thought. Dating of this branch split could put Celtic linguistic origins at the start of the European Neolithic, consistent with the separate southern Neolithic expansion round the coast of the Mediterranean. The final break-up of the Atlantic coast Celtic languages may have been as early as 5,000 to 3,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period in the British Isles.

While the genetic evidence for an ancient southern origin for the ancestors of modern British Celts provides a ringing echo to Cunliffe’s archaeological vision of the Atlantic cultural network,
it is very different from the familiar scene painted in history books, and from nineteenth-century romantic re-creations, of a once vast Celtic empire in Central Europe. There is another rider, since most of those southern ‘ancestors’ arrived even earlier than the Neolithic.

The last three hundred years have seen the construction of the orthodox picture of the Celts as a vast, culturally sophisticated but noisy and warlike people from Central Europe who invaded the British Isles during the Iron Age, around 300
BC
. Central Europe during the last millennium
BC
was the time and place of the exotic and fierce
Hallstatt
culture and, later, the
La Tène
culture, sporting their intricate, prestige, Iron Age metal jewellery wrought with beautiful, intricately woven swirls. Hoards of such weapons and jewellery, some fashioned in gold, have indeed been dug up in Ireland, seeming to confirm Central Europe as the source of migration. The swirling style of decoration is immortalized in a glorious illuminated Irish manuscript, the
Book of Kells
, evoking the western British Isles as a small surviving remnant of past Celtic glory. This view of grand Iron Age Celtic origins on the Continent and progressive westward shrinkage since Roman times is still held by many archaeologists. It is also the epistemological basis of strong perceptions of ethnic identity held by millions of the so-called
Celtic diaspora
now residing in the former British Empire and America.