Who were/are the Celts?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

recall that the sample was selected for people with four grandparents living in the same area - locals not cosmopolitans so some caution as to interpretations is needed and it should also be recalled that much social tradition is of recent invention .... that said, anything which supports the argument that we are all mutts and from the north eastern corner of the African continent is welcome

what would be interesting is the genetic make up of a truly random sample of the present inhabitants of these islands ...

i also appreciate the slant in some media that 'we are all immigrants'

very little comment on the Northumbrian Orange Circle in the media coverage

[Richard Tarleton]

recall that the sample was selected for people with four grandparents living in the same area - locals not cosmopolitans so some caution as to interpretations is needed

Thank you calum, my question in #2, my neighbours would have been eligible, I would not.

anything which supports the argument that we are all mutts and from the north eastern corner of the African continent is welcome

[Ian Thumwood]

These ancient migrations are spelt out in Barry Cunliffe's recent book which outlines migrations northwards from Spain, along the French coast and ultimately to Southern England.

Don't forget that the population of Northern France were from Scandinavia. I was reading last night about the ancestors of the Burgundians who menaced Eastern France in late antiquity and how there in evidence of migration from Bornholm which is an island between Sweden and Denmark.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i love this line of research work but i would wait at least ten to fifteen years before jumping up and down about dna evidence .... the methodologies and techniques are still developing .. and the maps of human global migration are still being developed and corrected

[Ian Thumwood]

I believe that the technology is in place but the issue would be taking a representative sample upon which to base an assessment and whether such a sample needed to be of a particular size to be meaningful.

I must admit to being hugely sceptical of their being any such thing as Celtic culture and that most of the supposed history actually stems from discredited 19th century ideas. I'm not an authority of this but the main notion of Celtic-ness appear to stem from the Iron Age which, if I am correct, stems from two distinct culture, Halstadt and La Tene, both of which appeared to originate from Switzerland and Germany. The Cunliffe book is sometimes heavy going but the maps are excellent and it is a book that I would recommend for people wishing to follow this line of interest up. What always interests me is that by the time of Christ, there had already been migrations of Ion age French to mainland Britain with Yorkshire inhabited by a tribe called the Parisii after whom Paris took it's post-Roman name. In my neck if the woods, the Belgae migrated from what is now Belgium and Champagne to the Hampshire basin.

It is fair to say that Saxon / Jute / Angle migration had an impact upon the native population increasingly from the 5th century onwards and the spread to Cornwall, Wales and Strathclyde as well as Ireland (largely untouched by Romans but not unaffected) makes this an attractive proposition for a Celtic residue yet not many people make a case for the fact that these people would have been Romano-British and themselves likely to have included elements from around the Roman Empire. That said, writers like Russell and Laycock have made a strong argument for a less effective Roman influence which enabled the constitution of Roman Britain to fragment very quickly once authority was withdrawn in 410AD.

I think there were shared cultures in pre-Roman times but am sceptical about there being single Celtic heritage even if some elements are common to quite distant locations.

[Pabmusic]

...There is a European race which managed to keep both its DNA and its (pre-Indo-Eurpoean) language distinct - the Basque language "an orphan, presumably from an island of aboriginal Europeans that resisted the Ind-European tidal wave" (Stephen Pinker) - and they still show distinct blood groupings.

Indeed. The prevalence of the Rh- factor is very high among Basques. About 35% are Rh-, the highest in the world (it's about 15% in Europe generally and lower elsewhere - about 7% on average). More than 30% of Basques are 0- (as opposed to 7% worldwide). I'm 0- by the way, as was my mother and is my daughter.

David Icke thinks it's the influence of alien lizard-people.

[Richard Tarleton]

I wondered whether this was worth doing - based on a saliva test? Standard ancestry research has taken my family tree back to the 17th and 18th centuries. I heard Benedict "Plantaganet" Cumberbatch talking about it the other day (he's clearly looked into his ancestry in some detail).

I'm A-, which makes you a sought-after blood donor

[Pabmusic]

...I'm A-, which makes you a sought-after blood donor

The Prison Service expected my blood for 30 years.

[Richard Tarleton]

The Prison Service expected my blood for 30 years.

My mother was RH-, which resulted apparently in my being about 4th attempt. Apparently the Basque RH-/eritroblastosis issue was discovered by a Basque GP in Argentina in 1939, looking at people there with 4 Basque grandparents.

[Anna]

I wondered whether this was worth doing - based on a saliva test? Standard ancestry research has taken my family tree back to the 17th and 18th centuries. I heard Benedict "Plantaganet" Cumberbatch talking about it the other day (he's clearly looked into his ancestry in some detail).

I'm A-, which makes you a sought-after blood donor

When you first mentioned DNA testing I thought you might be referring to this: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/about/ which traces roots out of Africa, whereas the Ancestry one possibly only connects you with long lost relatives (and I wondered how much is just based on USA and of no interest to majority in UK, but is it that one that Benedict Cumberbatch used or another?) I'd wondered about doing the National Geographic.

Incidentally, I'm A+ - a grade I always wished I could get in exams!

[ahinton]

David Icke thinks

Well, there's news!...

[Richard Tarleton]

When you first mentioned DNA testing I thought you might be referring to this: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/about/ which traces roots out of Africa, whereas the Ancestry one possibly only connects you with long lost relatives (and I wondered how much is just based on USA and of no interest to majority in UK, but is it that one that Benedict Cumberbatch used or another?) I'd wondered about doing the National Geographic.

Benedict C definitely used the 23andMe one I linked to above, he said. An interesting cross-section of reviews here - there is a choice of UK, USA or Canada when you register (see flag at the top) but it doesn't look as if this affects the results....some of the reviews suggest they have been put in touch with real people, not just told whether they are 2.5% Neanderthal! I must have thousands of US relatives anyway, as one of my 9xgreat grandfathers emigrated on a pilgrim ship in 1635 (born in Dorset in 1617), and they had gigantic families. One bunch of cousins (nine times removed) were named Lot, Sarah, Temperance, Patience.....they sound a barrel of laughs

Why don't you do the Nat Geographic one, Anna, I'll do this one (when I get back from hols) and we can compare notes!

[Pabmusic]

Well, there's news!...

[french frank]

New exhibition at the British Museum (24 September- 31 January) answers ALL the questions. Observer article, unpromisingly attributed to 'Britain's leading punk antiquarian, is worth a read as an account of how fusions and wild imaginings (plus a few canny cash-generating wheezes) appeal to our romantic side.

[Lat-Literal]

New exhibition at the British Museum (24 September- 31 January) answers ALL the questions. Observer article, unpromisingly attributed to 'Britain's leading punk antiquarian, is worth a read as an account of how fusions and wild imaginings (plus a few canny cash-generating wheezes) appeal to our romantic side.

"Saint" Julian may be a punk in his own mind. He emerged in the immediate aftermath of punk rock. But I reckon he was a quarter of the way vocally towards Scott Walker and could be seen as the nearest to a competitor to him in terms of idiosyncrasy. For 20 odd years, Walker has been wild. I am not sure that any of us who saw the former live at various times during the 1980s - starting with the Teardrop Explodes - would have anticipated his subsequent romping across the countryside to pursue history. Maybe, though, it shouldn't have been a huge surprise. The question was always what would have happened if an individual combined some intelligence, arguably an over-active imagination and a spiritual sort of philosophy that only made sense to him with mind-altering substances. It was of interest to me as I always felt the latter would be unmanageable. The answer turned out to be the extraordinary book "The Modern Antiquarian" which was wonderful and yet not to be taken seriously or was it? Here is information and the glowing reviews:

http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/the_books/

So while in terms of his stylistic approach, one could think of Malcolm McLaren's "The Ghosts of Oxford Street" - half-baked, slightly wacky ideas made into a collage for artistic effect - there is perhaps something more to be said for comparisons with Peter Ackroyd's unusual but academically impressive approaches to London. Imagine the capital city as a human body if you will. If anything, Cope is controversial because he is a bit less imaginative in his work than Ackroyd, albeit with a twist. What appear to be books for the coffee table - beautiful in their presentation, presumably trivial and, certainly on the surface, anything but punk in design - are not at all insignificant in their oddball historical content.