Difficult, but intermittently rewarding

books:

	• The Origins of the British Stephen Oppenheimer Robinson Publishing, 2007 - 512 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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Celtic confusions

While we in North America have a distressing tendency to lump most of the inhabitants of the British Isles together, those living there are aware of their diversity. That awareness has been carried rather to extremes by some scholars and politicians. "What is a Celt?" has been a key question, as has been its follow-up "What really happened to the Celts?" Tied in with these queries is the problem of finding an origin for the Celts and just what language they spoke. Stephen Oppenheimer addresses these and related issues in a comprehensive "detective story" incorporating history, analytical genetics and linguistic studies. His conclusions, well depicted in this provocative study, will prove surprising to some, and perhaps distressing to a few.

The British Isles, he begins, have the advantage of being invaders of a "terra nullius" [uninhabited land] some fifteen thousand years ago. As the Last Glacial Maximum retreated before the rise of a revived warm period, humans were able to enter a land they'd been driven from thousands of years previously. While this situation offers nothing to the historian, archaeologists and geneticists have a clear starting point for placing and dating the migration. Not an island then, Britain was a peninsula jutting out from the European land mass. That provided an easy route from the Mediterranean shoreline, around what is now Iberia to the southern and western coasts of Britain. Since "western" here now means Eire, it's clear the first adjustment of opinion must accommodate Ireland and Britain. Clearly, there were later population movements, but where did they originate, how long did they last and what numbers of people were involved? Most significantly, what languages did they speak?

From his introductory survey, Oppenheimer proceeds to tease out the answers to these questions. The origins are traced back in time using genetic markers. Mitochondrial DNA, carried down the generations only through female inheritance factors provides one scenario. The Y chromosome, the genetic marker for men is analysed separately, then compared. In most, although not all cases, the matches are mutually supportive. Archaeological finds are used as further indicators which have the advantage of solid dating techniques to support them, unlike the DNA tests which rest on a calculation based on presumed mutation rates. The language question remains contentious. Oppenheimer links it with the spread of farming entering Europe from Anatolia introducing early forms of Celtic into Western Europe. The author's genetic analysis also overturns the idea that farmers "displaced" earlier hunter-gatherer societies in Europe and Britain. Instead, farming was adapted by the resident population and farmers' larger families added some population pressure, but hardly "displacement". The same holds true for the Roman occupation, which was more interested in social stability and tax collecting than genocide.

The post-Roman era has also led to the establishment of displacement myths and their more recent overturning. History, partly thanks to reliance on "Saint" Gildas, has stoked the fires of national sentiments by depicting the Angles and Saxons as a barbarian horde bent on ethnic cleansing of the indigenous "Celtic" peoples. Oppenheimer rejects this tradition, arguing instead that a "warrior elite" may have entered Britain, but this was a small population and a continuation of British-Continental ties in any case. Just who those "barbarians" were is problematic in any case, since the author sees ongoing contact with the Frisian and near shore of Europe rather than a conquering horde emerging from northern Germany. It is now generally accepted that the Norman "Conquest" was only slightly more intrusive than the Roman one, with an elite doing the ruling and the long-lasting indigenous population doing everything else like farming, herding and trading.

A major issue here is language. Linguists, Oppenheimer argues have been keen to avoid dating of language branching, mostly because early attempts came to grief. He goes so far as to separate "Celtic" populations from "celtic" languages. Part of the reason for this is the lack of a written base of celtic to use as a foundation. The Classical Period commentators in Greece and Rome wrote of "Celts" in a vague sort of way, and even a man on the ground, Julius Caesar was unable to make definitive comments about either the people or their languages. More precise cultural details were omitted entirely. Oppenheimer's path through the language issues is inevitably a tortured one, but he makes a serious effort at simplification. Whatever his success is due to a paucity of real data. For him, the genes speak louder than words. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

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Great Britain as New Euskaria

An excellent book, like being back in college and taking a fun course with a witty, funny and knowledgeable professor. I appreciated the linear format with thesis backed with evidence approach. As a precaution, just like college, there were many terms and ideas that went over my head, which meant having to do some additional homework to catch up with text, but well worth the detour. To this regard, the appendix and glossary were extremely valuable. I have always been fascinated with the origins of the Basque; why would they be the only non Indo-European, Sub-Saharan or Semitic language in all of Europe and the Mediterranean and why stuck in the middle of Pyrenees? My other linguistic quandry was the lack of celtic words in the English language and the lack of consistency between English and Dutch/German/Danish. Finally the technology catches up with speculative history and paints a different picture of Western Europe. It is human nature to embelish, pander to the audience or just plain preach propaganda. But blood doesn't lie and for me all the pieces of the puzzle came together in Mr. Oppenheimer's book. I have no doubt the thesis will be seminal in the re-writing of British History.

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Difficult, but intermittently rewarding

Not the place to begin, but this book may reward advanced readers who can handle a popularized but scholarly work on the implications of recent findings in DNA. Earlier readers posting here frequently disparage this book's ponderous prose and its massive array of recondite DNA analyses. After reading more accessible, and considerably shorter (no coincidence!) works on genetics and anthropology by Spencer Wells and Bryan Sykes (for both authors, their two most recent books reviewed by me on Amazon), I felt ready to tackle Oppenheimer's work, despite its difficulty. While the time invested paid off in a better knowledge of the Celtic and British origin debate and the possible influence of Germanic cultural and linguistic influences preceding not only the Anglo-Saxon invasion but the preceding Roman occupation, Oppenheimer while he may be a better scholar than Sykes remains a less entertaining writer. Sykes can popularize his findings in "Blood of the Isles" & "Seven Daughters of Eve." He also can profit from them if you note the enterprise Oxford Genetics. As I commented when reviewing Sykes' "Blood," it remains curious that two geneticists both at Oxford do not even mention the other colleague in hundreds of pages of closely documented and meticulously referenced texts.

This apparent rivalry aside, Oppenheimer acknowledges very late in his text that names given to Rostov or Ian or Helena are merely "aides memoires" for R1B-11 or the like in an alphabet soup of markers all geneticists rely upon. Readers of both Sykes & Oppenheimer sniff disdainfully at this popularization, but surely both scientists and lay people need assistance in imagining "Eve" or "Lucy" or the "Ice Man" to make more personal the findings buried in blood types or bone samples. Oppenheimer carefully explains his reasons for clarifying relationships among these difficult classifications, numbering in the thousands by now. Much explanatory material on genetics here is relegated to appendices and a glossary; while Sykes & Wells integrate more definitions and analogies into their briefer, more readable books, Oppenheimer opts for density.

This can bore a reader. My eyes glazed over in the second hundred pages full of dull genetics. The first hundred, tackling the Celtic origins debate and guardedly based on scholars such as Simon James & Barry Cunliffe, and Iron Age archaeologists such as John Collis, argues a southerly direction into the British Isles for Celtic infusion, not the La Tene Danube-Central European homeland and its overland route for entry into the Isles. Personally, I'd have liked to have Bob Quinn's book "The Atlantean Irish" (reviewed by me) credited for its prescience regarding the Atlantic Celt "fringe" movement that Cunliffe and others have since fought to replace the Continental migration theories of the 19c. This vexed matter alone, building upon the past two decades of Celtic revision, or Celto-skepticism, could fill an entire book easily.

But, I did perk up eventually. This is more a reference book on a variety of unevenly covered but admittedly provocative topics. He writes clearly in places and dully in many others, depending it seems on his diligence vs. his enthusiasm! This is an arduous trek, but you need to weather this if your curiosity's aroused about this intellectual terrain that for the first time geneticists and linguists have entered to do battle over, not to mention archeologists and historians!

Advances in DNA may soon rely on its suggestions, or they may overturn its assumptions. But, Oppenheimer bravely piles all he has amassed for the benefit of science. It may be too clunky and over-ambitious, but he has done specialized researchers, armchair genealogists, and academics like myself needing a non-technical explanation of dozens of arcane debates all a service.

Oppenheimer builds on this fact-laden if recondite foundation to posit that many of today's ancestors came to the Isles perhaps as early as around 15-7,500 years ago. The land bridge before the end of the last Ice Age became submerged allowed two major inflows of migration, from a Ukrainian-Moldavian refuge, and an Iberian refuge. The former provided a basis for North Sea movements added to later by Scandinavians, Saxons, Belgae, and other Continental peoples. The latter brought people in on the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish sides closest to the Irish Sea that opened up in the later periods of global warming. Germanic languages cannot have diverged in Old English so rapidly after the Saxon incursions, nor were (against the Welsh historian Gildas' spurious claims of Celtic "wipeout") the indigenous natives necessarily Celtic-speakers all prior to the landing of Hengist and his post-Roman mercenaries.

Percentages of genetic disruption rarely reach even the point of "decimation" of 10% in a handful of Anglian areas, according to genetic studies of inhabitants today in these long-stable regions of Britain. Simply and ineradicably, this persistent divide, genetically and perhaps linguistically, Oppenheimer proposes, persists in our DNA. This parallels the Germanic vs. Celtic division of languages in the Isles, the spine of mountains serving as an insular border between these two major routes for farming and colonization.

The hoary myth of a Celtic genocide by Teutonic overlords that inspired Arthur's last stand, it seems, proves more a "Dark Age" screed than plausible history. Granted that this early medieval era remains fraught with dangers for those reliant only on chronicles or a misleading archeological record, Oppenheimer here makes his boldest suggestion.

Probably the first to enter this fray as a geneticist, he confronts linguistic assumptions about the rapid spread and dialectal evolution in only a few centuries of Anglo-Saxon in post-Roman Britain. Germanic languages, he opines, might have become established long before Romans, let alone Saxons, entered into what was not necessarily a Celtic-dominated Brittania. Celts themselves, whatever this term means given the looseness of this pseudo-ethnic linguistic concept, did not rush en masse into the islands, and they too were perhaps the harbingers of not a massive demographic invasion but an elite influencing cultural and linguistic trends among the natives, who may date back ten thousand years before the arrival of Celtic-language speakers. Unfortunately, traces of any words that are pre-Celtic lurk rarely in the archaeological record, according to most experts. We lack a Rosetta Stone to decode whatever insular peoples spoke before Celtic languages became the norm among both the newcoming elite and the long-settled old-timers.

Therefore, Oppenheimer turns to DNA for clues. He challenges linguists who for a century have been indoctrinated to ignore searching for language origins. He argues that science can offer tentative solutions that account for a Germanic undercurrent that may not be that apparent on the surface, but which aligns with what we know about rates of linguistic change that may have begun as long ago as 3000 BCE (estimates differ) that can be calibrated with patterns of genetic migration.

His thesis? Most of the original British Isles inhabitants descend from a massive "founder population"-- maybe far more than three-fourths or more of those today living in some locales. Due to genetics and settlement patterns, most humans stick to one place for millennia. This conservatism therefore provides a solid bedrock. It cannot be eroded even by the waves of more recent, and tribally-named, intruders. While closer to us in time and in the historical record (however tenuous!), these famous warriors themselves often number in the low single-digits (5% often!) in terms of percentages of genetic "material" we British and/or Celts carry today.

All subsequent immigrations, whether Celt, Roman, Saxon, Angle, Jute, Viking, or Norman, Oppenheimer states in the closing line of his epilogue, diminish by their traces in the descendants of the majority who trace their roots to British-resident or Celtic-origin DNA today. Most of the origins of the British predate even the Celts. Oppenheimer concludes: "we are all minorities compared with the first, unnamed pioneers, who ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets." (421)

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Exploding Myths

Stephen Oppenheimer: The Origins of the British. The New Prehistory of Britain and Ireland from Ice-Age Hunter-Gatherers to the Vikings as Revealed by DNA Analysis. London, England: Constable and Robinson, 2006 (Paperback edition 2007), xxii and 628 pages, with 22 color plates and numerous maps and diagrams.

Like most "Brits", I was taught in school that the Welsh, Cornish and Manx-speaking peoples were the remains of the originally Celtic population of Britain who had been decimated and driven into hiding by the furious assaults of the Angles and Saxons in the early middle ages, while the origin of the Scots was lost in antiquity. Stephen Oppenheimer, a geneticist rather than a historian, explodes all this as a radically oversimplified myth in his latest book, "The Origins of the British". Using the resources of DNA analysis, which have only become available over the past 10 to 15 years, and in dialogue with the work of historians, linguists, archaelogists, climatologists and other geneticists, Oppenheimer traces the "prehistory" of the inhabitants of the British Isles from the end of the Ice Age (he consistently speaks of the LGM = Last Glacial Maximum) up to the Norman invasion of 1066. And while he nowhere claims to have all the answers, he provides enough information to make it clear that the history of the British is a lot more complicated than my old history teacher was prepared to give it credit for. Britain appears to have been settled both from the South and West and from the North and East. The dichotomy between the Celtic-speaking western parts and the "Germanic" east quite possibly goes back thousands of years. Oppenheimer follows the historical developments from the Palaeolithic through the Mesolithic and the Neolithic right up to the Bronze and Iron Ages, establishing that the south of Britain (the part generally known today as England) was peopled mainly from the north-western European mainland. Although Oppenheimer is not a linguist, he broaches a fascinating argument on the origins of Old English, which he sees as possibly being a separate branch of the Germanic family of languages, related perhaps rather more to the North Germanic branch than the West Germanic, as is commonly supposed. This form of "Ènglish" may, he speculates, have been spoken in England already at the time of the Roman invasion, which would explain the total lack of evidence for Celtic as the original English tongue. DNA analysis makes it seem highly unlikely that the Angles and Saxons committed mass murder, and the same is true of the Viking and Danish invaders of some centuries later. The entire thrust of Oppenheimer's argument has been well summarized by some other reviewers, so I will leave it at that - this is a book that anyone interested in these issues should really read for themselves. And apropos reading it for yourself: The style is eminently sober and scientific, even if the memory-aiding names of genetic groups seem to some readers to be over-populizing. Some of the chapters in the middle of the book were a little confusing on the first reading to me as a non-geneticist, and I later wished I had read Appendix A (An Introduction to Genetic Tracking) before tackling the main body of the book. But I really cannot agree with those reviewers who accuse Oppenheimer of bad style; he has mastered an immense amount of information and passed it on in a way which is both illuminating and memorable.

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Not dumb enough!

In Britain, there is a mantra uttered by the PC lobby that "we have always been a nation of immigrants". History books concentrate on various "invasions" of our homeland which have supposedly changed our genes and made any idea of a British people just nonsense.
Oppenheimer shows that this is wrong. Most of our blood comes from men and women who arrived over 10,000 years ago from the Iberian peninsula when the last glaciers retreated. Recent developments in tracing DNA enables us to track them because the various regions of the British Isles still bear their genetic imprint. The same technology also sheds new light on the ancestry of the Celts.
This is all fascinating stuff and Oppenheimer should be congratulated for not dumbing down his story for the sake of popular appeal.
However, I must admit I struggled through those many parts of the book which detailed at great length exactly what percentage of people possess various gene variants. A few pages like that would have been fine, but we get rather too much. I'm afraid he could have done with a better editor and more appendixes.
It's still a very interesting book, but it's not for non-scientific readers or those whose interest in the subject comes from genealogy research.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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.

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