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The Irish Not of Celtic Origin?
schwit1 writes: The discovery of a burial site in Ireland has thrown into doubt all theories concerning the Celtic origins of the Irish. "'The DNA evidence based on those bones completely upends the traditional view,' said Barry Cunliffe, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Oxford who has written books on the origins of the people of Ireland. DNA research indicates that the three skeletons found behind McCuaig's are the ancestors of the modern Irish and they predate the Celts and their purported arrival by 1,000 years or more. The genetic roots of today's Irish, in other words, existed in Ireland before the Celts arrived." The article is quite detailed, and outlines the overall scientific problem of the Celts: [namely that it] is now quite unclear who they were, where they came from, and where they went. In related news: Scientists have found new evidence of a human presence in Ireland as far back as 12,500 years ago.
DNA research indicates that the three skeletons found behind McCuaig's are...
Anyone else read this description and think it sounds like some sort of "mob hit" or something? "Yeah, those three skeletons we found over there behind Jim's house...."
Actually, now that I clicked on the link to see TFA, I see that McCuaig's is a pub. Now I'm guessing the remnants of a prehistoric barfight....
What do you have against the Irish? Or DNA and the origins of peoples for that matter?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
... I brutally displaced the Irish!
Dark Reflection
All right... we'll give some land to the niggers and the chinks. But we don't want the Irish!
Humans are mutts.
Table-ized A.I.
To be fair, we "invited" those folks to come over here. Those lazy Irish bastards just showed up unannounced.
That the oldest Irishman should be found buried behind a pub.
Happy (belated) St. Paddy's Day, sir!
Come now! ANYONE who has ever read the Táin knows that the Tuatha Dé Danann defeated the Fir Bolg for control of the island! :D
SDLeary
We've been invaded so many times: The Celts, The Normans, The British. Every time loads of them settled here and ended up "Becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves" as the saying goes. So who got here first, and why are people so determined to invade us?
When I was driving cab, I picked up many an Irishman leaving the pub.
Most of them seemed unclear about who they were, or where they came from, and they didn't know where they wanted to go.
But they were all fine people and very good tippers.
So...that's why they put that line in Blazing Saddles. A bit of a history lesson. Interesting.
Well, duh. The Celts weren't known for living under trees, hoarding gold and granting wishes to their would-be captors.
sig: sauer
The most interesting thing about this discovery is how it puts the concept of "natives", not just in Ireland, but around the world into question.
There are significant political and social consequences relating to this, obviously.
In North America, many so-called "natives" (despite many having a majority-European or even a majority-African ancestry) receive preferential treatment and financial support from governments and other organizations.
Yet the more we learn about the Clovis culture and the Beothuk culture, the more we see that there were multiple waves of migration into the Americas.
Even ignoring the European/African ancestry of today's "native" North Americans, we find that some of their ancestors were merely the latest arrivals from Eurasia, displacing and in some cases eliminating the existing inhabitants.
This, of course, should make us question if these self-titled "natives" should still receive the preferential treatment they currently receive. Their claim to the land starts to look tenuous, or at least no stronger than that of any other later-wave migrants to North America.
No Irish, no deal.
I thought it was already well understood that the Celts were a culture that precipitated more or less throughout France and the British Isles, for quite some time. It's perplexing to me that this is news at all, since I can't recall anyone ever saying that the Irish were ever purely Celtic in origin.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The discovery of a burial site in Ireland has thrown into doubt all theories concerning the Celtic origins of the Irish
The Celts, according most thinking on the subject, originated in Central Europe or there abouts some time in the bronze age, something like 1200BC. The earliest evidence of humans in Ireland, according to the BBC article quoted in the OP says:
Since the 1970s, the oldest evidence of human occupation in Ireland has been the hunter-gatherer settlement of Mount Sandel on the banks of the River Bann, County Derry, which dates to 8,000 years ago.
- we now have evidence of humans even earlier than that. So, it was already obvious that the Irish are not likely to be descended purely from the Celtic tribes that immigrated to the island later. Not unless they completely eradicated the previous inhabitants; in any case, this new discovery changes nothing about the ancestry of the Irish.
You know, the more we learn about antiquity, I think the more we thought we knew about where humans showed up and when is completely bullshit.
Humans have been around a lot longer, doing a lot more settling and other aspects of civilization than people have believed. The narrative that more modern humans were the first in all of these places has always struck me as absurd.
So much of history is written by people who assumed they were the first at everything, and a large amount of that is utterly wrong.
Ever since they found a submerged Indian city from like 7000BC or so I've thought it fairly obvious there's far more to human history than people realize.
Humans have been around a very long time. We might not ever piece it all together, but stuff like this is pretty cool.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
http://fansided.com/files/2015...
First off, do read "How the Irish Saved Civilization"
Great book.
Along similar lines of who the original humans in Eire were, is the mystery of the Etruscans, who settled in what is now Tuscany in Italy.
Genetic tests indicate they're only similar the current residents of Sardinia, who haven't been as intermingled with wave after wave of migrations, etc that Italy was.
Etruscan cattle DNA are similar to cattle DNA from ancient Anatolia(Turkey).
The Etruscan language, architecture and culture were dissimilar from those around them like the Greeks and Celts.
The Romans incorporated much from them, but the Etruscans remain a mystery...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
"The genetic roots of today's Irish, in other words, existed in Ireland before the Celts arrived."
So does that make them the original hipsters?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Not necessarily, many Irish came to America as indentured servants and had to buy their way to freedom
The Celts were a northern European tribe (France, Germany). The British Isles people were Picts and Saxons. I've always wondered how the Irish claimed to be Celtic. Never made any sense to me. It's nice to be vindicated.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Recent DNA work from 15 years old has shown that pretty much the British Isles are one people.
And that there was little infusion of DNA from Europe, and what was diffused, ie Norman, Saxon etc... is highly geographical. IE they didn't intermarry much or move much. Stykes wrote THE book on it.
Celtic or Celt is a style of ironworking from Central Europe.
A linguist noticed (around 1700 something) that there were shared patterns/sounds in the various forms of Gaelic spoken in Europe and Ireland and Wales and Scotland, since in Europe that area corresponded to a tribe the Romans called Celts, he summarized the language was Celtic and those peoples who spoke it were Celts. The term was applied to the Irish to give them a sense of national identity in the 1880's. Later they migrated to the New World and played basketball.
As much as the Irish would love it that they were a separate race (what ever race is) they are us (Ulsterman here) and we's are thems. And we have to include the Scots as well.
The summary is kind of bad, but probably only because the beginning of TFA itself is so horrible.
What they've found is that there's DNA in some 4000 year old remains that highly correlates with modern people in the modern "Celtic" area (Ireland, Scotland, and Wales), vs. the rest of Europe. The interesting thing about this is that the current guesstimate of the emergence of proto-Celtic from proto-Indo-European is only about 3000 years ago.
What this could reasonably mean:
What it doesn't say:
What this find does is add fuel to the already raging fire over exactly what archeological cultures were Celtic, and where and when it originated. That was already going before this though.
...and of course, where did we find the ancient forefathers of Ireland?
Outside a bar.
Just sayin'.
-Styopa
Humans are mutts.
Agreed.
And the problem seems to me here to be more one of terminology. Once you clear that up, this finding isn't surprising at all.
It's also wrapped up in the so-called "etymological fallacy," where we assume a word must mean the same think as the root it might have come from thousands of years ago. But meanings change over time. And so do cultures.
The word "Celtic" comes from words used by Greeks and Romans to describe a group of people who inhabited central Europe and France. When you look at these ancient texts by Greeks and Romans, they use completely different terms to describe the inhabitants of the British Isles. The earliest Greek terms refer to the Pretannikai nesoi ("Pretannic Isles"), which is the root of our word "Britannic." Roman sources often differentiate between "Celts" and "Britons."
Most of the people who were the original "Celts" in Roman and Greek terminology still inhabit various parts of central Europe and France. But they don't call themselves "Celtic."
Instead, at some point the term floated westward. Some of this may have been actual migration of Celtic peoples, but undoubtedly some of it was simply a linguistic process of progressively referring to the people outside of the "civilized world" as "Celtic." The "Celts" and the "Gauls" were originally the people outside of Roman territory to the North and West, but once those regions were assimilated (with the native populations), it makes sense that the "new Celts" would become those "barbarians" outside of the Roman regions.
Fast-forward quite a few centuries, and you have modern narratives of Irish and Celtic history being created, along with an impulse to create a separate identity from the English (and their associations first with Romans then with French). So, whoever is living in these parts of the British Isles come to identify as "Celtic," not because they actually know they are descended from the original "Celtic people." Even Wikipedia clearly understood this long before this new find supposedly upended all previous theories: there are separate articles for the original Celtic people vs. the modern "Celtic" idea. The latter article clearly notes: "The concept of modern Celtic identity evolved during the course of the 19th-century...."
Yes, there have been many who have tried to posit connections between the ancient Celtic peoples of continental Europe and ancestors of modern Irish, etc. But those theories often had little evidence associated with them. Even linguists often debate how much the so-called insular Celtic languages are related to the actual languages used by the "Celtic peoples" on the continent that the Greeks and Romans actually called "Celtic." (The "insular Celtic languages" are the only ones still spoken today, and the evidence from the morphology of extinct Continental ones is pretty scant, so it's hard to judge the detailed relationships. Also, it should be noted that if there were any migrations at all of actual Celtic continental peoples to the British Isles during historical times, any commonalities could be due to such contact, even if there was a pre-existing culture and language already in Ireland.)
Anyhow, there's lots to all of this -- but the point is that there are at least three different meanings to the word "Celtic": (1) the actual group of people the Romans and Greeks referred to in Continental Europe, whom the Romans and Greeks viewed as distinct from the Britons, (2) the modern "Celtic" languages, which mostly seem more related to each other (and confined to the islands) than to other extinct ancient languages, and (3) the modern concept of "Celtic" culture, which tends to be associated with Ireland and neighboring regions.
Anyone who knows anything about ancient history realiz
From Carleton Coon, The Races of Europe (1939).
n/m
Not necessarily, many Irish came to America as indentured servants and had to buy their way to freedom
Ssshhhh!!! You dare not point out that historical ACCURACY for fear that you will be branded a racist.
You should re read the article.
The accepted theory so far has been the Celtic tribes went from Central Europe to the West around 2,500 -3000 years ago.
These finds indicate there were Celts in Ireland a 1000 years earlier which could mean they moved from Ireland to Europe, the other way around.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
whaaat, it totally is (if remotely factual, haven't read tfa yet). Anthropology nerds are still nerds.
IT'S MY ISLAND!
In the Lebor Gabála Érenn, a medieval Irish Christian history, the Milesians are the final race to settle in Ireland. They represent the Irish people. The Milesians are Gaels who sail to Ireland from Iberia after spending hundreds of years travelling the earth. When they land in Ireland they contend with the Tuatha Dé Danann, who represent the pagan gods...Fénius Farsaid (descendant of Noah's son Japheth) is the forebear of the Gaels.
Or, maybe three people happened that way some time ago.
(the above ripped off from wikipedia)
The Irish Book of Invasions is a medieval manuscript that collects and bowdlerizes tales and poems by earlier Irish writers, which were themselves based on pre-christian oral traditions of unknown age.
It says Ireland was taken six times by six groups of people: the people of Cessair, the people of Partholon, the people of Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha De Danann, and the Milesian Celts.
All these groups were heavily mythologized by the ancient Irish, and the later retro-fitting of Christian trappings makes these legends even more unreliable. It's pretty much impossible to tell whether the Fir Bolg are the same as the Formorians, for example.
But anyway, the Milesian Celts came from Spain, the De Danaan from central Europe.
Humans in Ireland 12,500 years ago? If that were true, why are there none now?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
they couldn't get the Haplogroup any tighter? yeash....
DF13? DF63? CTS6919?
something new?
I'm L513 which is supposedly a few thousand years younger than those bones.... it'd just be nice if they had a complete sequence on these guys....
No, not about Homer Simpson.
The classicist joke goes "The Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name.
The joke is, if you don't get it, is that we know absolutely nothing about the originator(s) of those poems, except that they are traditionally credited to someone called "Homer", who has no other historic existence. By definition whoever wrote those poems is "Homer".
After reading the TFA, the claim that the Irish are not really Celtic has the same self-referential quality.
First, the term "Celtic" is not well defined - is means in essence, what we attach it to.
Second, the discovery highlighted in the article is that the ancestors of the Irish lived in Ireland before the assumed arrival of "the Celts" from the European continent, thus they aren't true Celts (since it is assumed that a "Celt" is someone descended genetically from this ancient continental culture, which we call "Celtic").
But third, it points out recent research that the Celtic languages and cultural traits may have actually originated in Ireland and the British Isles, and from there spread to the rest of Europe, to show up in classical account of the Greeks and Romans many centuries later. And it happens that we use "Celtic" to designate speakers of a Celtic language - Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and Breton - and the associated culture.
So the Irish (and Welsh, Scots, Manx, etc.) are not descended from a Celtic invasion of the British Isles, so they aren't really "Celts"; except that they are since increasingly seem to have actually been the true origin of Celtic culture in the first place, and they definitely speak the languages that we describe using the term "Celtic".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
This is old news for anyone that knows anything about the mythology/pseudo history of the Irish. Every Irishman that knows their own lore knows that the island was previously inhabited before the Celts came (by many peoples). This is sensationalist buggered garbage. BTW, there is probably some Etruscan DNA to be found among Italians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What do you mean Celtic? At the time of the Roman Empire the Celts lived throughout the Danube valley. They migrated then to Spain, and the sons of Mil came over the sea to Ireland. (That's always sounded strange to me, but that's what's reported.) There they met the current inhabitants and fought them in bloody battles, after which they divided the country, The part above ground went to the sons of Mil and the part underground went to the Tuatha de Danaan (i.e., the people under the hills). Nodbody talks about the daughters. I've alway read that last part as "The winners burried the losers", but it was the *SONS* of Mil that came over the sea. Nobody talks about the daughters. But there were, obviously, descendants.
That leaves out a whole bunch of other invasions, and I don't know where to put the Formorrians, not being studied in Irish Celtic lore. But the DNA of three people just isn't much to make a decision about who the ancestors were. And I see no reason to doubt that many of the ancestors of the current Irish were called Celtic by the Romans. That others of them were called something else also isn't surprising.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Ever heard of the a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_Urheimat_hypotheses">Indo-Europeans? Better known by the pseudoscientific Nazi version of their name Aryans?
Their language is the forebear of many many many languages spoken between Burma and the Atlantic. The Persians, Romantic languages, Germanic languages, Slavic Languages, many Indian languages, etc. are all descended from Proto-Indo-European. The Celtic languages are in this family. Apparently somewhere in the middleish of this huge area (depending on the scientist it could be Ukraine-ish, somewhere in Turkey, or the Balkans, the Proto-Indo-Europeans didn't figure out how to write shit down for a couple very important millennia so there's a lot of educated guessing involved), in the 4000s BCE or slightly earlier, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European invented a lot of horse, wagon, and chariot related gear and proceeded to conquer the aforementioned huge area. They apparently either didn't engage in mass genocide, or didn't succeed at mass genocide, because it's pretty obvious that the Swedes and Bangledeshis had different ancestors in 4000 BCE even tho their language was only spoken by a single small region at that time.
As the Celts are one of the off-shoots of the Indo-Europeans it is not anywhere near accurate to say this article claims there were Celts in Ireland in 12,500 BCE. There were no Celts at all in 12,5000 BCE, and the closest thing you'd find to them (the people that would become the people that would become the people etc. etc. that would become Indo-Europeans who would become Proto-Celts who would become Celts) were nowhere near Ireland.
What they found was evidence a human was on the island in 12,500 BCE.
Right.
Gobekli Tepe in Turkey has redefined our understanding of early human "civilization".
Were talking about a massive undertaking that would have involved hundreds if not thousands of workers.
And this was all done BEFORE agriculture...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The summary is bullshit. It was quite clearly written by someone who does not know what Celtic means. The news is that somebody human butchered a bear in Ireland several thousand years before we thought there were people to butcher bears in Ireland.
It's highly doubtful that person had anything to do with the Celts as a) in this time period Celts did not actually exist, and b) their very distant ancestors would have been thousands of miles away in the Donbass or Turkey at this point in history.
I suspect that whomever it is was closely related to the groups that occupied Ireland prior to the Celtic arrival in Ireland, which was much more recent. The Romans actually have recorded history from when the Celts showed up in Ireland, albeit they were quite far from the Irish action so they didn't write down anything about the Celtic conquest of the island.
I think you missed the point. 15 years ago I learned in college that the Celts were actually waves of loosely associated migrations over a few thousand years, and back then it was thought that Ireland had been populated for at most ~8000 years. Less than a decade ago DNA evidence shows the earliest wave came through Iberia, and not West. The story changes as we are capable of learning more. The post you commented on was flagging that the article already is based on outdated assumptions. Telling him to read the article again is like saying "I read it on the internet so it MUST be true".
My guess is as good as any.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I really expected better from someone who studies ethnicity and related DNA. Let's look at some of the examples: Hungarian look like other people from central Europe. Finns look like other people from North Europe. But Ugro-finn people from their native land (Siberia) are actually Mongoloid. Turcic people in Asia are also Mongoloid, but Turks in Turkey look pretty much European. Conclusion: when Hungarians/Turks arrived to Europe, it was actually relatively small number of people* that somehow conquered locals and eventually made them speaking their language.
Another example: distribution of B blood type in Europe isn't related anyhow to ethnic borders (with a notable exception of Basks). Conclusion: ethnicity has no foundation in biology.
Another example: in ancient Balkans, there have lived many nations, well described by Greeks and Romans: Illyrians, Tracians, Dacians, Celts. They have all disappeared long time ago, but there is no mention in history that there was any sort of war, genocide, famine or anything similar that could have annihilated not one but several nations**. Conclusion: entire nations may disappear in process described in the first example.
*) compared to the local population
**) some of them remained, but not in all areas where they originally lived; Celts and Tracians disappeared completely
No sig today.
Genealogy is an information science as much as anything else.
Not too different from the argument over whether the Anglo Saxons overran Britain or the post-Roman Britons just took on an Anglo Saxon identity.
And a number came as "Guests of His Britannic Majesty", ie convicts
Would the Irish take offence and demand to fight me?
More seriously, if the Irish aren't the epicenter of Celtic culture, who the heck is? Does the word Celt even have meaning if you just say "well the Irish aren't really Celtic you know..."
What is this, some kind of weird hipster anthropology? "I'm into the real Celts, you wouldn't know them."
...but it's leprechauns...