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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.
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.
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