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.

Comments

Nonsense

[jandersen]

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.

Hmmm ...

[gstoddart]

the ancestors of the modern Irish and they predate the Celts and their purported arrival by 1,000 years or more

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.

Bad summary not his fault

[T.E.D.]

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:

1. The current guesstimate is wrong, and they actually split more than 4000 years ago. As an addendum, the Halstatt culture may not be the one and only indication of the proto-celts.
2. Celtic culture spread to the British Isles by cultural diffusion, not by the replacement of actual peoples. At least where those particular genes are concerned.

What it doesn't say:

1. The Irish are not Celtic. Not only doesn't it say this, its a patently absurd. Linguistically this is as much a settled fact as exists, and no archeology work is going to change that. We may not be sure where proto-Celtic originated (we weren't even before this), we may not be sure exactly when, but the evidence for the group's existence is unaffected.
2. Celtic is not Indo-European. Again, laughable. Its relation to Indo-European is so linguistically sound, that from a layman's perspective it can be taken as fact.

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.