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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....
... I brutally displaced the Irish!
Dark Reflection
Humans are mutts.
Table-ized A.I.
That the oldest Irishman should be found buried behind a pub.
Happy (belated) St. Paddy's Day, sir!
I agree with it not being surprising. Irish lore ends up a lot like LOTR lore where "first" is really "first except for the people here in he age before we got here" and iterate on that theme for a while.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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?
You got it in reverse. LotR closely follows the tradition of Irish (and even more that of Welsh) lore.
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.
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
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.
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
[...] 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.
Following your logic illegal immigration (to the US) should not be illegal; these migrants are just part of newer wave whose claim to the land is at least as strong as all waves that came before. Including the one that brought so many Europeans and Africans.
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 get special treatment and financial support because they were, quite recently, the victims of terrible human rights violations; and in some cases, still are. Those violations have a trickle-down effect. The current generation, even if not victimized directly, is still disadvantaged by their ancestry.
Further, on the one hand, you suggest that our standards of decency are wrong-minded (that we should not provide support to these people) but on the other subtly judge their ancestors by those same standards.
Perhaps you just want to have your cake and eat it too, as long as the pigmented people don't have a slice.
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.