The 19th century myth of the ‘Celts’ as a separate race originating in central Europe, moving westwards and eventually invading the British Isles, which is still held by many neoPagans, has been effectively demolished by new genetic research.
A team of scientists at Oxford University has discovered that the Ancient Britons were descended from people who crossed the Bay of Biscay from Iberia in boats about 6000 years ago. They interbred with the few thousand indigenous hunter-gatherers who had been here since the Ice Age to create a genetic ‘fingerprint’ that can still be detected today in the modern population of these isles.
Apparently, the majority of the indigenous British population are descended from these Iberian settlers, termed the Oisins by the boffins, with some genetic input from five other major racial groups or clans. Chronologically these are the Eshu clan, named after the African trickster god, from North and West Africa who arrived here around the same time as the Oisin clan; the Re clan, who were early farmers from the Middle East; the later Romans, who do not seem to have interbred with the Ancient Britons to any great extent as there is little sign of their genetic mark; the Sigurds who settled in northern Scotland, Ireland and West Wales from Scandinavia; and the Danes who colonised East Anglia in Anglo-Saxon times. Other research tracking racial migrations into this country by DNA profiling the modern population confirms that two thirds of the Ancient Britons came variously from southern Spain, the Basque region, Germany, Turkey and the Balkans. The other third came from Scandinavia and other parts of northwest Europe many thousands of years ago.
The researchers claim that while the Oisin gene pool is concentrated in the so-called ‘Celtic’ areas of Wales and Ireland, it is also strongly represented across England. The significance of this is that Celtic nationalism, itself largely a political product of the Celtic cultural and spiritual revival of the 19th century, has no historical and racial justification as we are all genetically linked as one homogeneous ‘British’ people, albeit with different (yet shared) racial origins and regional characteristics. This research also challenges the false concept of ‘racial purity’ promoted by racists as we are all mongrels.
Obviously this genetic research also has a spiritual dimension. Each wave of migrants would have brought there own religious beliefs with them. Historians and archaeologists now accept that a proto-Druidic religion existed in the Bronze Age and contained surviving elements of Neolithic spiritual beliefs. This makes nonsense of claims of a ‘pure’ Celtic paganism existing in these islands, as different racial groups would have added their own indigenous beliefs to this spiritual melting pot. The new model of Britain’s prehistory is therefore one of successive waves of immigration from Northern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, rather than a series of violent invasion. These migrations then blended into a cultural and religious continuity to create our ancient British racial identity.
References
B.C. Sykes, Blood of the Isles (Bantam Press, 2006)
Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British (Constable & Robinson, 2006)
Article in Prospect magazine entitled Myths of British Ancestry
A team of scientists at Oxford University has discovered that the Ancient Britons were descended from people who crossed the Bay of Biscay from Iberia in boats about 6000 years ago. They interbred with the few thousand indigenous hunter-gatherers who had been here since the Ice Age to create a genetic ‘fingerprint’ that can still be detected today in the modern population of these isles.
Apparently, the majority of the indigenous British population are descended from these Iberian settlers, termed the Oisins by the boffins, with some genetic input from five other major racial groups or clans. Chronologically these are the Eshu clan, named after the African trickster god, from North and West Africa who arrived here around the same time as the Oisin clan; the Re clan, who were early farmers from the Middle East; the later Romans, who do not seem to have interbred with the Ancient Britons to any great extent as there is little sign of their genetic mark; the Sigurds who settled in northern Scotland, Ireland and West Wales from Scandinavia; and the Danes who colonised East Anglia in Anglo-Saxon times. Other research tracking racial migrations into this country by DNA profiling the modern population confirms that two thirds of the Ancient Britons came variously from southern Spain, the Basque region, Germany, Turkey and the Balkans. The other third came from Scandinavia and other parts of northwest Europe many thousands of years ago.
The researchers claim that while the Oisin gene pool is concentrated in the so-called ‘Celtic’ areas of Wales and Ireland, it is also strongly represented across England. The significance of this is that Celtic nationalism, itself largely a political product of the Celtic cultural and spiritual revival of the 19th century, has no historical and racial justification as we are all genetically linked as one homogeneous ‘British’ people, albeit with different (yet shared) racial origins and regional characteristics. This research also challenges the false concept of ‘racial purity’ promoted by racists as we are all mongrels.
Obviously this genetic research also has a spiritual dimension. Each wave of migrants would have brought there own religious beliefs with them. Historians and archaeologists now accept that a proto-Druidic religion existed in the Bronze Age and contained surviving elements of Neolithic spiritual beliefs. This makes nonsense of claims of a ‘pure’ Celtic paganism existing in these islands, as different racial groups would have added their own indigenous beliefs to this spiritual melting pot. The new model of Britain’s prehistory is therefore one of successive waves of immigration from Northern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, rather than a series of violent invasion. These migrations then blended into a cultural and religious continuity to create our ancient British racial identity.
References
B.C. Sykes, Blood of the Isles (Bantam Press, 2006)
Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British (Constable & Robinson, 2006)
Article in Prospect magazine entitled Myths of British Ancestry
