A Nation Once Again. NOT.
I see where scientists, meddling as usual in things better left alone, have “discovered” that the inhabitant populations of Britain and Ireland are linked more firmly and extensively than anyone ever thought. Or wished.
Specifically, they claim that DNA tests indicate that the British Isles have for many millennia been inhabited by a single people who still remain in the genetic majority, and that incomers like the Celts, Romans, Saxons, Angles, Viking and Normans have had little effect, barely rippling the surface water of the gene pool.
The supposition is that the British Isles, still land-linked to Europe, were scoured clean of people by the glaciers, and that those people all went to southern Spain and Italy and France and other places where it was warm.
When the ice melted, they all went back. Supposedly, about 75% of the ancestors of the current Brit and Irish populations came to the islands between 7,500 and 15,000 years ago, before the land bridges between Europe and Britain and Britain and Ireland broke and separated the islands forever.
So the people did their own thing, for years and years and years, and finally the Celts showed up, bringing their language and new things like agriculture with them.
More invaders followed, but according to the figures they are mere drops in the original DNA bucket: 12% of the Irish gene pool, 20% in Wales, 30% in Scotland and about the same in southern and eastern England.
That’s everybody, all-in. According to this research, the ancestors of the vast majority of people who call Britain and Ireland home (or origin) were present in those islands long, long before the Romans got there in 43 CE. But the Celts were already there!
This interests me, of course, but it also displeases me very much indeed. I am still mightily attached to the idea that the Celts, of whom I am proudly and loudly one (with the anciently anthropological epicanthic eyefolds to prove it), are dramatically different from the Others (Angles and Saxons and Jutes, oh my!) in so many ways and all of them BETTER, and I am quite reluctant to give it up.
(Though I’m sure there’s Viking DNA roaring around somewhere in my double helices, given the knowledge of what went on back in the day in the west of Ireland where the O’Kinealys—and those eyefolds—originally came from. And that would be okay, for sure.)
But as for these pre-Celtic über-islanders, or whatever one can call them…I dunno. Unless, unless, unless they’re really….ATLANTEANS! And who’s to say they’re not? Refugees from the big floods, 10,000 years or so ago—it all ties in.
Now that I could live with. Or as.
Specifically, they claim that DNA tests indicate that the British Isles have for many millennia been inhabited by a single people who still remain in the genetic majority, and that incomers like the Celts, Romans, Saxons, Angles, Viking and Normans have had little effect, barely rippling the surface water of the gene pool.
The supposition is that the British Isles, still land-linked to Europe, were scoured clean of people by the glaciers, and that those people all went to southern Spain and Italy and France and other places where it was warm.
When the ice melted, they all went back. Supposedly, about 75% of the ancestors of the current Brit and Irish populations came to the islands between 7,500 and 15,000 years ago, before the land bridges between Europe and Britain and Britain and Ireland broke and separated the islands forever.
So the people did their own thing, for years and years and years, and finally the Celts showed up, bringing their language and new things like agriculture with them.
More invaders followed, but according to the figures they are mere drops in the original DNA bucket: 12% of the Irish gene pool, 20% in Wales, 30% in Scotland and about the same in southern and eastern England.
That’s everybody, all-in. According to this research, the ancestors of the vast majority of people who call Britain and Ireland home (or origin) were present in those islands long, long before the Romans got there in 43 CE. But the Celts were already there!
This interests me, of course, but it also displeases me very much indeed. I am still mightily attached to the idea that the Celts, of whom I am proudly and loudly one (with the anciently anthropological epicanthic eyefolds to prove it), are dramatically different from the Others (Angles and Saxons and Jutes, oh my!) in so many ways and all of them BETTER, and I am quite reluctant to give it up.
(Though I’m sure there’s Viking DNA roaring around somewhere in my double helices, given the knowledge of what went on back in the day in the west of Ireland where the O’Kinealys—and those eyefolds—originally came from. And that would be okay, for sure.)
But as for these pre-Celtic über-islanders, or whatever one can call them…I dunno. Unless, unless, unless they’re really….ATLANTEANS! And who’s to say they’re not? Refugees from the big floods, 10,000 years or so ago—it all ties in.
Now that I could live with. Or as.
posted by Patricia Kennealy Morrison | 9:39 AM
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