A new paper at
Nature by Patterson et al. argues that Celtic languages spread into Britain during the Bronze Age rather than the Iron Age [
LINK]. This argument is based on the observation that there was a large-scale shift in deep ancestry proportions in Britain during the Bronze Age.
In particular, the ratio of Early European Farmer (EEF) ancestry increased significantly in what is now England during the Late Bronze Age (LBA). On the other hand, the English Iron Age was a much more stable period in this context.
I don't have any strong opinions about the spread of Celtic languages into Britain, and Patterson et al. might well be correct, but their argument is potentially flawed because:
- significant population shifts need not result in any noticeable changes in ancient ancestry proportions
- ancient ancestry proportions can shift without significant migrations from afar due to cryptic population substructures
- large-scale population shifts need not result in langage shifts, especially if they're gradual
- small-scale population shifts can result in language shifts, especially if they're sudden.
Indeed, when I plot some of the key ancient samples from the paper in my ultra fine scale Principal Component Analyses (PCA) of Northern and Western Europe, it appears that it's only the Early Iron Age (EIA) population from England that overlaps significantly with a roughly contemporaneous group from nearby Celtic-speaking continental Europe. The relevant PCA data are available
here and
here, respectively.
See also...
Celtic vs Germanic Europe
Avalon vs Valhalla revisited
R1a vs R1b in third millennium BCE central Europe
434 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 401 – 434 of 434@Dranoel
My sincerest appreciation for what you are doing and how you are helping me! Again I have no other option as to deeply thank you for what you wrote! You are irreplaceable in what you do here, so please keep going! Shine like a crazy diamond and do not fade away!
(…) haha: D like a man has hopes, but no – you are unreformable;) rudeness, vulgarity and knowledge from wikipedia – the worst combination. (…)
Well, unlike you, I do not discriminate against data or people. It is not true what you write because many times I have provided data from various sources. The fact is that not only the data from wikipedia, but also the logic of your own comments is unbearable for you. So why should I make more effort if you fight yourself best? See below.
(…) So you still have to ignore you. (…)
You got upset too much and you probably meant that: 'So I still have to ignore you.', didn’t you?
If so, why do you come back to the shootout with your bare hands again? I have already written that you should have simply ignored me, as you have called on everyone before.
(…) You irritate some, and entertain others. You are the clown of this blog �� such a harmless monkey. That’s your charm. (…)
You are pitifully pathetic. I do what I want with you with no effort, only by simple logic.
You broke unexpectedly quickly but you did not have to reply to me this time, either. You could just have remained silent and pretended to be smart. However, probably for some internal compulsion you keep replying to my posts and once again in your comments you dispelled all doubts as to what you really are.
(…) And those texts must have touched you a lot, since they keep you awake. Apparently there was a lot of truth in them �� I am going to make breakfast and I wish you a nice day. Stay in your shit hut and wait for the return of the big lechia �� turbo-slavs will save you! (...)
Oh yeah, your sophisticated words make me bleed from all my orifices, so I can not sleep at night. But seriously, perhaps you had better loosen your pickelhaube? It is obvious that it is kneading your mind and completely obstructing your field of vision. Be careful because you may hurt yourself even more drastically, in your own kitchen, with deadly sharp milk or the ‘blurry shadow of the fog’… :-)
As an aside, it is fascinating how Pictish stones, right into the Christian period, reproduce a lot of the same iconography as these bronze age Iberian /Scandinavian stelae.
Scotland always somehow seems to be carrying on with, or hanging on to, the last gasp of everyone else’s previous era, when you look at each big cultural wave or age that washes about western Europe.
Except the Vikings — we got them here early.
@Skeibha Is “NIE” = non-IE, or is it “Northern IE”?
If you do believe in an EEF substrate, would it be GAC?
Do you think that the modern English language has words from GAC?
(Words like “dog” or “boy” have no cognates in either West Germanic, Norse of Romance languages).
BTW, CWC was not “post-PIE” but was PIE itself; Yamnaya might be ancestral to maybe Anatolian (doubtful), Phrygian, Armenian, Helladic and Albanian, but even these ones were unsubstantiated and uncorroborated.
@Andrzejewski
Upcoming paper (https://youtu.be/QoGmPJJS3X8) states that CWC almost exclusively choose GAC like candidate for farmers substrate.
BBC more likely acquired additional substrate from more western famers.
@SKRibHA
Some cases in Gaelic (and probably Irish) the S in salann (salt) (and other words beginning with S) does sound as an H.
In Scottish Gaelic orthography that sound change is indicated by inserting an H.
And of course, Irish and Gaelic like to make changes at the beginning, middle &/or end of words.
Salt = salann. My salt = mo shalainn. The S is silent.
eye = súil Eye salve/ointment sàbh-shùil (S is silent. Sounds like hav-hu:l)
Seumas = (James, sounds like Shaymas) in the vocative is Sheumais (sounds like Haymish)
If Hallstatt means “place of salt”, perhaps it is the case (genitive, or locative if they had that there then) that explains why it has no S.
Maybe the S>H fossilised only in some words that once began with an S in the nominative. Like feminine gender or uncountable nouns or something.
Perhaps they do similar things with cases in Classical Greek, I don’t know. In the days when Classical Greek was commonly taught eg for anyone studying medicine, Gaelic speakers remarked on the affinities of Gaelic with that language. And were said by scholars in other parts of Europe (mostly France) to be good at Greek. Its perceived affinities with Celtic languages was one of the things that confirmed for people like the juvenile (and short lived) linguist Alexander Murray that both were part of one large language family.
Andrzejewsky
What about madog — isn’t that fox in Welsh?
And madadh in Scottish Gaelic ( madə'ɣ ends with voiced “ch” / hummed G) is hound or mastiff type dog.
Gaelic madadh-allaidh, wild/fierce hound = one of many expressions for wolf.
madadh-uisge = otter.
@Bob, yes, if you have some ideas about what samples in the published set show would be predicted to show some differences, then happy to try anything to look into them with the data Davidski has provided.
@ambron and arza: Latest news of what the Hungarian researchers are up to with adna with possible relevance to "Balto-Slavic" drift - https://agi.abtk.hu/en/news/the-colleagues-of-rch-iag-at-the-hunlifesci2021-international-conference.
Some abstracts are here: https://agi.abtk.hu/images/HunLifeSci2021/Agikollegak_print_HunLifeSci2021.pdf
"Genetic History and Life of Bronze Age Communities in Western Hungary" (Gerber et al)
"Bronze Age Europe was home to a number of well documented and shifting communities, when today's genetic makeup was formulated. Nevertheless, regional demographic and population genetic histories are yet to be described. Here we provided 20 newly sequenced human genomes at an average 0.1x coverage from three archaeological horizons of previousl understudied archaeological periods from the excavation site of Balatonkeresztur, Western Hungary, dated between 2400-1650 BCE.
Our results indicate a population turnover from first to second horizon around 2200 BCE with a group of high (42%) Hunter-Gatherer component previously unknown from the period, which during the transition from the second to third horizon subsequently blended into the prevailing genetic pool of surrounding populations through female biased admixture.
The origin of this particular Hunter-Gatherer ancestry likely comes from unsampled regions of Eastern Europe, and contributed to various populations to some extent, while becoming most prominent in the Baltic region from the middle of the second millennium BCE.
Kinship network and uniparental genetic makeup revealed patrilocal social structure in line with previous results of Bronze Age Europe."
Quick comparison to the Hungarian record from about this time (post 2600 BCE, pre 1900 BCE): https://imgur.com/a/ZLpthDz
I3528 and I1502 are some relatively similar samples from this time.
The date of 2200BCE is quite early compared to most of the samples from SRB / HRV showing elevated HG and Balto-Slavic related drift.
(Previous news for comparison - https://agi.abtk.hu/en/news/news)
@ambron and arza: Re; the Gerber abstract I posted upthread, in a simple 3-way Global 25 model with IronGates, Yamnaya and Barcin, the Latvia Baltic LBA samples have about 38% HG ancestry on average, so if Gerber is using the same model and its accurate, then their finding of 42% would be an "uncanny proportion" that does equal or exceed these most HG rich samples. And also higher than the Mako_EBA sample from a similar time period (approx 2200 BCE).
E.g. - https://imgur.com/a/jpIk269
Alternatively if it's just a read of a HG associated component in ADMIXTURE it may or may not be.
@ Matt
Thanks! I haven't seen these abstracts yet.
They're apparently on the right track with the exception of Eastern Europe being the source of this ancestry in the Bronze Age (unless Neman culture will be drastically different than other HGs that we have from the Baltic region).
I'm not sure if I understood your second comment correctly but if you suggest that they may have samples that are identical to Baltic_BA then yes, you're right, they do have at least one such sample.
@arza, second comment is just a musing on whether these unpublished samples would be higher in HG ancestry than any of the published samples (including the Latvia LBA who seem richest in that ancestry so far, at a population level anyway for a population with many samples? Rather than outlier from Vatya.).
"Andrzejewski said...
BTW, CWC was not “post-PIE” but was PIE itself; Yamnaya might be ancestral to maybe Anatolian (doubtful), Phrygian, Armenian, Helladic and Albanian, but even these ones were unsubstantiated and uncorroborated."
I wouldn't be so quick with such grand pronouncements. The genetic case, especially uniparentals, for Balkanic and late Anatolian IEs (Thracians, Greeks, Phrygians, Armenians, etc) coming from Corded Ware is very weak. I don't know much about linguistics but I doubt there is much of a case there either. Also, one should account for the CHG-like admixture that native foragers in northern Europe lacked but all IE-speaking steppe descendants had, which points to a more southern origin than the CW area.
@Wee
'madog' in Welsh is like 'madeg' in breton, derived from 'mad' = "good" (adj.) second name Maddock, Maddox in Wales, Madec in Brittany -
no visible link with 'fox' in Brittonic (the remnants I know)
'fox' is 'cadno', 'canddo' (dial.?), llwynog in Welsh, 'louarn' (dial- 'luern') in Breton - 'lowarn' in Cornish -
IE or Celtic *s- turned into h- in brittonic, before loanwords reintroduced s- ;
I don't know if this regular definitive change occurred first in mutated words, as the phonetical /s/ > /h/ change in Gaelic and irish written s- > sh- ; but without these Celtic systems of mutations with have initial *s- /s/ >/h/ in Greek too -
@all
As someones think with sensefulness, a language or dialect doesn't find birth in a night, and cannot be linked too tightly to the historical beginning of expansion of a tribe or culture. So Celtic s older to IA, at least it implies LBA - Celtic is surely a post-BB evolution of one of the BB's dialects of Central-North Europe
So, those samples of the Baltic BA type that come from Hungary are older than Spiginas2.
Hi Davidski, what do you think about the suggestion that classical Greek's Steppe ancestry was straight from the Yamanya and not from Corded Ware?
@Wee - I don't think evidence of contact between proto-Germanic and proto-Celtic is all that surprising. The two groups have been neighbours from the Bell Beakers right up to the Romans. Celtic placenames are as far east as Poland.
@Matt
Matt said...
@Bob, yes, if you have some ideas about what samples in the published set show would be predicted to show some differences, then happy to try anything to look into them with the data Davidski has provided
Great, I am working something bespoke up from scratch that should establish if it is possible to distinguish between key Iron Age groupings / potential migration events. I am going to try and make it simple and initially will cut out the archaeologically more complex sites. They can be visited at a later stage. There is still the problem of small sample numbers for most sites and outliers potentially impacting results - particularly for the critical Early Iron Age.
It may take me a few days to fully work it up (I want to be 100% about selecting the right sites and dates on those sites - and checking out the detailed archaeology of the all the sites is a nightmare as many are new to me and some of them very poorly documented). I will post here or pass on via Davidski as there will be a lot of info.
Ancient DNA at the edge of the world: Continental immigration and the persistence of Neolithic male lineages in Bronze Age Orkney
Orkney was a major cultural center during the Neolithic, 3800–2500 BC. Farming flourished, permanent stone settlements and chambered tombs were constructed, and long-range contacts were sustained. From ~3200 BC, the number, density and extravagance of settlements increased and new ceremonial monuments and ceramic styles, possibly originating in Orkney, spread across Britain and Ireland. By ~2800 BC this phenomenon was waning, although Neolithic traditions persisted to at least 2500 BC. Unlike elsewhere in Britain, there is little material evidence to suggest a Beaker presence, suggesting that Orkney may have developed along an insular trajectory during the second millennium BC. We tested this by comparing new genomic evidence from 22 Bronze Age and three Iron Age burials in northwest Orkney with Neolithic burials from across the archipelago. We identified signals of inward migration on a scale unsuspected from the archaeological record: as elsewhere in Bronze Age Britain, much of the population displayed significant genome-wide ancestry deriving ultimately from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. However, uniquely in northern and central Europe, most of the male lineages were inherited from the local Neolithic. This suggests that some male descendants of Neolithic Orkney may have remained distinct well into the Bronze Age, although there are signs that this had dwindled by the Iron Age. Furthermore, although the majority of mtDNA lineages evidently arrived afresh with the Bronze Age, we also find the first evidence for continuity in the female line of descent from Mesolithic Britain into the Bronze Age, and even to the present day.
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB46830
@arza, very interesting. Orkney is thought to be a place where agriculture continued longer in within Britain, or the evidence for farming failing isn't as strong, possibly because the soil retained better fertility over time (one possibly far fetched idea I heard was maybe they used seaweed as a fertilizer).
So in a way it does seem to ponentially add some evidence that may confirm the idea that very potentially, the end of Neolithic Britain was linked to the phenomenon of demographic decline due to failure of agriculture (then the larger populations can sweep in?).
It reminds me a bit of how in Ireland, again, Lara Cassidy's still embargoed thesis found some signal of excess contribution of Neolithic populations in Southwestern Ireland, and again at least one instance of an apparently surviving local I2a variant, and apparently also steppe ancestry. Relevant quotes: https://imgur.com/a/erxK4p8
Cassidy mentions 4x samples from SW Ireland from CAEBA who are enriched in Neolithic ancestry; only one of them appears to be male and has the I2a variant, while the other three are not typed and all appear to be female based on the appendix and sample list. Perhaps there would be more, with more samples.
Southwestern Ireland is I think where agriculture is again thought to have survived longer, and for the same reasons. No soil fertility depletion.
(I guess if Cassidy had published this, it may have trumped the Orkney finding!).
Probably doesn't have anything with Pictish?
Orkney is also where the HG rich outliers in the Scotland EEF set were found...
@Wise dragon
Greeks can't be straight from Yamnaya. There had to have been sort of intermediate population involved.
It may or may not have been Corded Ware. Hard to say at this stage without more samples.
@ Ryan
The point has slipped by you. This isn’t about shared vocabulary as such. It’s like a smoking egg-timer. And set a fair bit earlier than expected. I didn’t describe it very well. I would urge you to read the paper.
It is a very specific corpus of vocabulary which is also reflected in shared art and artefacts that are distinctive and fairly well dateable to specifics of the bronze/amber trade.
It is vocabulary (or specific shared grammatical treatment) that is *uniquely* shared between Celtic and Germanic but neither shares it with the other languages that would be considered linguistically closer, or Geographically closer.
When other languages use words with the same root, they do not treat them grammatically in this unique way shared by people at either end of Europe.
Celtic does not share this with Italic, nor does Germanic with Balto-Slavic. So - relevant to Davidski’s question about when Celtic languages entered the British Isles. (Britain is of course right there on the route between Spain and Scandinavia).
First this sharing of culture and vocabulary must be after the *time of emergence* of some linguistic community in Scandinavia that became (or was pre-) Germanic; and another from Iberia that had something already distinct from Italic languages.
They shared this, to the exclusion of their linguistic close kin and geographical intervening populations — but much earlier than either Germanic or Celtic are usually presumed to emerge. Celtic, or one dialect or distinct forerunner of it of it spoken in southern Spain, must already have parted ways from Italic. And likewise some sort of language that was, or was going to become Germanic, mist already have emerged.
@ Moesan
I’m afraid that sounds like a folk etymology. And a circular one. The dictionaries I looked at offer “Reynard” (fox) as the moniker for the famous/eponymous heroic Prince. What did his name mean, then? What’s the last syllable?.
The dictionaries I looked up gloss the Prince’s name (he appears in early Renaissance times) as “Reynard”.
They also give various versions of fox in Welsh that include madog, madoc and madyn.
Math, good, in Irish and Gaelic just doesn’t work the way you describe your Welsh hard-d: it sounds mah or vah when treated the way you describe.
So “madhadh” (which ends with a voiced ch/x) definitely has nothing to do with “good” in Irish or Gaelic at least.
Forget Welsh, then: it remains that the uses of the same word in Gaelic all mean doglike animals
Hound or mastiff; madhadh
Wild dog/wolf; madhadh-allaidh (and many more)
red dog/fox; madhadh ruadh
water dog/otter madadh uisge or madhadh donn (brown dog/spaniel)
Killer whale madadh-cuain (ocean wolf / hound)
It is even a placename element in Scotland, eg Lochmaddy / Loch nam Madadh
So whether you disallow Welsh or not, it remains that the word “dog” just happens to share an island with a language that prefixes an almost identical syllable with “ma” to describe various of doglike and wolfish creatures.
@Wee :
I think you misunderstood me, what is sure is that I'm not sure I understand you..
you wrote :
Math, good, in Irish and Gaelic just doesn’t work the way you describe your Welsh hard-d: it sounds mah or vah when treated the way you describe.
So “madhadh” (which ends with a voiced ch/x) definitely has nothing to do with “good” in Irish or Gaelic at least.
The irish and Gaelic -th is the equivalent of Welsh/Breton -d in their respective evolutions from Celtic (cf leathan < > llydan, ledan : broad...). This was an answer to the supposed words in Welsh for fox, what I didn’t agree. But perhaps had we here again personal names applied to animals ?
> madhadh ruadh for fox : I found only madra rua in Irish dictionaries and also sionnach in both Irish and Gaelic dictionaries… rua is ruadh, OK, but madra in front of madhadh ? I found madadh : dog and madraidh : pack of dogs in Gaelic, nothing officially with *madh- in Gaelic or Irish lined to dogs, so I think your name was madadh ruadh...But my point was about Welsh names for fox, not to discuss Irish diverse names for dogs and close animals. Neither it was to pretend there was a link between Irish math and madh(adh) ...
Concerning Renard (I don’t know why it came here) I ignore the « prince story » but I copied this :
« The given name Reynard is from Reginhard, Raginohardus "strong in counsel". Because of the popularity of the Reynard stories, ‘renard’ became the standard French word for "fox", replacing the old French word for "fox", which was ‘goupil’ from Latin vulpēcula*. »
* I add : with a supposed Germanic evolution, in fact a britto + continental Celtic evolution
on a latin word pronounced by Germanics who then kept still /w/ in place of /v/ !
In French we say ‘Le Roman de Renart’ (12th Cy) but the etymology is the same, a Germanic personal name which gave Reinhard in moderne German, Raynal in Catalan/Occitan, Renard, Regnard, Rainard, Reynard … in French regions.
The common and correct name goupil for fox survived in Oïl France until the 19th century.
This use of a personal name for animals were very common in Brittany too :
Olier (Oliver) the cock, Gwilhoù (petform for William, Guillaume) the wolf and Alan (Alan, Allen) the fox ! Interestingly, alan, elan were names indicating auburn or tawny fured animals in ancient Breton (I-E links with Slavic jelen, olen for stag, (red) deer ???)
Wee e said... @ Ryan
"I didn’t describe it very well. I would urge you to read the paper."
Wee e -- sorry I missed the cite for this paper you must have sent earlier.
Could I bother you for it?
"It is a very specific corpus of vocabulary which is also reflected in shared art and artefacts that are distinctive and fairly well dateable to specifics of the bronze/amber trade.
It is vocabulary (or specific shared grammatical treatment) that is *uniquely* shared between Celtic and Germanic but neither shares it with the other languages that would be considered linguistically closer, or Geographically closer."
@Matt
This is a scoping document for a simplified Iron Age migration model to test and see if it is possible to observe any differences considering the potential source populations are so similar.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EYJ6SGhTsGiFYS6j-2m1fwwtRT814G3bROFbDObUoPo/edit?usp=sharing
I am now starting to define sites for each group and then will identify samples that fall in the appropriate timescale for each grouping. I shall probably initially exclude sites that have successive groupings due to radiocarbon plateau issues and potential difficulty in accurately allocating samples to a small time window.
@Andrzejewski
Thanks for what you wrote.
(…) Is “NIE” = non-IE, or is it “Northern IE”? (…)
NIE = Non-IE
(…) If you do believe in an EEF substrate, would it be GAC? (…)
This is not about what I believe, but about what can be actually or logically proven on the basis of real, not somehow 'reconstructed' data. It also matters if something is / was more or less likely. EEF in GAC is ‘very likely’, but nowhere has anyone proven that genetic admixtures are synonymous to e.g. language substrate, etc.
Languages are carried by people and their cultures and traditions, not by genes or broken pots lying in the ground.
Those who know me better, such as 'ambron', know that for a long time I have been focusing mainly on analysing generally available data and it is from there that I draw my conclusions. I do not avoid speculation, see, for example, what I am testing now, i.e. 'Robert’s' idea that the 'Old European' I2 WHG from the Balkans was the real PIE, and R1a EHG, R1b WHG / EHG could have only been secondary 'euroindopeised' to some extent.
‘Robert’, unfortunately, has never dared to describe his theory in points, maybe because I found logical problems in what he has claimed many times, see problems with Baltic language, etc.
If the EEF was to leave any linguistic footprint in the PIE, it would leave it in the agricultural vocabulary.
The problem is the fact that in, for example, Polish / West Slavic, no one has detected any substrate so far. (Compare the substrates in Germanic, Greek, Avestan, Sanskrit, etc., but the same logically applies to Proto-Celtic, etc.). Sometime around 2013, Jaska wrote in the no longer existing 'forumbiodiversity' about the alleged work of a Finnish linguist who allegedly found some language substrate in Proto-Slavic. Unfortunately, I have never been able to find this paper.
Logic dictates that the language of the EEF, and especially the agricultural vocabulary, should have been later adopted by the PIE (if the PIE really came from the steppe).
If PIE was related to the so-called EEF / E, G, I2, etc., then its vocabulary in PIE was 'always' there, and only vocabulary related to horses, etc. later found its way to Post-PIE together with the so-called Western Steppe Herders (WSH).
I do not know how it was, but if kurgans can be any clue on PIE formation, then we should look for PIE where the first kurgans were built, i.e. in Varna and Suvorovo, i.e. east of the Balkan and Carpathian mountains.
As for the differences between the Post-PIE languages, I am interested in the differences between the primary NIE languages of I1 WHG + EHG = SHG from Scandinavia, I2 WHG / EHG from the Balkans and steppe, R1a EHG from forest-steppe, R1b WHG / EHG from the Balkans and WSH from the steppe, E and G EEF from Anatolia. After all, they all could not have been PIE ... :-)
I hope that maybe we will carry out some speculations here, how it could have been with the formation of PIE, depending on where and with whom and what this PIE may be originally related to...
(…) Do you think that the modern English language has words from GAC? (Words like “dog” or “boy” have no cognates in either West Germanic, Norse of Romance languages). (…)
I do not know. Maybe these words were left after NIE I1 Pre-Proto-Germanic SHG from Scandinavia?
I do know that English has a lot of words identical to Polish / Slavic, but most of them in a secondary devoiced form, see e.g. SieR+S’C’ > HaiR, or alternated Nie+S’C’, ZNie+S’C’ / GNie+S’C’ > KNeaD, GNiaZDo > NeST, etc.
(…) BTW, CWC was not “post-PIE” but was PIE itself; Yamnaya might be ancestral to maybe Anatolian (doubtful), Phrygian, Armenian, Helladic and Albanian, but even these ones were unsubstantiated and uncorroborated. (…)
If this was the case, then PIE was, as I wrote above, the so-called satem, or rather alternated. I assume CWC was only Post-PIE.
@Wee e
Note that: I have given examples of secondary devoicing S>H also in Indo-Iranian languages, which, like Celtic languages, are differently secondary distorted, see Sanskrit: सर (sará) Persian: هلتاک (haltâk, "salty yoghurt"), هلث (halþ ~ halt, "salty, salty food"). This points to different language subdtrates.
Proto-Hellenic language Proto-Hellenic: *hāls Ancient Greek: ἅλς (háls) is uniformly distorted and devoiced, just like Avestan.
@Wee - I didn't miss the point, at least not entirely.
"It is vocabulary (or specific shared grammatical treatment) that is *uniquely* shared between Celtic and Germanic but neither shares it with the other languages that would be considered linguistically closer, or Geographically closer."
My point is that there aren't any languages geographically closer, or at least not separating them.
The amber thing is interesting though given the age and direction of those trade routes!
First, did Reich et al do ANY genetic comparisons between English samples by time period, and the assorted European groupings? There is a nonspecific discussion about fitting for instance his Yorkshire sample against his coastal Kent sample, and then comparing somebody, it being not clear who, against his European groups. Did he fit only on the basis of proportion of early farmer DNA, or on the basis of overall SNPs or specific unusual SNPs?
The proportion of first farmer DNA in the population really has little to do with bronze and iron age migration. Reich et al argue that the proportion of first farmer ancestry in the population increased during the late bronze age and essentially, only France has a high enough percentage of first farmer DNA to account for that.
My problems with that are, the proportion of first farmer DNA could have APPEARED to increase by 5 percentage points because Neolithic Britons who were invisible in Beaker period sampling were now mixed in enough to show up in burials, or because of genetic drift. It is even possible that large numbers of people migrated from France and increased the amount of first farmer DNA, and this masked a similar migration from the Netherlands that might have lowered it. I also notice that the region of Flanders was not sampled at all.
Second, I don't understand at all the analysis that the author of this blog did. We are basically told he did an analysis and look at this graphic. Well, I can not understand the graphic, and I'm not alone. Please explain both the method, eg, what was compared, and what the analysis showed in English words.
One other thing, please tell us specifically what parts of nearby Celtic-speaking continental Europe specifically what English DNA overlaps with? I specifically want to know which nearby Celtic areas contributed migration to actually which parts of England. During the middle and late bronze age, the Netherlands was Celtic, and it was partly Celtic during the pre-Roman iron age.
Or is it your finding that migration DID specifically come ONLY from France, but the time period encompasses both the late bronze age and the iron age?
My assumption is that FRA_GrandEst_IA2 was Celtic-speaking.
You can refer to the paper or its free supplementary data to learn more about this population.
But we really need more samples from France to be able to work out how Celtic speech arrived in Britain.
I know I'm late to the party, but I just updated the Celto-Germanic PCA Views tool:
https://vahaduo.github.io/g25views/cvg/
List of changes.
Celts & genes:
As far as the relationship between genes and languages is concerned, we should always be aware of and keep in mind the almost invisible nests of Y-hg "N" in Hungary, determining their Uralian language today.
archlingo
Celtic from the West can make sense as has been proposed by conferences in Wales. It's would have been easier for Italo-Celtic to spread along the Mediterranean coast to Iberia than over the Alps to Salzburg. The Ibero-Celts are attested to. Portu(gal) and Galicia are self explanatory. So there was proto/early Celtic on the Atlantic. Unified Celtic then developed, not by conquest and immigration but as a trading language for the Atlantic metal trade starting perhaps as far back as 2000 BCE with the first evidence for mining. Later ingots have been found offshore in modern Israel, part of the Phonecian homeland. Tin is scarce in the Levant. The alternative sources, some small deposits in Egypt apart was Afghanisatan. Arsenic was used on the steppe but it is poisonous to work with.
The Phonecians intruded into the tin and silver (from Rio Tinto) trade. Historical evidence dates from 600 BCE, especially 450 BCE. Archaeology suggests earlier. 900-600 BCE is when the Insular Celtic langauges are thought to have split into P & Q groups. The loss of unity due to loss of the tin trade has been offered as an explanation of this. Both Phonecian contact with Britian and the tin trade have been disputed, Galician Spain seeming more obvious but place names/coins and isotope analysis have returned tin trading Phonecians to the south coast of Britain. Indeed there may have been an amber trading station in Kent.
So what about Hallstadt and La Tene and Turkish Galicia or indeed Polish/Ukrainian Galicia? The explanations are yet to be developed but both the metal miners and the salt miners were wealthy. The Rhine and the Danube are good trading routes. The language could have spread one way, the material culture the other - see British India.
Response to "When did the Celtic languages come to Britain?" by Philip Owen.
The view is too narrowed to the metal trade.
According to almost ALL glottochronological conjecture, Italo-Celtic split from some intermediate stage of Indo-European around the middle of the third millennium.
This should have happened in the Carpathian Basin, from where Italo-Celtic split into a northern = Celtic and a southern = Italic offshoot.
It is a very long way from here to Philip Owen's suggestions.
Best regards
Hans J. J. G. Holm
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