The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain by Oppenheimer

years for theof Gaulish, Goidelic and Brythonic from their most recent common ancestor. 3
    Now, all of these dates will have their own inherent errors, but the implication is that we are looking at separate celtic-language and British-culture stories starting from at least the time of the Bronze Age, if not earlier – in any case, before the Iron Age. The earliest evidence for metal mining in the British Isles comes from southern Ireland and north Wales, connecting up to the pre-existing metal industries of Brittany and the Spanish Peninsula. This finds cultural resonance in Cunliffe’s description of the simultaneous introduction of the Maritime Bell Beaker – a pottery style from the same Atlantic regions ( Figure 5.12b ).
    However, when we look further, at equivalent estimates for the separation of celtic languages as a whole from other Indo-European languages, a much deeper timescale appears. Dates for the separation of the ancestor of celtic languages from Italic and Germanic language roots are estimated at around 6,000 years ago by the Auckland group. 4 In other words, celtic-linguistic roots could go well back into the Neolithic period.
    The Neolithic, or the New Stone Age, was also the time of the spread of agriculture into Europe, and Colin Renfrew has argued strongly that Indo-European languages spread throughout Europe on the back of agriculture. If the celtic Indo-European branch had a Neolithic date of separation, the implications for its influence on European prehistory take on a quite different perspective from that of the spread of a successful Iron Age tribe.
Languages are not the same as nations or peoples
     
    Before opening Pandora’s box and plunging back into speculative cultural, linguistic and even genetic links along the Atlantic seaboard drifting ever further back into an opaque celtic-linguistic prehistory, I would like to address the genetics primarily in this section and put the peoples of the European Atlantic coast in a broader time perspective. Whether celtic languages were introduced to the British Isles during the Neolithic or the Bronze or the Iron Age, those who introduced them were not the first people in Britain, and in common with Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans, need not
necessarily
have made much numerical impact.
    In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a tendency to equate culture, language and people. This usually meant combining the three together with genetic heritage into a ‘racial’ package, and seeing all three as moving in concerted historical and prehistoric migrations. The idea of large-scale gene flow is still with us, encapsulated in the racial use of the word ‘blood’. So, for instance, we find a documentary title such as ‘Blood of the Vikings’, intended to imply that we could simply look for Viking genes and work out how much ‘Viking blood’ made its way into the British Isles, and where. While I am interested in looking for specific gene flow, I do think that it is important to get away from the idea that genes, language and culture move together in equivalent doses. France has since Roman times spoken a Romance rather than a celtic language, but this is not to say that the bulk of French ancestors physically came from Italy. This is a typical example of the phenomenon of ‘language shift’ following invasion. The impact of a newmovement of genes into an old population depends far more on the size of the pre-existing gene pool than on any archaeologically visible cultural changes. One of the good things about the politically correct archaeological reaction to racial migrationism in the late twentieth century is that it has forced upon us the realization that culture and language can move relatively independently of gene flow; but that does not of course mean that they always do.
    While it is clear that different parts of Britain do show clear genetic differences, these differences do not necessarily relate to any ethnic labels we