David,

Some time ago I stumbled upon an interesting site which claims that the word Saxon referred to Germanic speaking pirates from the North Sea area, and not a specific ethnicity, and thus the English are not Saxons. He claims rather that the Eastern English are descendants of the Angles, who controlled an area from Southern Scandinavia to Holland. Also that we could look on the Angles as early Vikings.

Thus he considers the English language of Scandanavian origin - food for thought?!

Point 3 above - that the Celts originated in Iberia is also very interesting, as it would certainly make sense genetically and linguistically if the Celts were a Neolithic farming people who spread by boat from Anatolia to Eastern Spain, then radiated out from there. This would explain the very early split of Celtic in the Indo-European language family, and why Celtiberians and Irish seem to have the most archaic forms of the language, rather than say Eastern France.
Also if the Celts were a group of Neolithic Iberians pushing first Northwards, then Eastwards, it would explain why they supposedly never got to the South East coast of England - which would be strange if they originated in Central Europe.

wealh = Briton = slave

slaves don't breed much. i just read that until the late 18th century more black africans had been forced to migrate to north america than whites, but whites outnumbered them by 5 to 1 because of differential mortality and reproduction rates. the total assimilation of celts might simply be the function of strong reproductive skew in dark age britain toward elites, and the very proactive assimilation of upwardly mobile britons into anglo-saxon society (even in the USA, there are many cases of immigrants not teaching their children their native language and deemphasizing their past).

"slaves don't breed much"

The servitude of Britons was probably closer to what we call serfdom or villeinage than to New World plantation slavery. I.e. peasant labourers subject to a lot of taxes and restrictions on their freedom to move around.

There's indeed linguistic evidence that Celtic languages originated in Iberia, but it's not necessarily the case that its diffusion was carried by large numbers of people. Aren't paleolithic inhabitants of the British isles largely the same genetically as the later neolithic ones?

pconroy :

i've never heard of celtic being particularly unique or a split off branch of indoeuropean. Isn't considered almost the twin branch of Italic ? Langauges that branch off early in indo-european are armenian and hittite for example .

Oppenheimer uses extremely limited haplotypes for his work and draws very broad conclusions from them. I wouldn't take it too seriously.

The servitude of Britons was probably closer to what we call serfdom or villeinage than to New World plantation slavery. I.e. peasant labourers subject to a lot of taxes and restrictions on their freedom to move around.

yeah, i assume so. that being said, future peasants are often the descendants of present nobility.

I watched an episode of "Time Team" recently where they excavated an "Anglo-Saxon" grave yard in Yorkshire. Analysis of the bones and DNA showed the bodies who were buried in the Saxon manner were in fact Yorkshire locals. The only 'foreigner' was a Norwegian servant girl.

In regard to the so called 'Celtic' DNA on the east coasts, these are the very areas which were extensively raided by Irish raiders during the period in question and much later.

I long for the day when archaeologists pay a little more attention to the modern fashion industry rather than their own theories. As a warrior I am naturally going to equip myself in the latest military technology available. My wife will of course dress in the latest fashion from the continent. Ahh the attraction of the exotic!

"Analysis of the bones and DNA showed the bodies who were buried in the Saxon manner were in fact Yorkshire locals"

What did they mean by 'Yorkshire locals'? And how did they identify someone as a 'Norwegian servant girl'?

Jon R

"As a warrior I am naturally going to equip myself in the latest military technology available."

If it's an incremental improvement on what you already know, and/or a purely cosmetic difference without much functional impact either way, then perhaps.

Whereas if it's something fundamentally different that renders the half a lifetime you just spent learning to be professional and deadly with your current kit irrelevant, then perhaps not. Unless the new stuff is so overwhelmingly superior that it's learn or die. (Even then: how many generations did it take knights to adapt to a battlefield dominated by footsoldiers with bows & pikes?)

Ogunsiron,

The Anatolian group, of which Hittite was one language, are believed to have branched off earliest from Proto-Indo-European, next after them was the Celto-Italo-Tocharian branch, see here:
Indo-European Language Tree

Also, this link about Old Irish says that:

Because there are many remarkable archaisms preserved in most of its dialects, Celtic seems to have branched off quite early from the Proto-Indo-European parent language.

I found Oppenheimer's book fascinating. But I but me some buts, including
(1) His "England" varies in size a lot. It always excludes Cornwall. It probably excludes Cumbria. Sometimes it excludes Devon, Somerset and Dorset, sometimes it excludes more of the South coast, sometimes (I think) it excludes Lancashire, often it excludes the W Midlands. He might have been wiser to call it "england" and define it once, with care.
(2) He proposes, virtually without evidence, that E England spoke a Germanic "Belgic" tongue before the Romans arrived. However his map on p60 (British paperback edition, Fig 2.1b) shows E England particularly well-endowed with "percentages of ancient place-names that were celtic". Very rum.

Neziha,

I think some of Oppenheimer's linguistic work is based on that of Dr Forster, like this:


The rise and fall of the Celtic language - 4 July 2003

New research suggests that the Celtic language became a distinct language and was introduced to the British Isles much earlier than originally believed. Dr Peter Forster at the Molecular Genetics Laboratory and Dr Alfred Toth at the University of Zurich have used Celtic language inscriptions to reconstruct the history of the language and its position in the Indo-European family of languages.

Dr Forster used a model for tracking DNA to present the changes in the Celtic language as it spread and contracted across Europe. Dr Forster believes farmers carried the Celtic language into the British Isles, Ireland and France in a single wave 6,000 years ago, contrary to earlier beliefs.

One thing is clear: Celts did not originate in Iberia (but in the Rhin basin most likely) and there is no indication of connections between the Iberian peninsula and Britain/Ireland in the Celtic period. In fact Iberian Celts seem to have been cut from the mainland c. 600 by an Iberian "reconquest" of the NE and therefore they never recieved La Tène influences nor practiced Druidism (that is believed to be of British origin).

Nevertheless there were many contacts between Iberia and Britain in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age (before the arrival of Hallstatt Celts to Western Iberia c. 700 BCE). And it is possible that a fraction of the original Epipaleolithic/Neolithic settlers of Britain and Ireland were of Franco-Cantabrian or even Iberian-proper origin - though I think the main source was the Rhin basin (or now submerged Doggerland) anyhow (though the genetic pool of that area has been more modified since then than that of Britain, logically).

There is this misleading myth that shared cultural or genetic elements between Iberia and Britain are "Celtic" and that is surely false. Such common elements must be pre-Celtic (and therefore pre-Indo-European) - or at least that's what the archaeological record strongly suggests.

...

On the main issue, better than Oppenheimer is surely the paper of Capelli et al., 2003 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0960-9822(03)00373-7) leaves a clear impression of the British Y-DNA genome being a gradual mixture between a "native" Western element (Welsh, Basques) and a Northern European one (Danish/North German mainly), but significatively more slanted towards the "native" side (only some Eastern coastal areas would be rather "Germanic").

But there is much work to do on high definition Y-DNA for Europe yet. The substructure of R1b1c specially seems to be still underdeveloped and could potentially give much fine-grained information.

Luis,

I'm not disputing the fact that after the LGM (Last Glacial Maximum), people holed up in the Franco-Cantabrian Refugium spread out North - towards Britain and Ireland - and South - towards Morocco - from there.

But it would also seem that Iberia was the source either directly or indirectly of a second wave of agricultural immigrants also.

PConroy, I used the phrase "it is possible that a fraction" of the Epi-/Neolithic colonists arrived from SW Europe. Immediately after clarifying that "I think the main source was the Rhin basin (or now submerged Doggerland)".

So we are basically in agreement.

I cannot exclude that a fraction of the British colonists of that time could have arrived from SW Eruope because the high resolution study of DNA necesary for that is still to be done or inconclusive (some data suggests it other rather not).

In any case, Britain and the Atlantic basin of SW Europe (from Portugal to Belgium) shared strong connections in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age, forming a somewhat homogeneous macro-region, that in some times spans further beyond but always retains this core "Euro-Atlantic" area as culturally connected between the Megalithic expansion and Celtic one. The same that Celts or Vikings probably carried some genetics to the islands, surely the Chalcolithic and Bronze age travellers did too. The exact ammount is yet to be clarified though and is sometimes hard to take apart what is Paleolithic from what is post-Neolithic or intermediate.

Razib,

I am sorry to be somewhat off-topic, but where did you read this about slaves in North America? I didn't think it was true that more blacks were brought to America as slaves than whites immigrated from Europe, but it's possible. Does that include the West Indies?

The issue is that Oppenheimer uses 6 Y-STR markers, which is completely inadequate for anything, particularly in Western Europe (the land of R1b1c). Of course Brits look like Spaniards at that resolution.

Now, at 10 times that many, you get a better picture.

I am sorry to be somewhat off-topic, but where did you read this about slaves in North America? I didn't think it was true that more blacks were brought to America as slaves than whites immigrated from Europe, but it's possible. Does that include the West Indies?

not including west indies, and only until around 1780. 'power and plenty,' ronald findlay.

i seem to have recalled wrong btw. it wasn't equal at all. confused and mixed & matched numbers, though the point about slave mortality still holds.

Neziha,

Obviously if Oppenheimer had sampled used a thousand markers and than used a algorithm such as STRUCTURE, he might have more finely grained clusters of ancestry, but I believe he was deliberately using a select few SLOW mutating markers, to delve into deep ancestry of the British.

I hate to say this, but Black slaves in the Americas - except for Brazil - fared better than their brethren in the Arab world - there male slaves were castrated and never produced offspring.

Meanwhile there are numerous sites that detail the fate of White slaves in the Americas and the Arab world.

Quite a number of these make the point that in the early colonial days there were far more White - mostly Irish and Scottish, with some English - slaves in North America than Black slaves. Later things evened out more, but overall it seems that there were more White than Black.

pconroy:

Scots and Irish were not slaves, they were indentured servants who were held till they paid off their debt. It was not a life time thing and their kids were not born into this system. There was a big difference between indentured servants and slaves and indentured servitude largely ended by the mid 1800’s, slavery did not. As far as I know, indentured servants could legally marry, could not have their kids sold to someone else, they could not be summarily executed or tortured. Women could not be raped at will. I’m sure all these things did happen, but it was not legal because they were not considered “property” they were more so just debtors who were in contract to work off the debt.

Be careful of the sites on the new, a lot of them a shady as they are run by neoconfederates apologists. Reality is the Arab system was worse but that does not take away from Razibs point.

It is kind of like saying...well Armenians didn't have it as bad as the Jews...what is the purpose of making such a statement to begin with?

The only whites who were legally like slaves in North America that I know of were the convicts brought to Georgia who were forced to work. I have no idea how many there were, I know a lot of them were Irish/Scots/low class English, Welsh...Welsh names are pretty common in the South East of America even today.

There were some isolated cases of whites, especially orphan children who were made slaves under the idea that they were "mulatto or octoroons" when they were not. Obviously there is little data on how common this was. I can imagine some private orphanages selling children, but I can't imagine it was "normal".

Longma,

No group has a monopoly on sorrow or success - but some groups here in the US think that they do? If you look far enough back in any ethnic groups history you will see periods of slavery and golden eras.

Read this link for more information on Irish slaves and their treatment in the New World:

In the 12 year period during and following the Confederation revolt, from 1641 to 1652, over 550,000 Irish were killed by the English and 300,000 were sold as slaves, as the Irish population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000. Banished soldiers were not allowed to take their wives and children with them, and naturally, the same for those sold as slaves. The result was a growing population of homeless women and children, who being a public nuisance, were likewise rounded up and sold. But the worse was yet to come.

In 1649, Cromwell landed in Ireland and attacked Drogheda, slaughtering some 30,000 Irish living in the city. Cromwell reported: “I do not think 30 of their whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody in the Barbados.” A few months later, in 1650, 25,000 Irish were sold to planters in St. Kitt. During the 1650s decade of Cromwell’s Reign of Terror, over 100,000 Irish children, generally from 10 to 14 years old, were taken from Catholic parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In fact, more Irish were sold as slaves to the American colonies and plantations from 1651 to 1660 than the total existing “free” population of the Americas!

I'm not blaming anyone, I'm just reporting history - I'm Irish myself, but partly descended from Cromwellians.

pconroy: Yes, but slow-mutating is relative (half the family groups in my surname project include at least one mutation on those 6 markers over less than 500 years), and in any case there's not enough markers to make any reliable conclusion about prehistory. False convergence and divergence are more likely than not.

Didn't you read about that Florida accountant Sykes mistakenly identified as a descendant of Genghis Khan when he really belonged to a not unusual European haplogroup(R1a) that diverged something like fifty thousand years ago from the haplogroup containing Khan(C3)?

Sykes, incidentally, uses nearly twice as many markers as Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer's resolution is even crappier than that.

pconroy:

"If you look far enough"

yep.

key words.

When were the Irish taken from their land to a place they would always be visible minorities, not allowed to speak their language, not allowed to marry, not allowed to read or do math, given new names, and given a new religion where they were taught for hundreds of years the religion (that they can't read the Holy Book of) clearly states they were made inferior and subordinate by God?

I don't recall that chapter in Irish history, but feel free to enlighten me.

The most important things about the Irish to me was their faith they largely retained (Catholic), their land (most Irish were never forcefully removed from Ireland a land where they were always the majority and knew was theres unquestionably, and most important very few if any Irish look visibly different from the English...you can only tell by name which is easy to change and not always by name.

If the Irish looked like Dravidian and lived next to the English...you have have had a different story altogether.

In fact black slaves were favored eventually because Irish and Welsh indentured servants kept running off. In the end, if one managed to change their accent or if their kids have none and change their names they are just like everyone else. Blacks slaves were obviously black and suspect to be runaways which is why they had to carry "free papers".


You are right no people have a monopoly on suffering or oppression.

My only point is that every situation is unique and to try to minimize what someone else has been through by comparing it to others when the situations were not directly comparable is not in anyone's interest and is not conducive to making anything better.

Saying "get over it it happened to your great great grandfather well it happened to my great grandfather X 5 is only serves to make people resentful and defensive.

Its like me going to the Holocaust Museum and walking up to a Jewish guy whose parents survived that and saying..."well wasn't that bad...hell genocide was relatively common before WWI"...

That may be true but that doesn't help anything.

sorry last one was me...same name two different languages.

pconroy:

one last thing.

As I implied there are many ways to suffer and everyone has their unique hell to deal with just depends on how recent the wound.

Never spent time in Boston, but I have in Philly and the Irish Pubs are full of recent, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation Irish Americans who hate the English and use to raise a lot of money for the IRA and would talk about some of the atrocities you spoke about like the English did it to their parents last week.

Hell, the Chinese I know who most hate the Japanese over World War II were not even born they are the kids and grandkids of the people who actually suffered.

I can't speak for American Indians, as I've only met one "pure one" in my life. Black people, rarely in closed company talk about slavery and often hesitate to talk about racial admixture in their family because they feel it comes from rape (true or not) it is an issue of shame.

Most black people I know who talk about these type of things talk about current issues of racism or Jim Crow (as many blacks alive today lived through that or were born at the end of it). To be honest, outside of an academic setting or on line I have rarely ever been with a group of black people and the topic turned to slavery. I think that would be odd and you would notice people start to get uncomfortable.

I would suggest you pay less attention to talking heads, race pimps, and leftist academics...get to know real folks.

I hesitate to joust with pcconroy on matters of Irish history, but methinks the figures he quotes are bunk. If Drogheda had a total population of 30,000, that would have made it one of the largest cities in the British Isles at the time. I rather doubt it. Most historians estimate 3,000 for the number killed. Adding noughts to historical statistics is a popular pastime, and not only in Ireland.

David B,

Seems you may be right about the figure being more like 3,000 than 30,000 for the number slaughtered in Drogheda - based on a Google survey. I didn't question the figure myself in the source I linked to, as that was the number I learned in history class in Ireland - what can I tell you?!

Longma/Dragon Horse,

The point I'm making is that throughout history at different times and places, various groups have been victimized and suffered, but those that have shaken off the victim mentality and loosed the bonds of their internalized slavery, have eventually succeeded in life and society - that's all.

I would say to any victimized group that they need to process those events, and then move on. For many US Blacks, especially in the South, the people they hate most are the Crack**s in the next town over - many of Irish or Scotch-Irish descent - they have forgotten the time when both groups toiled in the fields together as slaves.

You're right about one thing though, for Irish or British slaves who escaped, there was a much better chance of passing as a freeman, in another part of the country.

@pconroy: I suspect that it's not just your Drogheda figures that are wrong. "from 1641 to 1652, over 550,000 Irish were killed by the English": that sounds to me to be most unlikely. My Irish grandfather used to recommend that one should never believe any Irishman's account of Irish history. Just whose account one might believe he never did say, so I've ignored the old boy and had a quick look at the relevant bit of Roy Foster's "Modern Ireland". His numbers start with the massacre of Protestants in 1641, which he estimates as 2000 "casualties" - but I think he means deaths. Thereafter there was war between the "Confederate Catholics", as they styled themselves, and the King. The size of the King's army is pretty small: 10,000 Scots in 1642. Once the King had lost the Civil Wars in England and Scotland, in 1647 a Parliamentarian army was sent to Dublin - 2000 men. Anyway, by 1649 there had been 8 years of intermittent war in Ireland with Royal armies of a few thousand and no comment by Foster on the scale of casualties, save for the 1641 massacre. I take it that there isn't the remotest chance of deaths being in the hundreds of thousands in this period. Cromwell's army arrived in 1649, so if you seek massive numbers of deaths it must be compressed into 3 years. I look here for gory tales of half-a-million deaths, and all I find is in a footnote "It [the Irish population] had certainly dropped; 34,000 soldiers emigrated, and others were conscripted or 'sold abroad'. 'Slave-hunts' certainly happened, though there extent has been exaggerated; there were possibly 12000 Irish in the West Indies by the late 1660s". If I may say so, 550,000 my left foot!

@pconroy: Ranelagh's "A Short History of Ireland" gives some numbers too. He reckons the Protestant deaths in 1641 at 12,000, rather than 2,000, has a Scots Parliamentary army losing 3,000 dead at the Battle of Benburb in 1646 and gives Cromwell's army as totalling 20,000. He gives 2,600 men of the Royalist garrison at Drogheda killed. (Which reminds me that the Catholic forces who had started off agin the King were now on his side. Tricky bugger, Civil War.) That's all the numbers I see there for the period 1641-1652. Again, there's nothing there that could get anywhere near hundreds of thousands of deaths.

dearieme,

Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water...

There are many Books online who quote the estimates of Sir William Petty as to the depopulation of Ireland:

Sir William Petty, the political economist, calculated that out of an early seventeen century population of a million and a half in Ireland, some six hundred thousand, five-sixths of them Irish, perished by war, famine, or pestilence.

That would mean about 500,000 Native Irish or dead.

This link to Cromwell says:

The Physician-General of the Army of Cromwell, Dr. William Petty, estimated that about 504,000 of the Irish perished and were wasted by sword, plague, famine, hardship and banishment between 23rd October 1641 and the same day in 1652. Put another way, the population of Ireland in 1641 was 1,448,000 and by 1652, 616,000 perished of which 504,000 were natives and 112,000 colonists and 40,000 soldiers left Ireland to join armies on the continent

That rate of dead - about 35% - is greater than that suffered by Poland in WWII...

Oops, a death rate of about 42%, greater than Poland's death rate of about 35% in WWII

@pconroy: A lengthy civil war will indeed lead to many deaths by "plague, famine, hardship", but your citation said that "550,000 Irish were killed by the English", which is an entirely different claim. If you actually meant "the rebellion by the Catholic Confederation lead to the deaths of 550,000 (or 616,000) of their countrymen" you should have said so. But I still think the figure implausibly high: your ancestors and mine may have been bloody fools to stage their rebellion but I doubt that they need have half-a-million deaths on their conscience. A death rate of getting towards 50% when the war involved armies of just a few thousand? Dr Petty was a distinguished chap, but he arrived in Ireland in 1652 when the war was about over. I'd like to know what modern historians think. The 30 Years War on the Continent, which was in some ways the backdrop to the British Civil Wars, lasted three times as long as the period that interests you and involved much, much bigger armies. One of its historians, C V Wedgewood, wrote "Until at least the middle of the nineteenth century no estimate of the loss of life and wealth was too extravagant for belief. The population was supposed to have sunk by three quarters... The more critical research of the last three generations [she wrote in the 1930s] has revealed ... that contemporary figures are unreliable...". She remarks on how much smaller the destructive powers of armies were then, compared to her day. She says "the figures, which have been confused over the generations by propaganda of different kinds, are extremely difficult to establish with any certainty". Another comparison would be England and Scotland; the Civil War armies there were much bigger than in Ireland; their economies were in some ways more vulnerable, being more based on arable land and trade rather than pastoralism - you can drive your cows to safety in Ireland, but your English crops are burned, your trade-based occupations destroyed. The Royalists did commit a nasty slaughter of civilians in Bolton; Irish troops likewise in Aberdeen, and those same gentlemen attempted a genocidal cleansing of Campbells from Argyll. But no one that I've ever read cites total death rates anywhere near your proposed figures. All in all, the figures you cited seem to me probably to fall into Wedgewood's categories of "too extravagant" and "propaganda". But if you can point me to recent researches, I'll take correction.

dearieme,

William Petty was a census taker and statistician, among other things. To estimate the number of Irish dead or departed, he didn't have to witness the actual slaughter, he just had to have data on the numbers before and after and subtract.

If his estimate are not proof, then I'm not sure what levels of proof would suffice...