[Archport] The origins of the British

[Graca Cravinho <fcsilva@ptmat.fc.ul.pt>]

Title: The origins of the British

This comes from the Society of Antiquaries Newsletter!

The origins of the British

Salon 148 also reported the publication by Brian Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University, on the work of The Oxford Genetic Atlas Project, which concludes that the most common genetic fingerprint in modern Britons is almost identical to the genetic fingerprint of the inhabitants of coastal regions of northern and western Spain. Now a second study, by Stephen Oppenheimer, called The Origins of the British: a genetic detective story (published by Constable) has reached broadly similar conclusions.

Oppenheimer's book is more soberly academic than the avowedly popular Sykes, and he consistently uses archaeological evidence to support his arguments, so that his book comes across as more rigorous. He too notes the genetic similarity between Basques and Brits but doesn't believe this means that Britain was populated by migrants from northern Spain sailing up the Atlantic; instead he simply believes that Basques and British people all share a common origin in the people who settled Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago. Oppenheimer believes that another small wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago.

Like Sykes, he finds that the English, Irish, Welsh and Scots derive most of their current gene pool from the same source. Oppenheimer says that 'these figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.'

Oppenheimer's book is full of interesting thoughts on the true origins of the Celts, for example, and whether they really are a definable cultural, genetic and linguistic group. But one of his most startling conclusions is that the language that we know as 'English' is pre-Roman rather than post-Roman in origin. He argues in detail and at length that there was no post-Roman invasion of Britain from the Germanic-speaking near Continent. How then did we all end up speaking a dialect of German? Because, says Oppenheimer, we always did &#9472; that was the language we spoke before the Roman conquest.

In support of this inference, he considers Tacitus' report that 'between Britain and Gaul the language differs but little' and argues that the language of Gaul was Germanic. He also cites recent lexical evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues who found that the date of the split between Old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the 'Dark Ages', and that English might well have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.

These challenging ideas, along with much else (including a clear explanation of how genetic tracking works), are summarised in a special report that Stephen Oppenheimer wrote for the October issue of Prospect magazine, called 'Myths of British ancestry'.