The origins of the British : a genetic detective story : the surprising roots of the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh / Stephen Oppenheimer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Oppenheimer, Stephen.

Contributor:

George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnology--Great Britain.

Ethnology.

Great Britain.

Human beings--Migrations.

Human beings.

Physical Description:

xxi, 534 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 25 cm

Edition:

First Carroll and Graf edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Carroll & Graf, 2006.

Summary:

History has long maintained that the Anglo-Saxon overtaking of the Iron Age Celts was the origin of the British people. "Celtic Britain" reconstructs the peopling of Britain -- through a study of genetics, climatology, archaeology, language, culture, and history -- and overturns that myth and others. The Anglo-Saxons, who supposedly conquered the Celts, contributed only five to ten percent of the British gene pool. The "Atlantic Celts," long believed to have migrated to Britain from Central Europe around 300 BC during the Iron Age, can be linked genetically to the people of Basque country. And linguistic evidence suggests that, besides Celtic languages, a Germanic-type language similar to Norse was also spoken in Britain long before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Oppenheimer explaines the surprising roots of the present-day cultural identities of the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh.

Contents:

Part 1 The Celtic myth: wrong myth, real people

1 'Celt': what it means today, and who were the classical historians referring to? 19

2 Celtic as a language label 50

Part 2 Colonization of the British Isles before the Roman invasion

Introduction: Can language dating tell us when the Celts arrived? 95

3 After the ice 99

4 Ultimate hunters and gatherers: the Mesolithic 137

5 Invasion of the farmers: the Neolithic and the Metal Age 173

6 Who spread Indo-European languages? 243

Part 3 Men from the north: Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans

Introduction: The Saxon Advent 263

7 What languages were spoken in England before the 'Anglo-Saxon invasions'? 267

8 Was the first English nearer Norse or Low Saxon? 293

9 Were there Saxons in England before the Romans left? 308

10 Old English perceptions of ethnicity: Scandinavian or Low Saxon? 331

11 English continuity or replacement? 344

12 The Vikings 384

Appendix A Introduction to genetic tracking 422

Appendix B Our maternal ancestors: an overview of the European gene tree 431

Appendix C Paternal trees of ancestry in Europe 435.

Notes:

"First published in the UK by Constable ... 2006"--T.p. verso.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

ISBN:

0786718900

9780786718900

OCLC:

75811569

Publisher Number:

9780786718900 90000