[lit-ideas] On the peopling of the British Isles
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 7 May 2014 07:53:37 -0700
After his 1066 and all that comments, Speranza concluded,
"No wonder Oppenheimer's book brought further controversy to an already
controversial topic!"
Well, yes, Oppenheimer refers to controversy, but the advantage of his book is
that he is attempting to look at all the most recent data, recheck the various
conclusions and draw new ones if necessary. The advantage of studying the
British Isles is that during the LGM (the coldest part of the last ice age) the
Isles were either covered by Ice or an uninhabitable icy desert. In other
places there was continuity, but not on these islands. At some point people
came from some place and colonized them. The ideas scoffed at by Sellar and
Yeatman are old and abandoned my most scholars. Genetic studies have pretty
much convinced everyone that Romans, Jutes, Frisians, Vikings, Angles, Saxons
and Normans were not as big a deal as was once thought. A "foundation stock"
was already there, perhaps as early as 12,000 bc and it stayed there and
flourished during all the famous invasions. When in recorded history these
invasions took place, some of them were of the same stock as the people who
were already there. Here is Oppenheimer:
"At the time of the great post-LGM European expansion of 15,000 years ago,
there was no North Sea. Instead, there was a flat grassy plain stretching all
the way from Poland and the southern Baltic, through southern Sweden, Denmark,
Germany, Frisia and Holland across the North Sea and into eastern England
(Figure 3.3). In fact, had they wished, our forebears could have walked in a
straight line all the way from Berlin to Belfast, although in practice they
seemed to prefer wandering along beaches. If it still existed today, the North
Sea Plain would be in the centre of the Ingert distribution (Figure 3.8).
Ingert dates overall in Europe to 21,000 years and may have originated in a
Balkan Ice Age refuge (see below).59 Three British founding clusters from
Ingert (I1c-1, 2 and 3) date to around 13,000, 14,000 and 12,000 years ago,
respectively.60 This suggests a pre-Younger Dryas (i.e. Late Upper
Palaeolithic) spread for at least part of the Ingert branch. While Ingert is
present at a low rate of about 3.3% throughout the British Isles, this figure
rises to over 10% on parts of the English north-east coastal region, in
particular York and Norfolk. Given this distribution, the age of Ingert in the
British Isles,61 and the fact that he is no more common on the neighbouring
Continent, the chances are that this represents the echo of an ancient
intrusion. To me this is the first of a series of specific, dated, early
British genetic intrusions from the Continent which tend to mitigate claims of
a later Anglo-Saxon genocide." [Oppenheimer, Stephen (2012-03-01). The Origins
of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (Kindle Locations 2422-2430).
Constable Robinson. Kindle Edition.]
Some place Oppenheimer said that during the Younger Dryas the sea dropped
something like 127 feet. That apparently permitted the North Sea area to
become the plains he refers to. So while I'm not willing to read all the books
that Oppenheimer did, his argument seems persuasive that after the Younger
Dryas receded and temperatures warmed, southern parts of Britain, Wales, and
Ireland (which during the Younger Dryas had land extended much further south
than it does today), enabling groups to walk across the North Sea Plain as
early 12,000 bc forming the foundation stock that spread north as the ice
receded.
Except . . . there are apparently two famous "refuges" where people clustered
during the Younger Dryas, the Basque and the Balkan. The first people to
people the British Isles, in Oppenheimer's opinion came from the Basque refuge.
Those people moved north peopling the Western Area of Europe which included
crossing the grassy plain which is now the North Sea. The earlier view was
that this peopling was done from the Balkan refuge, spreading people across
central Europe and then to the British Isles.
I do wonder about the names various scholars assign to genetic markers,
"Ingert" for example. There is some sort of fame involved, like naming a
mountain or a feature on Mars. Do scholars acknowledge other scholars marker
names? Some time ago I read Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, the genetic roots of
Britain and Ireland by Bryan Sykes. He assigns a number of names represented
by genetic markers, but I don't find those names in Oppenheimer's book. Since
Sykes wrote his book in 2006 and Oppenheimer in 2012 perhaps Oppenheimer is
using more recently identified genetic markers. However, I thought that only
the discoverer of these markers got to name them and I hadn't the impression
that Oppenheimer was doing research that extended to the identification of
markers. That worries me a little, for if he is renaming other researchers'
markers, how will the casual reader ever keep track?
Lawrence
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