The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (2 page)

Acknowledgement of the above does not necessarily indicate their agreement with the views expressed in this book.

As ever, my agents, Carole Blake and Julian Friedmann, always go the extra mile and more. I count myself very lucky to be on their list.

I have had an enormous amount of support from the team at my publisher, Constable. With such a large number of figures and references, this has involved much more work than the average popular science book. I would like to thank particularly Pete Duncan, Bill Smuts, John Woodruff, Katharine Timberlake and many others, including Jan Chamier, Andy Hayward, Sarah Moore, Bruce Connal, Charlotte Deane and Beth Macdougall, not forgetting Nick Robinson, who runs the whole show with such enthusiasm.

I thank friends and family, who have put up with my grumpy behaviour over the months leading up to publication, and pointed out that life need not centre around a laptop. In particular, I thank my friends from the Bradshaw Foundation, Damon De Laszlo, John and Peter Robinson, and Jean Clottes, who arranged diversions such as visiting a pristine, protected section of the Magdalenian cave at Niaux in the lower Pyrenees. There, in the crypt of our ancestors, we saw immaculate, confident charcoal cartoons of a horse and a stoat and fifty metres of clear, fresh footprints made by three immortal children, two of them running hand in hand, now all over 13,000 years old. Surely, one of the artists in this Ice Age refuge had British cousins, who carried on the equine artistic tradition in Robin Hood Cave, at Creswell Crags.

Finally, thanks to my long-suffering wife Freda and my children Maylin and David.

As a child, I sometimes wondered why people told jokes about Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Scotsmen. Why should our origins and differences matter? Part of growing up was realizing that they do matter and trying to understand why. We do not benefit from ignoring our own cultural identity and physical origins or by casually derogating those of others.

The English have traditionally had uneasy relations with their ‘Celtic’ neighbours. Part of the unease has to do with history, part with nationhood and part with territory. Perhaps I could illustrate this by a mid-twentieth-century anecdote:

I was taken as a babe-in-arms for my first holidays to a cottage on the side of a mountain in North Wales. Sixty years ago, my aunt had ‘inherited’ some sticks of furniture and the informal lease
of the cottage, at a peppercorn rent, from an elderly English headmistress. More of a shepherd’s hut built of massive granite blocks, the cottage had one small living room and two tiny bedrooms. Yet, for several decades it housed many members of our extended family over Easters and summers.

I made annual pilgrimages to this magic hut over the next twenty years. There was lots of nothing for kids to do in the cottage. On a small shelf on a convertible sofa were mildewed books and torn society magazines collected during the 1930s. My elder brother and sister played with the farmer’s daughter while my younger sister and I tried to trail after. In my late teenage and early university days in the sixties, I regularly dragged my Oxford friends up to the cottage in Wales. I remember once the farmer’s daughter, who was by now married, making a sharp comment about one of my guests’ open-air washing habits. I enquired about this from my friend, a rather posh debutante, who explained innocently that she had given up washing in the chipped enamel bowl in the shed and started going straight to the spring. Here she had regularly bared her lovely body to the cows and sheep in the hillside field. Unfortunately, the spring overlooked the bus stop and the milk churns on the coastal road, and so more critical eyes from the village enjoyed the treat.

Towards the end of my clinical studies, things changed abruptly. My elderly aunt received her written marching orders from the farmer’s daughter, who on the death of her own mother had inherited the farm. As my cousins were leaving after their last holiday there, they noticed a contractor’s van on the hill. Workmen had come to install an electricity transformer beside the cottage. My aunt was very upset. Above all, she felt a sense of betrayal that the capital of friendship she had built up
over such a long time had evaporated with the death of the farmer’s wife. She felt that the old lady would never have allowed it. Of course, whatever her dubious squatting rights, my aunt had no moral right to such expectations or feelings of betrayal. Our large English extended family had enjoyed exclusive use of the cottage for a negligible rent. I was very fond of my aunt, but her view of her relationship with the farmer’s family was rose-tinted. Like my own mother, she treated the farmer’s daughter in the same bossy way as she did her nephews and nieces. This, combined with a conviction that she was right, usually left the opposition speechless.

Tight-lipped but courteous was indeed how I usually found the Welsh-speaking farmer’s family on the occasions I ventured into their parlour. The farmer’s wife may just have been too polite, or at a loss to know how to deal with this prolonged unremunerative tenancy. Her daughter, with more education and a different perspective, must have been waiting some time. There was obviously a pressing reason for terminating the tenancy: to improve the cottage and let it out at a more commercial holiday rate. But the body language I saw at the time also indicated a deep sense of resentment and outrage. We were foreigners, we had strange ways and foreign English names – even Germanic, like my father’s – and we had unjustified control of their property.

There should be no doubt as to the very real power and impact of perceived national and regional identity. There is certainly no mistake about this among the modern populations of the British
Isles
^*
outside England. Disputes, attacks, mutilations, murders and occasional bombings are committed annually in the name of such divisions. A wide range of overt and hidden considerations of ethnicity affect the regional allocation of UK Government spending, and Britons are constantly reminded, both in their history books and in the modern history of their political institutions, of the importance of regional division. Football teams are named after ethnic labels, and fans fight under their flags. No British person hears more than a sentence from another before mentally placing them in their regional context.

I argue in this book that these divisions are real and consistent. They have a deep and very ancient history, which can be traced both culturally and genetically to two widely separated European regional origins for our ancestors. Even the ‘myths’ of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity represent the same two real divisions. As with all folklore, however, these labels ultimately mean something quite different, and may refer to older events. The distortions of history, propaganda and misunderstanding need to be viewed in the context of other evidence if we are to separate actual events from fiction.

Why do I feel the need to write a book which emphasizes national and ethnic divisions, when these have caused such grief and ought to be buried? Well, first I believe in celebration of our diversity rather than cultural levelling. Pretending that differences should not exist is a political fib. I just do not accept that a sense of pride in culture and diversity is the primary cause of nationalistic crimes. The causes of such crimes can be more clearly identified in the deliberate agenda set by some politicians – as can be seen from the recent history of Germany and the Balkans. Interest in our cultural and biological diversity is sinister only when the agenda are competitive, derogatory or exclusive. Of course, such sinister agenda are not exclusive to individuals in power, but people of different cultures usually manage to co-exist without genocide until stirred up by ambitious politicians.

The Origins of the British
describes the story of the peopling of the British Isles since their recolonization after the end of the last Ice Age, from about 15,000 years ago. I combine genetics, climatology, geology, archaeology, linguistics, culture and history to reconstruct and explain our roots and differences. Most speculation on our roots centres on resonant ethnic labels, such as Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. This book is no exception to that emphasis, but those labels do not mean quite what we have been led to believe.

There is a rising trend of scepticism about the validity of terms such as ‘Celtic’ and ‘Celts’, which is apparent in several recent books written by archaeologists. Despite this, it is indeed true that there are systematic genetic differences between the
so-called Celtic regions of the western British Isles and England, and that there are some parts of the British Isles which show close genetic links to Scandinavia. Perceptions of ‘Celtic’ and ‘Viking’ ethnicity held by people living in, say, Ireland and York are not simply meaningless, and should not be flushed away by the bathwater of academic Viking- and Celto-scepticism. But while traces of invasions, from the historical period and just before, do exist in today’s regional genetic patterns, the overall picture of deep genetic divisions between England and the British Atlantic coasts and islands is much more ancient than is implied by the story which tells of how Anglo-Saxons ethnically cleansed other Britons from their land. Some geneticists still actively promote the Anglo-Saxon wipeout view. Equally, documentaries that invite us to join a quest to trace the ‘Blood of the Vikings’ miss the point that our relationships with Scandinavians are much older than the Viking raids.

Likewise, the perception of genetic and cultural differences between ‘Celtic’ regions and England has a basis in reality, but has little to do with the nineteenth-century orthodoxy, still current today, of Celtic origins in Iron Age central Europe. Rather, the regions of Wales, Cornwall, Ireland and western Scotland have for many thousands of years shared genetic and cultural links with Iberia and the French Atlantic coast. I hope to establish more clearly than ever before the true genesis of the peoples we currently call insular Celts: the Scots, Welsh, Cornish and Irish.

From the Neolithic period, we shall travel from megalithic complexes like Stonehenge and massive passage-tombs like New grange in Ireland to the extraordinary preserved Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney (Plate 5). During the Bronze
and Iron Ages, we can marvel at the swirly designs of British gold and bronze artefacts, previously thought to support Celtic origins in Central Europe, to the precious ornaments found in exotic Saxon burials such as the one at Sutton Hoo. In each case, the British have continually adopted and developed new ideas, language and cultural practices from the recurrent invasions from across the North Sea and the English Channel, while managing to retain most of their prehistoric genetic heritage. That process of cultural borrowing from new visitors continues today.

The book is based on similar research to that employed for my previous book,
Out of Eden
: I have used the so-called phylogeographic approach to follow and date gene flow from different parts of the Continent into the British Isles. Details of the methods I have used can be found in the appendices. However, I should mention here that, as in the previous book, I have used personal names as nicknames or aides-mémoires for the major gene groups. In each case, I have chosen a personal name, from the appropriate region, which starts with the first letter of the technical name (i.e. from the consensus scientific nomenclature). So, for example, I have called the male gene group R1a1 Rostov, since it is strongly associated with the Ukraine, ‘Rostov’. As before, this is intended not to personalize such small elements in our genome, but to help the reader keep track of the migrations of different gene groups. And also as before, there will be the odd academic reviewer who still regards this practice as a familiarity and trivialization unworthy of their genes and their discipline. Too bad. I agree with my publishers and other reviewers that it helps a general readership.

In 2004, I gave a talk on my book
Out of Eden
at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. The topic was a genetic perspective on the peopling of the world by humans. Arrangements for the lecture at the excellent Royal Museum seemed largely to be run by bright medical students. The talk went well, but the morning before I had made the mistake of responding to a request from the publicity lass to provide more of a local angle for the Scottish newshounds. Although there was no mention of Scotland in any of my books, I unwisely agreed to be available from my hotel room to offer some opinions on where the different regional populations of the British Isles had come from and on the ancient division of English and Celtic speakers. I say ‘unwisely’ because of what subsequently happened in the media.

I gave several interviews to reporters from my Edinburgh hotel-room phone on the Sunday morning, and then gave my book talk that evening in the grand lecture theatre of the Royal Museum. I saw no journalists. I signed books, answered keen, well-informed questions, and then ate duck in a French restaurant with my wife. Later we crossed the Grassmarket, back to our hotel, to sleep. On the bank holiday morning of our drive back to England,
The Scotsman
appeared under my hotel-room door.

I couldn’t miss the front-page article, titled ‘Scots and English aulder enemies than thought’,
¹
with the accompanying editorial leader ‘Relatively well connected’. I went to a newsagent.
The Herald
also ran the story, giving it more space on an inside
page: ‘English-Scots split goes back 10,000 years: genetic proof of Celts’ ancient ancestry’.
²
The
Independent
ran a front-page article under the heading ‘Celts and English are a breed apart? Absolutely, says Professor’.
³
Other Scottish and English national papers ran the story in various forms and under different bylines. I could tell that they were all syndicated from just one of the interviews I had given, since multiple errors were repeated, such as a fabricated description and a title of an imaginary post in Oxford that might have been taken from a Roald Dahl book. Other persistent errors included the erroneous claim that all of this was in my book and had been discussed in my lecture of the previous day.