The Irish are Not Celts

[Celtic_Punk]

yes Blitz that is also true. The loose knit "celtic empire" was primarily a culture takeover. Take a look at southern canada if you will. The culture there is hugely influenced by american media and tourism. but go 200km north, and you see a totally different people.

Celtiberians, different genetics than all other celts. Massalians is another one! Sure they didnt fully assimilate, but their culture sure did change a whole lot. and they still had greek genetic roots.

Today what makes you irish is not being irish by blood. There are millions of us around the world, due to the dispora. But what makes you irish is how you conduct yourself. Your culture.

act american? you are american. act french, yer a frenchman! Your culture determines who you are. Not your blood.

unless you are a welshman... Once a welshman.. Always a welshman

[Anastasios Helios]

I know that the French have their cheese and bread and Asterix, but how can one "act American?"

[Yyrkoon]

I know that the French have their cheese and bread and Asterix, but how can one "act American?"

Travel the world wearing khaki shorts, a hawaiian shirt, white socks, sandals, and a baseball cap and talk really loud and slow at people in foreign countries because obviously if you talk to them like they'er both stupid and four, they'll understand you better. Oh and get ripped off by every street vendor on your travels. Back home, you have to be a religious fanatic apparently and not believe in evolution.

I say all of this as an American, so take it as that

[TheStranger]

act american? you are american. act french, yer a frenchman! Your culture determines who you are. Not your blood.

unless you are a welshman... Once a welshman.. Always a welshman

I don't share that opinion with you, because I think that this is a very nationalistic and/or stereotypical thinking.

@Anastasios Helios
But the Netherlands and Switzerland are also famous for their cheese. So your antionality is Dutch and you don't like cheese you're no Dutch? Your postings imply such old-fashioned thinking.

[Olaf Blackeyes]

Well i learned something tonite. I didnt know the Gaelic blood was different than Celtic. But in the end i guess it doesnt matter a whole lot, cuz the Celts invaded the main British Isle, and so for 500+ years the Irish had only Celts to trade with. Result=MAJOR celtic influence and finally cetic cultural conversion uponthe Irish. The only people in the world to retain the original Proto-European blood in the truest sense are the Basque people in northern spain.

[artavazd]

Well i learned something tonite. I didnt know the Gaelic blood was different than Celtic. But in the end i guess it doesnt matter a whole lot, cuz the Celts invaded the main British Isle, and so for 500+ years the Irish had only Celts to trade with. Result=MAJOR celtic influence and finally cetic cultural conversion uponthe Irish. The only people in the world to retain the original Proto-European blood in the truest sense are the Basque people in northern spain.

You know Ive read some theories, which state that the Basque have connections with the Kartvelian speaking people of the Caucasus namely the Georgians.

[cmacq]

Of course, I would have to weigh-in on this subject?

And I will, but just not now, because I need some snooze time, muy pronto.

At this juncture, I will say I agree with Riastradh’s statement about Kelt, yet I may add that the study cited offers no actual evidence of its claim. I shall, explain this in greater detail at a later date. For example, most people are largely unaware of the rather selective and dramatic changes in the demography of Great Britain in the last two centuries. It is extremely easy to either be totally unaware of patterns or purposefully obscure patterns. My experience tells that most, for one reason or another, simply do not recognize patterns, primarily because of the nature of the sample and the methods used to organize the data. This reminds me of the Neanderthal genome project, which it turns out was a minimally interesting exercise in genetics, but by all means had nothing to do with actual Neanderthal DNA, despite repeated claims to the contrary. Otherwise, please see Kelts vs Britons, Neds, Pikeys, hangers-on, various sundries of all sorts, and other fellow travellers.



CmacQ

[oudysseos]

I'd just like to point out that mitochondrial DNA is evidence only of descent from the mothers, which does not preclude, for example, invasions of 'Celt' warriors, raping as they went. If every aboriginal, non-Celt Irish male had been killed and all the women impregnated by Celts, the mtDNA would still not show any Celt influence. (I'm not proposing that this is what happened, just pointing out that there are limits as to what may be inferred from mtDNA).

Another issue is that Celt is now generally not held to have been an ethnic designation, but one of language, material culture and myth, which are things that would not necessarily show up in mtDNA. So McEvoy and Bradley's findings, while very interesting, are not really apropos. The apparent fact that the matrilineal ancestors of Ireland came up from the Iberian peninsula after the last Ice Age does not mean that Ireland was never a heavily Celtic culture. A parallel example might be Roman Gaul- what is now France was eventually 'Romanized' in terms of language, architecture, material culture and political structures, but genetically the population were not all Romans.

By the way, here is the home page of the authors of the study quoted by the OP.
http://www.gen.tcd.ie/molpopgen/index.php

[Olaf Blackeyes]

To be honest Europe is one of the least RACIALLY divied places on Earth. The conflict usually come from centuries old ETHNIC and/or RELIGIOUS conflicts.
EX take the Balkans. The Serbs vs Croats. All that murder was inspired by the fact that Serbs and Orthodox and the Croats are Catholic. Thats one of the FEW ways they are different. They are both of Slavic desecent, they live in geographically similar areas, eat pretty much the same stuff, speak the same language or close to the same language, Ect....

BTW i read this info like three years ago in a paper book so if someone wants to prove me wrong go for it.

[Celtic_Punk]

Thanks for that informative post oudysseos. I didn't actually know that Paternal DNA didnt show up in those types of tests. So even if it was consensual or not, the celtic warriors who would have gone to Eire and left their... erm trace... would not show up at all in the tests. misleading the conclusions in its entirety. Thus rendering this "irish are not celts" statement false until more conclusive tests are made.

[satalexton]

interesting.....but sorry I LOLed at that title. This thread is surprisingly more intelligent than it appears....

[Sumskilz]

Yyrkoon makes a good point concerning the use of mtDNA in the study. This only determines the direct female ancestry of a population. There are several reasons this can be misleading. An example of this is the case of modern Mexico. As we know from historical records a significant number of Spanish men came over from Europe to settle in New Spain while a very insignificant number of women came along with them. The native population which would have initially outnumbered the Spanish by a considerable margin was reduced drastically by disease and mistreatment. Furthermore discriminatory laws prohibited men of native ancestry from owning most types of wealth making it more appealing, from a survival point of view, for women of native ancestry to marry men of Spanish ancestry. The DNA evidence supports this story in that the vast majority of Mexicans have a Y haplotype (Male) of European (or other old world) origin and an mtDNA haplotype of Native American origin. If one didn’t know the history and examined only the mtDNA of modern Mexicans they would assume erroneously that the population was almost entirely of Native American ancestry when in fact they are quite mixed.

[cmacq]

This same theory was proposed for GB.

I see three huge red flags;

1) part-funded by the National Millennium Committee
2) The American Journal of Human Genetics
3) “The primary genetic legacy of Ireland seems to have come from people from Spain and Portugal after the last ice age,” said McEvoy. “They seem to have come up along the coast through western Europe and arrived in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It’s not due to something that happened 2,500 years ago with Celts. “We have a very old genetic legacy.”

_____________________________________________________

First, the National Millennium Committee is the haunt of those, similar to others which inhabit National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers or NCSHPO in the US, that have a very narrow agenda.

Second, although the study of human genetics uses basic archaeological background information to support theories, in the strictest sense, genetic studies can only provide reliable information about relatively modern populations.

Third, using genetic data McEvoy’s statement is totally speculative; the assumption here is that the composition of Europe’s population in the past was as it is today. Also using McEvoy’s logic western France, Normandy, and England should be the same as well? Now from what I understand, this has been proposed for GB, which is strange because of McEvoy’s further statement about the similarities of the Irish and Scot populations?

For example how could this study discern between the DNA of what may be called continental Celts of the 3rd century BC (that were also present in northern Spain and Portugal, form the extremely ill-defined populations the occupied the extremes of western Europe seven thousand years ago??? It is extremely easy to drown a host of relatively discrete populations into a huge mass of gobblety gook that may appear similar to one glob and different to another. I’ve seen this done with dentition studies. Established relationships depend on the qualifiers and the type of analysis used to sort the data.

With this said, I personally have never viewed the multi-faceted Irish, Scot, Welsh, Briton, nor Breton populations as being Kelt in the strictest use of the term. I view the use of Celt as a modern invention with very little evidence to support it. Its sort of like the tail wagging the dog. For example the term was used by the Greeks and Latins to specifically identify a continental ethnicity associated with the Gallic Culture within a well defined time frame. Of this Gallic Culture we know it was initially centered in southeastern France, Switzerland, southern Germany, and Austria, yet have very little actual evidence of their language. In the modern use Ireland and GB only became Celt after it was discovered that the once dominant language were somewhat related to that used by the former Gallic Culture that was called Kelt.





CmacQ

[oudysseos]

I've looked into this a little, being an interested party, as it were. The OP may have had good intentions on posting an interesting article, but he is very guilty of over-interpreting one popular science version of serious genetic research to make a huge claim in order to criticize the EB team. Unfortunately that is not what the scientists or the journalist said at all.

1.

The Irish are not Celts and their warrior culture had nothing to do with Celtic tribes

There are some problems with this statement. Let's define some terms.

Celts: in modern terms the word Celt is used to describe any one of the many European peoples who speak, or spoke, a Celtic language. The Goidelic/Gaelic languages (spoken in Ireland) have been identified as part of the Celtic language group since the 17th century or so. That kinda makes the Irish 'Celts' right there, by definition.
Of course, the Celts were not a monolithic homogeneous people: they didn't all speak the same language and were never united politically. Their common cultural and linguistic heritage never prevented them from whuppin ass on each other at every opportunity. The Irish and Gauls could be very different from each other (even genetically) and still both be Celts.

In any event McEvoy and Bradley are not asserting that the Irish were not Celtic in language, material culture or myth, but rather that they did not acquire their Celtishness (neologism, anyone?) genetically.
There are some authors that it would be worthwhile investigating if you're interested in this subject; Bryan Sykes, Blood of the Isles
http://books.google.ie/books?id=-w1y...refox-a&pgis=1
Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0786...tu#reader-link

In fact an example drawn from Sykes perfectly illustrates what's wrong with Riastradhs statement: genetically less than 2 per cent of the English are descended from the Normans. Would you conclude on this basis that the Normans never conquered England? And the Roman genetic contribution is even smaller. Does that mean that Agricola was only a myth? Who built Hadrian's wall then?
Using genetic markers to make statements about culture is very chancy. According to Sykes the genetic makeup of the British Isles remains overwhelmingly what it was in the Neolithic: a mixture of the first Mesolithic inhabitants with Neolithic settlers who came by sea from Iberia and ultimately from the eastern Mediterranean. But the culture of the British Isles is not Neolithic or Iberian. So maybe, just maybe, sex is not the preferred method for diffusing culture.

2.

Another problem with Riastradhs statement is that he asserts that he knows what Irish warrior culture [in the EB timeframe] was like (i.e. not Celtic).

There are no Irish written source from the EB timeframe, and damned little written about Ireland by anyone else, so I wonder on what grounds does Riastradh base his knowledge of Irish warrior culture? He referenced the Tain in another thread. The earliest manuscript for the Tain comes from the 12th century ce, and was considered a fable by one of the scribes who wrote it down. There is some evidence that the oral tradition for the Tain goes back to the 6th century ce, which is remarkable, but hardly takes us into the EB time frame.

All in all, I would think that the onus is on Riastradh to prove that he has better information about Irish warrior culture in the 3rd century bce than the EB team.

3.

In fact, the idea that there was some kind of a mass celtic invasion(peaceful or otherwise) into Ireland has been disproven (sic).

"Disproven" is a little extreme. There appears to be a general academic consensus that Celtic culture in Ireland developed gradually and continuously, and that the introduction of Celtic language and elements of Celtic culture was a result of cultural exchange with Celtic groups on South West continental Europe from the neolithic to the Bronze Age. However, this is not universally accepted by all scholars, according to a TCD source of mine who unfortunately must remain anonymous. I think that the consensus is probably true, but even so Riastradh has got the wrong end of that stick if he wants to beat someone with it. To wit: none of these geneticists or scholars dispute the existence of Celtic Culture in Ireland, just its origin. True, there does not seem to be genetic evidence for a massive Celtic invasion in 600 bce, but Celtic culture was prevalent in Ireland by the time people started writing about it. It got there somehow.

[Celtic_Punk]

Plus you gotta accept the fact that Ireland is really now the least influenced celtic culture on the planet. Its one of the few places on earth you can find towns that purely speak gaelic.

I mean most of the Welsh either cant speak Welsh or can speak both (whether they want you to know it or not... buggers) Same with scotland. I dont know about the cornish or the Bretons. But those are the ONLY surviving celts.

[Anastasios Helios]

@Anastasios Helios
But the Netherlands and Switzerland are also famous for their cheese. So your antionality is Dutch and you don't like cheese you're no Dutch? Your postings imply such old-fashioned thinking.

I was being sarcastic mate. I've never been to Netherlands or Switzerland before, but i'm sure that their cheese is great.

[TheStranger]

Yeah I supposed that; my post was more referring to Celtic Punk :)