Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #344910 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

About the Author
Stephen Oppenheimer of the University of Oxford is an expert in the use of DNA to track migrations. His Out of Eden rewrote the prehistory of man’s peopling of the world in a thesis since confirmed in Science, while Eden in the East: the Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia challenged the view of the origins of Polynesians as Taiwanese rice farmers.

Customer Reviews

Exploding Myths
Stephen Oppenheimer: The Origins of the British. The New Prehistory of Britain and Ireland from Ice-Age Hunter-Gatherers to the Vikings as Revealed by DNA Analysis. London, England: Constable and Robinson, 2006 (Paperback edition 2007), xxii and 628 pages, with 22 color plates and numerous maps and diagrams.

Like most "Brits", I was taught in school that the Welsh, Cornish and Manx-speaking peoples were the remains of the originally Celtic population of Britain who had been decimated and driven into hiding by the furious assaults of the Angles and Saxons in the early middle ages, while the origin of the Scots was lost in antiquity. Stephen Oppenheimer, a geneticist rather than a historian, explodes all this as a radically oversimplified myth in his latest book, "The Origins of the British". Using the resources of DNA analysis, which have only become available over the past 10 to 15 years, and in dialogue with the work of historians, linguists, archaelogists, climatologists and other geneticists, Oppenheimer traces the "prehistory" of the inhabitants of the British Isles from the end of the Ice Age (he consistently speaks of the LGM = Last Glacial Maximum) up to the Norman invasion of 1066. And while he nowhere claims to have all the answers, he provides enough information to make it clear that the history of the British is a lot more complicated than my old history teacher was prepared to give it credit for. Britain appears to have been settled both from the South and West and from the North and East. The dichotomy between the Celtic-speaking western parts and the "Germanic" east quite possibly goes back thousands of years. Oppenheimer follows the historical developments from the Palaeolithic through the Mesolithic and the Neolithic right up to the Bronze and Iron Ages, establishing that the south of Britain (the part generally known today as England) was peopled mainly from the north-western European mainland. Although Oppenheimer is not a linguist, he broaches a fascinating argument on the origins of Old English, which he sees as possibly being a separate branch of the Germanic family of languages, related perhaps rather more to the North Germanic branch than the West Germanic, as is commonly supposed. This form of "Ènglish" may, he speculates, have been spoken in England already at the time of the Roman invasion, which would explain the total lack of evidence for Celtic as the original English tongue. DNA analysis makes it seem highly unlikely that the Angles and Saxons committed mass murder, and the same is true of the Viking and Danish invaders of some centuries later. The entire thrust of Oppenheimer's argument has been well summarized by some other reviewers, so I will leave it at that - this is a book that anyone interested in these issues should really read for themselves. And apropos reading it for yourself: The style is eminently sober and scientific, even if the memory-aiding names of genetic groups seem to some readers to be over-populizing. Some of the chapters in the middle of the book were a little confusing on the first reading to me as a non-geneticist, and I later wished I had read Appendix A (An Introduction to Genetic Tracking) before tackling the main body of the book. But I really cannot agree with those reviewers who accuse Oppenheimer of bad style; he has mastered an immense amount of information and passed it on in a way which is both illuminating and memorable.

Celtic confusions
While we in North America have a distressing tendency to lump most of the inhabitants of the British Isles together, those living there are aware of their diversity. That awareness has been carried rather to extremes by some scholars and politicians. "What is a Celt?" has been a key question, as has been its follow-up "What really happened to the Celts?" Tied in with these queries is the problem of finding an origin for the Celts and just what language they spoke. Stephen Oppenheimer addresses these and related issues in a comprehensive "detective story" incorporating history, analytical genetics and linguistic studies. His conclusions, well depicted in this provocative study, will prove surprising to some, and perhaps distressing to a few.

The British Isles, he begins, have the advantage of being invaders of a "terra nullius" [uninhabited land] some fifteen thousand years ago. As the Last Glacial Maximum retreated before the rise of a revived warm period, humans were able to enter a land they'd been driven from thousands of years previously. While this situation offers nothing to the historian, archaeologists and geneticists have a clear starting point for placing and dating the migration. Not an island then, Britain was a peninsula jutting out from the European land mass. That provided an easy route from the Mediterranean shoreline, around what is now Iberia to the southern and western coasts of Britain. Since "western" here now means Eire, it's clear the first adjustment of opinion must accommodate Ireland and Britain. Clearly, there were later population movements, but where did they originate, how long did they last and what numbers of people were involved? Most significantly, what languages did they speak?

From his introductory survey, Oppenheimer proceeds to tease out the answers to these questions. The origins are traced back in time using genetic markers. Mitochondrial DNA, carried down the generations only through female inheritance factors provides one scenario. The Y chromosome, the genetic marker for men is analysed separately, then compared. In most, although not all cases, the matches are mutually supportive. Archaeological finds are used as further indicators which have the advantage of solid dating techniques to support them, unlike the DNA tests which rest on a calculation based on presumed mutation rates. The language question remains contentious. Oppenheimer links it with the spread of farming entering Europe from Anatolia introducing early forms of Celtic into Western Europe. The author's genetic analysis also overturns the idea that farmers "displaced" earlier hunter-gatherer societies in Europe and Britain. Instead, farming was adapted by the resident population and farmers' larger families added some population pressure, but hardly "displacement". The same holds true for the Roman occupation, which was more interested in social stability and tax collecting than genocide.

The post-Roman era has also led to the establishment of displacement myths and their more recent overturning. History, partly thanks to reliance on "Saint" Gildas, has stoked the fires of national sentiments by depicting the Angles and Saxons as a barbarian horde bent on ethnic cleansing of the indigenous "Celtic" peoples. Oppenheimer rejects this tradition, arguing instead that a "warrior elite" may have entered Britain, but this was a small population and a continuation of British-Continental ties in any case. Just who those "barbarians" were is problematic in any case, since the author sees ongoing contact with the Frisian and near shore of Europe rather than a conquering horde emerging from northern Germany. It is now generally accepted that the Norman "Conquest" was only slightly more intrusive than the Roman one, with an elite doing the ruling and the long-lasting indigenous population doing everything else like farming, herding and trading.

A major issue here is language. Linguists, Oppenheimer argues have been keen to avoid dating of language branching, mostly because early attempts came to grief. He goes so far as to separate "Celtic" populations from "celtic" languages. Part of the reason for this is the lack of a written base of celtic to use as a foundation. The Classical Period commentators in Greece and Rome wrote of "Celts" in a vague sort of way, and even a man on the ground, Julius Caesar was unable to make definitive comments about either the people or their languages. More precise cultural details were omitted entirely. Oppenheimer's path through the language issues is inevitably a tortured one, but he makes a serious effort at simplification. Whatever his success is due to a paucity of real data. For him, the genes speak louder than words. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Not dumb enough!
In Britain, there is a mantra uttered by the PC lobby that "we have always been a nation of immigrants". History books concentrate on various "invasions" of our homeland which have supposedly changed our genes and made any idea of a British people just nonsense.
Oppenheimer shows that this is wrong. Most of our blood comes from men and women who arrived over 10,000 years ago from the Iberian peninsula when the last glaciers retreated. Recent developments in tracing DNA enables us to track them because the various regions of the British Isles still bear their genetic imprint. The same technology also sheds new light on the ancestry of the Celts.
This is all fascinating stuff and Oppenheimer should be congratulated for not dumbing down his story for the sake of popular appeal.
However, I must admit I struggled through those many parts of the book which detailed at great length exactly what percentage of people possess various gene variants. A few pages like that would have been fine, but we get rather too much. I'm afraid he could have done with a better editor and more appendixes.
It's still a very interesting book, but it's not for non-scientific readers or those whose interest in the subject comes from genealogy research.