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I realize that there's real research being done here. But as a layman, I read this and only understand that Scottish, Welsh and Irish people are descended from

• defrost 3y ago
  Modern North Americans largely are not descended from those that lived in North America two thousand years ago - the original locals were swamped by immigrants from elsewhere. Modern England is largely made up from those descended from earlier immigrantion waves of mostly European origin that displaced original iron age occupants. The "fringes" (for want of a better word) of the modern UK and Republic of Ireland (Scotland, Wales, the island of Ireland) still retain populations that are largely descended from OG occupants.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    > the original locals were swamped by immigrants from elsewhere. Not swamped. They first had up to 80% of their existing population eliminated by diseases that early european explorers bought with them.
    • yosito 3y ago
      IIRC it was likely more than 80% that were wiped out by disease, giving later European settlers the ability to promote the idea of the Americas as a largely unsettled wilderness scattered with savages, though just a couple decades before Native American civilizations had rivaled Europe.
  • yosito 3y ago
    > Modern England is largely made up from those descended from earlier immigrantion waves of mostly European origin This I didn't know. Thanks. I guess I need to brush up on my knowledge of English history.
    • KMag 3y ago
      For one, England means "land of the Angles" (or in French, "Angleterre": "Angle land"). The Anglo-Saxon majority people group of England descend from the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, from the coastal German regions of Anglia, Old Saxony, and Jutland. There's also significant admixture from Norse invasion/settlement (and also the Normans, who were Norse who took over a region of France and adopted a dialect of the French language, before conquering England in the year 1066). Going further back in time, I'm guessing you're aware that modern Scotland corresponds roughly to the area of Britain that the Romans weren't able to conquer. The Roman settlement of Londinium became London. We also get our English word "pound" and its abbreviation "lb." from the two halves of the Latin phrase "libra pondo", dating back to Roman Britain.
      • deleted 3y ago
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• DFHippie 3y ago
  First, this conflicts with stories ascribing more exotic origins to the Picts. Second, that it demonstrates that there is some continuity between the pre-Indo-European population of the British Isles and today; i.e., they weren't totally replaced. Third, that the particular sub-populations having this ancestry, and similar to the Picts, are in Wales, Northumbria, Northern Ireland, and Western Scotland, not in Sussex, say. None of this is obvious. There are people in the British Isles today who resemble the Picts. There are people in the British Isles who don't resemble the Picts. It was known that there were people in the British Isles before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. It was not known that these were the Picts. It was known that the Picts were regarded as culturally distinct, when they were around, from other populations which are regarded as having a continuous history to the present times. It was not obvious that there were any genetically Pictish people left, or, if so, where they lived. It was not obvious that the Picts were just the pre-Indo-European people of the British Isles. These things were among hypotheses offered, but genetic analysis has established that it is so.
  • biorach 3y ago
    > It was known that there were people in the British Isles before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. It was not known that these were the Picts I don't think that the article supports the theory that the Picts were descended from the pre Indo European population. It's actually somewhat unclear on this > The analysis revealed that Picts descended from local Iron Age populations, who lived across Britain before the arrival of mainland Europeans. Iron age populations on the British Isles and Ireland are generally associated with Celtic, Indo European, cultures. The Iron Age in Scotland is generally considered to have lasted from around 700BC to the start of the Medieval Era. The pre-Indo-European populations would date from the Bronze age and the Mesolithic - which the article makes no mention of, so it's not clear what relationship the Picts had with the populations before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. In any case it's not widely believed that there was an "Indo-European" invasion, or arrival. Instead the genetic and archiological evidence points to a diffusion of small groups across Europe which seem to have spread their culture and language by "elite capture" rather than by wholesale population replacement. The general consensus until now is that the Picts spoke a variety of, or something closely related to Brittonic, the Celtic, Into-European language spoken across the rest of Britain at the time, ancestral to modern Welsh.
• csomar 3y ago
  I think people (researchers? Historians?) overestimated the effects of human migration. Genetics might be showing that most people really moved nowhere for the last 3000 year or so.
• creativenolo 3y ago
  Glad you asked. I grew up near lots of Pictish stones, and had just assumed too.