> 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 t

> 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.