| Barry |
Posted on: 03-Mar-2007, 12:22 PM |
Replies: 28
Views: 20,463
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Archeology and genetics seem to indicate that the Indo-European languages (to which the Celtic languages belong) originated either in what is today's Ukraine or Turkey. Many words - invariably those that we can imagine would have been important way-back-when, like 'wolf' or 'mother' (she's still important, for sure) are similar across many Indo-European languages. More modern words, say 'gun,' are entirely different words across the languages. Anyway, when the words are added up, compared and contrasted, it looks like Indo-European may have had a forest and hills origin. That points to Turkey more than it does the Ukraine, this being more savanna-like than the heavily-wooded and mountainous Turkey. Where ever it was, all Indo-European languages can be traced to a group of people that had evolved a language that we might term today as 'Proto-Indo-European' (First-Indo-European).
With the rise of agriculture maybe 10,000 years ago in lands south of Turkey - Mesopotamia, more or less in Iraq (god bless them) it probably was not long before agriculture spread to an Indo-European speaking tribe(s) in Turkey. (As an aside, perhaps the NON-Semitic speaking civilizations of Mesopotamia were Indo-European.) Then, either Indo-European tribes (or their culture), spread westward across Europe bringing agriculture with them. For all its faults, agriculture feeds more people than does hunting and gathering, so population numbers rose and young folks set off for new lands to till. Or, agri-culture spread quickly, more quickly than did actual people, over Europe's pre-farming tribes. In any case, Indo-European dialects made the journey too, and in the various quasi-isolated areas developed into new languages (within the Indo-European family). There surely developed a proto-Germanic, a proto-Slavic, and a proto-Celtic language, among others. These too, continued to evolve as they traveled, intermingled with other Indo-European groups (and with the Cro-magnon non-agricultural people already living in Europe), or became isolated themselves. The spread of peoples out of the hearth-land continued for thousands of years, with Celts of several linguistic persuasions making it all the way to the margins of western Europe.
As I mentioned before, these Celtic speaking tribes would have encountered pre-existing people, people now called the Cro-Magnon. The Cro-Magnon are those humans (likely indistinguishable from us or the incoming Indo-European tribes) that replaced the Neanderthal in Europe, and had now been there for tens of thousands of years. I'd venture to say that the Basque people of northern Spain and southwestern France are the descendents of the Cro-Magnon - and perhaps so to were the Etruscans of Tuscany, Italy - now extinct as a culture. And perhaps, so too, descendents of Cro-Magnon were the Picts and Scotti of Ireland and Scotland.
The question is - as always - are the people of the Celtic lands (the 7-nations more or less) primarily Celtic in genetic origins or are they primarily Cro-Magnon with some Celtic genetic input. Certainly, the cultures became what we call Celtic, but we don't know how much is input from pre-Celts and how much is Celtic proper. What we know for sure is that the pre-Celtic populations were not eliminated, so Celts of today are a blend of the two. So that makes Stonehenge and New Grange ours, even if they are pre-Celtic in origin. |
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