Excerpt from The Rat Race by Andy Norfolk
Ostara / Beltane 2009 issue
This article has been prompted by recent discussions on the Pagan Network forum in which someone from outside of the United Kingdom claimed various things about racial origins and what they might mean. Do you feel Celtic? Does that make you feel superior? Well it shouldn't! The Celts are not quite what, or who, you might think and nor are the British.
People weren't present in Britain during the upper Palaeolithic - about 14,000 bc. They came back as the ice retreated at the end of the last glaciation and we know that people were here from at least 12,000 years ago because of C14 dating of skeletal remains. The Mesolithic is the period of transition from the last glaciation to the development of farming and pottery in the Neolithic. In the Mesolithic, from about 8,500 bc to 4,000 bc people were hunter-gatherers, collecting wild food from the land around them. It has been estimated that there may have been no more than about 24,400 people in Britain at that time, based on how much land it needs to support contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. So where did these people come from?
Geneticists, such as Professor Goldstein, studying the influence of the Vikings on Britain looked at the Y chromosome which passed from father to son. While there are some traces of Norwegian DNA, what has become clear as a result of further work by people such Capelli, Sykes and Oppenheimer, is that about 75% of the population of Britain have very similar genetic origins. The remaining 25% are a mix of all sorts. During the last ice age there were human populations surviving in various places; on the Iberian peninsula, around modern day Kosovo and Macedonia and also to the north-east of the Black Sea. These population groups each had different Y chromosome groups. These haplogroups are labelled R1b, I and R1a respectively. We now know that the original people in Britain mostly came from the Iberian R1b haplogroup and that about three-quarters of us are their direct descendants. The same people also of course colonised Ireland. Our closest modern European relatives, if you study male DNA, turn out to the Basques.
Professor Sykes has studied mitochondrial DNA passed down the female line. He has identified 36 women from whom almost everyone on earth is directly descended. Seven of these are the "clan-mothers" from whom Europeans are descended. One of these, who was born 20,000 years ago near the present day border between France and Spain close to Perpignan, has been nicknamed Helena, which is the Greek for light. Her offspring have spread out to occupy territory from the Alps to Russia and Norway, including the British Isles. This is another link to our origins in a small part of Europe where people managed to survive the ice age.