British genetics

Beaker culture regions in orange

Not very long ago, we were treated to a study that suggested that DNA in the British Isles had been essentially unchanged since the retreat of the glaciers, with the only blip being the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons (in this scenario, we don't see any genetic discontinuity related to the arrival of the Celts, the Romans, the Vikings, etc.—only the Anglo-Saxons.)  More recent studies now suggest that there was in fact a very tremendous discontinuity about 2,500 or so B.C. with the arrival of the "Bell Beaker" culture, which replaced at least 90% of the DNA on the island, and which generally indicated that for whatever reason, the Neolithic peoples left essentially no descendants and much later arrivals from Central Europe's Bell Beaker culture.  The Bell Beaker culture is a bit mysterious, because it seems to have spread from multiple regions at once, it's got a big spread of open areas where other cultures are manifested instead, and it's ethno-linguistic affinities are dubious.  In fact, it's genetic markers come in two clusters; some from Neolithic Iberian sources, and some that bear a more Yamnaya influenced "steppe" genetic profile.  The Beaker phenomena seems to have been a brief hybrid between probable early Indo-Europeans coming from the Pontic-Caspian region and some locals from the Atlantic coast, and the beakers themselves might have been a prestige item that spread for whatever reason across a broad region across multiple ethno-linguistic and cultural groups.

This massive Beaker people migration to the British Isles and subsequent replacement of whomever was there before (the Stonehenge builders) has often been associated with an early stage of Celtic, which makes sense, but at the same time, the Bronze Age Urnfield culture is generally seen as the very earliest material culture that can be seen as an early stage of Celtic, with the subsequent Halstatt as proto-Celtic and the even later La Tene as actual Iron Age Celtic.  Given that, it seems likely that the Beaker migration to the British Isles had to have been, at best, some level of late Indo-European dialect or linguistic identity that predates anything that we can consider Celtic in any meaningful way.  So... how did Celtic get to the British Isles to be the linguistic identity of the first people who are historically attested in the region?

It's worth noting that the Insular Celtic languages are quite a bit different from the Continental Celtic languages, and make up a separate linguistic group.  This group is also posited to have been a P-Celtic stock, i.e., it is closer to the Gaulish languages than to other Celtic languages such as those of Cisalpine Gaul, the Celtiberians, etc.  This P-Celtic is sometimes also called Gallo-Brittonic.  Q-Celtic is Goidelic (i.e. Irish, Scottish) and the Celtiberians.  Nobody knows for sure where the division lies; Insular vs. Continental, or P- vs Q-Celtic.  But both models do suggest that there were extended contacts between the islands and the Continent still, so possibly even if the Beaker migrants to Britain were pre-Celtic, they were still part of a linguistic continuum that many centuries later emerged as Celtic.  Maybe.  Or maybe we should be looking for an elite dominance of Celtic arrivals separate from the original peopling of Britain by some other late Indo-European group (Nordwestblock?)

Anyway, archaeogenetics is a fascinating subject.  While it's told us some interesting things that are not very surprising (for instance, it's pretty much ended any remaining controversy surrounding the Indo-European homeland, at least from a scientific standpoint, although science deniers still hold on to their pet theories in some instances), it also has raised all kinds of questions and told us things that we didn't expect and can't explain.

I expect yet that many more interesting things will come out of the study of archaeogenetics.  It's been a wild ride in a short time for the study as it is.