Reddit reviews The Origins of the British

It's interesting to see how you've handled Iberia and the British Isles. I've been reading much archaeology and genetic history recently that discusses the similarities between these "Atlantic" peoples. Genetically speaking, the British and the Irish are closely related to the populations of the west-coast Iberian peninsula, as both populations derive (for the most part) from the original Paleolithic inhabitants of these areas, who had expanded out of an Ice Age refugium in Iberia.

For this reason, I found your idea of an Atlantic alliance and western Catholicism to fit quite well with actual historical processes that might have preserved and strengthened ancient links into a modern alliance of nation-states. After all, the genetics book I link above conjectures that Ireland's first post-Ice Age inhabitants spoke a language related to Basque, and Celtic spread through trade/invasion. Today, New Agers portray Celtic culture as something of "nature" from time immemorial. The truth is much more fascinating - figuring out the kaleidscope of historical processes that turn a culture of trade and political dominance (the Celtic languages were the "English" of the European Iron Age) into one we associate with shamrocks and leprachauns and other things ethereal, and whose last remaining bastions of native speakers are often on the far-flung margins of European civilization - the Dingle Peninsula in southwestern Ireland is one such bastion I have visited. I highly recommend a visit! You'll find nice, cozy pub towns dotted around the peninsula, nestled in beautiful hills, some fronting the ocean - all very beautiful but nothing too unfamiliar to anyone who has seen a rocky Atlantic coast, until you hear old dudes in the pub speaking a language that you could not even begin to classify as sounding like any other you have ever heard. Though some Gaels did make it to the states: a congregation of them held Gaelic services out in the North Carolina sandhills that I call home right up until 1900. But the point is, the language is far gone nowadays, despite the fact that any redditor with western European ancestry is bound to have a family tree full of Celtic speakers.

I digress... Big time...

Western Iberia, Normandy, Brittany, Ireland, and western Britain - we imagine them as disparate components of separate countries nowadays, but in ancient times, the sea was the highway. It was a lot easier to sail from southern Ireland to France than it would have been to travel overland to northern Ireland.

History is the ultimate dataset. I imagine I feel the same way Richard Dawkins feels about evolutionary genetics (which is really just another form of history): "We are walking archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas, walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading such messages and die unsated by the wonder of it."

A piece of parchment or a piece of DNA - they're all historical documents, and I intend to spend my life studying them all. But not because I want names and dates and statistics, but because it's my idea of the ultimate reverse engineering project - albeit one that will happen in my head :)

Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain covers the British Isles and is a pretty easy read meant for the non-technical audience. As far as I know, no one seriously disputes its findings which are, basically, that the people of the British Isles are overwhelmingly descended from ice-age populations and not, as many have long believed, from Celtic or Germanic-speaking groups that came over from mainland Europe. There is an ancient divide between the eastern (Germanic) and western (Celtic) sides of the British Isles, but it too dates back to the ice age and arises from the two groups having originated in different ice-age refuges in the western Mediterranean and Black Sea respectively.

or Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain by geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer. As mentioned in this book review by the NY Times

> In all, about three-quarters of the ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago ... Ireland received the fewest of the subsequent invaders [i.e. Celts, Romans, Angles/Saxons/Jutes, Norse, Normans]; their DNA makes up about 12 percent of the Irish gene pool, ... 20 percent of the gene pool in Wales, 30 percent in Scotland, and about a third in eastern and southern England. But no single group of invaders is responsible for more than 5 percent of the current gene pool

edit: fixed link, expanded quote

I don't have an online source, but it's all covered in this book.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Origins-British-Prehistory-Britain-Detective/dp/1845294823

DNA analysis has shown that the peoples of the western British Isles are overwhelmingly descended (where over 95% of their DNA is accounted for) from people who, at the last glacial maximum, lived in an ice age refuge somewhere in the western Mediterranean. They then migrated north along what would have then been a very different western European coastline --the British Isles would have been connected to the mainland because of much lower sea-levels-- eventually settling what is now the western British Isles some 13-10k years ago. Since that is so, it's entirely possible, and even likely, that the Basques, who after all do speak an ancient language, are related to the "Celts" of the British Isles.

Here is a relatively recent and authoritative work on the subject that is meant for the non-technical reader. I recommend it.

As for the supposed language connection, either you linked something other than what you intended, or you are badly confused. Since you are evidently unwilling to take my word for it, I recommend that you pose the question to /r/linguistics and see what they have to say about the idea of Basque being somehow related to the Celtic languages. I can assure you that it is a polite subreddit and that you are guaranteed to learn something about how and why languages are classified the way they are.

Go away and read this -

Educate yourself -

The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain: A Genetic Detective Story

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Origins-British-Prehistory-Britain-Detective/dp/1845294823/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464486490&sr=8-1&keywords=british+oppenheimer