I like the terminology the anthropologists use. The IndoEuropeans invaded Europe about 7,500 years ago and (replaced) the original inhabitants. Replaced means killed, raped, took as slaves, and otherwise removed them from the face of the Earth.
One wonders what kind of a world we would live in if the original Europeans had driven the IndoEuropeans back to Carpathia?
He says that 85% of the DNA in the British Isles is very ancient and goes back to day one, 12-16,000 years ago. They absolutely were not replaced by farmer invaders. Farming moved, not the farmers.
His studies elsewhere indicate that once a DNA type (The original) settles into a region it is seldom replaced.
I highly recommend Oppenheimers book:
""This book challenges some of our longest held assumptions about the differences between Anglo-Saxons and Celts – perceived differences that have informed our collective sense of identity.Orthodox history has long taught that the Romans found a uniformly Celtic population throughout the British Isles, but that the peoples of the English heartland fell victim to genocide by the Anglo-Saxon hordes during the fifth and sixth centuries."
"Now Stephen Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking genetic research has revealed that the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasion’ contributed only a tiny fraction to the English gene pool. In fact, three quarters of English people can trace an unbroken line of genetic descent through their parental genes from settlers arriving long before the introduction of farming."
One wonders what kind of a world we would live in if the original Europeans had driven the IndoEuropeans back to Carpathia?Until the cessation of WWII and the Cold War, the invasion and colonization of Europe by waves of ethnic groups from Central Asia and/or the Far East had never been stopped. :') So I'd quibble with that 'what-if' because whomever was in Europe just before the Indo-Europeans were probably not the original Europeans. :') The commonly held view is that an isolate probably indicates that its speakers either are the sole survivors of a much larger group which was there first but the rest of them were overwhelmed or absorbed by the now-dominant groups; or, that an isolate represents a later introduction from some unrelated group. A commonly referenced example of the former would be the Basque, while an example of the latter would be Malagasy, the 'native' language of Madagascar, which is a language right out of Borneo. OTOH...
America B.C.A fascinating letter I received from a Shoshone Indian who had been traveling in the Basque country of Spain tells of his recognition of Shoshone words over there, including his own name, whose Shoshone meaning proved to match the meaning attached to a similar word by the modern Basques. Unfortunately I mislaid this interesting letter. If the Shoshone scholar who wrote to me should chance to see these words I hope he will forgive me and contact me again. The modern Basque settlers of Idaho may perhaps bring forth a linguist to investigate matters raised in this chapter. [p 173]
by Barry Fell
(1976)
find it in a nearby library