The name "Galicia" is derived from the Celtic people who lived there prior to the time of the Roman conquest (the "Gallaeci"). There had apparently existed a fishing/sailing/trading commerce between Galicia and the British Isles and Ireland for centuries. Today, many red-headed, green-eyed Spaniards can trace geneological roots to Galicia. The modern Galician dialect however, has Portuguese roots, the Celtic origins having been almost obliterated. Galicians are considered by other Spaniards as something like country bumpkins.
Gunnar Heinsohn of the University of Bremen is one of Germany's foremost scholars and a key player in the chronological revisions of near-Eastern stratigraphy and historiology which you read about, if you read about that sort of thing. I once asked him how long he figured the white race had been on the planet, the topic at hand actually being the dispersion of caucasian languages and whether or not there'd actually been time for it.
Heinsohn's reply:
Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).
The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as follows
modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)
Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).
In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000. Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.
I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tribal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.
There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.
I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:
-600 onwards Iron Age
-900 onwards Bronze Age
-1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
-1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.
Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:
monostrat.: only modern man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by side
monostrat.: only Neanderthal man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by side
monotstrat.: only Erectus tools (deepest stratum for intelligent man)
The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critiques that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism. This "most misleading Englishman" (Velikovsky) needed millions of years to let invisibly small alterations do the big visible changes. It is quite funny to observe catastrophism combined with darwinizing time spans. Yet, I see it all over neo-Catastrophism.
Note that Heinsohn is not claiming that he has proof that the changeover to modern man from neanderthal was 3500 years ago per se; he is merely stating the fact, as he sees it, that there is no real basis in evidence to assign any greater age than that to the changeover. Emmet Sweeney and Heinsohn put the construction of the great pyramids somewhere around 900 BC and the flood, presumably, around 1200 or 1500 BC. Sweeney's two little books, "The Pyramid Age" and 'Genesis of Israel and Egypt" are major pieces of academic work and astonishing tour de forces.