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Who were the Celts? The Celts were a group of peoples that occupied lands stretching from the British Isles to Gallatia. The Celts had many dealings with other cultures that bordered the lands occupied by these peoples, and even though there is no written record of the Celts stemming from their own documents, we can piece together a fair picture of them from archeological evidence as well as historical accounts from other cultures. The first historical recorded encounter of a people displaying the cultural traits associated with the Celts comes from northern Italy around 400 BC, when a previously unkown...

Sunday, 30 June, 2002, 15:31 GMT 16:31 UK English and Welsh are races apart Gene scientists claim to have found proof that the Welsh are the "true" Britons. The research supports the idea that Celtic Britain underwent a form of ethnic cleansing by Anglo-Saxons invaders following the Roman withdrawal in the fifth century. Genetic tests show clear differences between the Welsh and English It suggests that between 50% and 100% of the indigenous population of what was to become England was wiped out, with Offa's Dyke acting as a "genetic barrier" protecting those on the Welsh side. And the upheaval...

History books favor stories of conquest, not of continuity, so it is perhaps not surprising that many Englishmen grow up believing they are a fighting mixture of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans who invaded Britain. The defeated Celts, by this reckoning, left their legacy only in the hinterlands of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. A new genetic survey of Y chromosomes throughout the British Isles has revealed a very different story. The Celtic inhabitants of Britain were real survivors. Nowhere were they entirely replaced by the invaders and they survive in high proportions, often 50 percent or more, throughout...

Professor Peter Donnelly, of Oxford University, said the Welsh carry DNA which could be traced back to the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. The project surveyed 2,000 people in rural areas across Britain. Participants, as well as their parents and grandparents, had to be born in those areas to be included in the study. Prof Donnelly, a professor of statistical science at Oxford University and director of the Wellcome Trust centre for human genetics, said DNA samples were analysed at about 500,000 different points. After comparing statistics, a map was compiled which showed Wales and Cornwall stood out. Prof...

Traditionally the difference between the English and Scots, Welsh, Irish and Cornish was attributed to the foreign influence of invading forces such as the Anglo-Saxons, Celts and Vikings settling in different areas of Britain hundreds of years ago. But Professor Stephen Oppenheimer of Oxford University, believes the difference originates much further back in history... The professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at Oxford University said the Celts of Western Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Cornwall are descended from an ancient people living on the Atlantic coast while Britain was still attached to mainland Europe, while the English are more closely related...

I have been interested in human migrations for many years. One of the markers of a population is the distribution of a blood type among a given population. I got interested in this because the blood type distribution in the UK is nearly 50/50 A/O, a small sample has other blood types. My dear old Ma is Black Irish and is A/B, not a common blood type in the part of Ireland where her family originated. Click on the link for distributions.

DNA shows Celtic hero Somerled's Viking roots IAN JOHNSTON SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT A HISTORIC Celtic hero credited with driving the Vikings out of western Scotland was actually descended from a Norseman, according to research by a leading DNA expert. According to traditional genealogies, Somerled, who is said to have died in 1164 after ousting the Vikings from Argyll, Kintyre and the Western Isles, was descended from an ancient royal line going back to when the Scots were living in Ireland. But Bryan Sykes, an Oxford University professor of human genetics who set up a company called Oxford Ancestors to research people’s...

A new study indicates that one of the largest of the Indigenous language families in Latin America originated in the sixth century BCE in the basin of the Rio Tapajós and Rio Xingu, near the present-day city of Santarém in the Brazilian state of Pará.There are around fifty languages in the Tupí-Guaraní language family, which gave us words like "jaguar" and "piranha." Now, Dr. Fabrício Ferraz Gerardi from the University of Tübingen's Institute of Linguistics and a team of international researchers have used methods developed in the field of molecular biology to compare and investigate the Tupí-Guaraní languages. This has...

Marine archaeologists began studying the 39-foot-long vessel—nicknamed the "Zambratija boat" because of its location in the Bay of Zambratija—after hearing reports from local fishermen in 2008. Researchers were surprised to learn the vessel dated to between the 12th and 10th centuries B.C.E, which they say makes it the oldest entirely hand-sewn boat in the Mediterranean.Workers painstakingly constructed the vessel by using flexible fibers to stitch together pieces of wood. While that technique was popular around the world both before and after the introduction of metal components, researchers say the Zambratija boat is unique because it's a rare surviving example of...

The remains of some of the earliest modern humans to enter Asia have been discovered in a Laos cave, according to a study published Tuesday.Excavations in the Tam Pa Ling cave over the past seven years revealed bone fragments belonging to early modern humans who inhabited the region some 86,000 years ago, and may have lived in the mountainous area for at least 68,000 years, according to Nature. The discovery pushes back the previous timeline on the exploration of humans, as these remains may be from some of the first humans to enter southeast Asia after leaving Africa...A small piece...

<p>The desert winds swept over the sands and out to the sea. Waters churned and the ships, loaded with wine from the ancient city of Tyre, tumbled in the storm.</p> <p>Swamped, the Tanit and Elissa foundered around 800 B.C., coming to rest upright some 1,300 feet under the Mediterranean, too deep for recovery.</p>

Two of the shipwrecks were likely from the end of the 19th century or beginning of the 20th century, including a "large motorized metal wreck" with no traces of cargo. In that wreck, researchers noted that the davits, which would have been used to lower lifeboats, were facing outward, which means any crew may have been able to leave the ship. The second ship was likely a wooden fishing boat.A third shipwreck was likely a merchant vessel that sailed between the first century BC and the second century. The ROV spotted artifacts that appeared to be amphoras, or tall, two-handled...

The Early Neolithic site of KTG, located on the North African Mediterranean coast near the Gibraltar strait (Fig. 1a), predates and partly overlaps in time with IAM2 (Table 1). At KTG a full Neolithic assemblage is found, including a diversity of cultivated cereals, domestic mammals and cardial ceramics. In contrast to the people at IAM, those at KTG are genetically similar to European Early Neolithic populations...Overall, the genetic patterns of local interaction between different groups in northwestern Africa are comparable to those found in Europe: farmers assimilated local foragers' ancestry in a unidirectional admixture process. Cases of hunter-gatherer communities adopting...

Fish soup. Salmon tartare with mango salsa. Sea bream a la plancha.The human genus has been eating fish since the dawn of time. Almost 2 million years ago, hominins in Kenya deboned a catfish. Around 800,000 years ago, hominins in Israel grilled a giant carp. Evidence of shellfish consumption also abounds, and it’s even been proposed that coastal Neanderthals dived for clams.It is therefore unsurprising that freshwater fish were critical resources for inland prehistoric peoples in North America, not to mention modern ones. It is surprising that archaeologists investigating their predecessors – the earliest people in Beringia (the land bridge...

...This year, the General Services Administration (GSA) will give away six of the historic beacons, including the Warwick Neck Light, at no cost. An additional four will be sold via public auction. The goal of the transfers is to preserve the historic buildings, even as technology renders them obsolete...Since the passage of the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act in 2000, the GSA has been transferring ownership of lighthouses... to groups willing to preserve them, according to a statement from the agency...At many lighthouses, upkeep is challenging: Two of the structures up for auction, the Penfield Reef Lighthouse in Fairfield, Connecticut,...

The petroglyphs were carved on a granite rock face that was once part of an island, meaning people would have had to make the carvings while standing on a boat, or from a platform constructed on ice, said Martin Ostholm, a project manager with the Foundation for Documentation of Bohuslan's Rock Carvings who is one of the archaeologists who discovered the petroglyphs, told Live Science.Bohuslan is already known for its rock carvings, including Bronze Age art made at Tanum... The team was looking for new petroglyphs in the area when they came across the moss-covered rock face. They noticed some...

Researchers announced Thursday that the timeline of Greece’s history needs to be pushed back by at least a quarter million years after a shocking discovery deep inside an open coal mine. Archaeologists uncovered the nation’s oldest archaeological site, which dates back at least 700,000 years. It is thought to be associated with some of our earliest hominin ancestors, according to The Associated Press. Although older archaeological sites have been uncovered in other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, this is the first major discovery of this age in Greece, and may completely rewrite aspects of the nation’s human history. The...

Key points: The study provides the first scientific evidence that silver used in her jewellery was sourced from the Aegean Islands in Greece. The findings offer an insight into the trade networks that existed and the emergence of Egyptian state. An analysis of bracelets owned by Queen Hetepheres — the mother of King Khufu, who would go on to build the Great Pyramid — has found that Egypt and Greece were involved in long-distance trade earlier than previously known.

According to the researchers, these findings are the first-ever archaeological proof of visitors from Southeast Asia originating outside of Makassar on Sulawesi arriving in mainland Australia.Two watercrafts depicted in the rock art feature motifs that appear on the Moluccan types of Southeast Asian vessels. They are distinct from other seafaring cultures from the region, enabling the researchers to confirm their identity.As well as their distinctive shape and configuration, both boats appear to display triangular flags, pennants, and prow adornments. By comparing these two depictions with historically recorded watercraft from islands in Southeast Asia, the researchers suggest that they probably came...

Location of Kaylu archeological site (a no 1), Jebel (a no 2), and Dam-Dam-Cheshme 1 and 2 (a no 3); view of the rockshelter (b1); location of the two burials (b2 and b3); Caspian Sea view from the site (c); human remains state of preservation (d and e); lithic industry from layer 7 of Kaylu (f) – point (1), lunates (2, 3), end-scraper (4), splinted pieces (5, 6), cores (7, 8). Credit: Open Archaeology (2023). DOI: 10.1515/opar-2022-0289 Stone Age humans may have made extended maritime voyages on the Caspian Sea, according to a new study published in the journal Open...