Stephen Oppenheimer

Although now over a decade old, this rethinking of the origins of the inhabitants of the British Isles deserves to be widely read. I am not sure its radical shattering of the standard view of our history has percolated far enough into the general public's vision of its own history.

It was so radical that initially I thought I might have picked up something closer to Bauval and Hancock but, no, this gets endorsements from luminaries such as Renfrew and Gamble and it is clear that the author show more has undertaken his own research and engaged with other serious researchers.

He terms it a book of 'popular science' but be warned that it is not a simple read and the art of 'skimming' a lot of technical genetic detail proved useful. And, of course, he is open about some of the speculative aspects of his work with another decade since to refine or refute by others.

I am not expert but my understanding is that refining is precisely what has been going on and that there has not been a great deal of refutation. Rather than say what is regarded as true in 2018, it might be best to summarise what Oppenheimer proposed from the genetics of over ten years ago.

The book is complex . My summary will not do it justice. I hope not to deter others from reading it and then following up with their own research. But here goes ...

The core proposition is that the vast bulk of the British population is much older in origins, although there is a cut-off date because of climatic conditions at the Last Glacial Maximum, than widely believed.

A key finding is that every historical political or military invasion (Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman and implicitly the migrations in the modern era) have had much less impact on the nature of the population in general than supposed by some archaeologists.

This fits with the theses of those archaeologists who see continuities in population from their reading of the artefact record. They suggest that each invasion was more of an elite takeover than a mass movement of peoples.

Oppenheimer endorses this general thrust, based on genetic evidence, suggesting that elite invasions tended to be takeovers of populations rather like themselves genetically. There were thus continuities of place as well as of time.

So where did the bulk of the population come from? One interesting finding is that there is a natural difference between what we call Celts and what we call English in the very broadest sense - or rather between the population of the Western seaways and those coming from the continent.

I think we are stuck with the terms Celts for political reasons even though it represents a wholly misguided nineteenth century origin legend but I would quite like to think of their rivals in these islands as 'Anglians'. We are stuck now with English.

This difference is ultimately expressed as two genetic lines coming from two Ice Age refuges - one in North East Spain (of which the Basques are a relict) and one in the Ukraine and Balkans. As the ice melted populations expanded northwards.

The Western line is actually the genetically dominant one, working its way up the seaways, so that perhaps two thirds of us British have ancestral origins in a settler community which expanded on the back of a neolithic culture (cardial ware) that was ultimately Mediterranean.

This is the one that underpins the genetics of what we call Celts but here Oppenheimer has a card to play. Just as he diminishes the idea of ethnic cleansing by Saxons, Vikings and Normans so he does the same to another cherished myth - the Celtic homeland in Europe.

He points out that language and culture are not genetics. Although cultural forms flowed into Britain from mainland Europe that we now link to Celticism, the culture that arrived amongst the 'Celts' (as we know them) was imported on a different genetic base.

There is much that is more speculative in the book on the Indo-European languages of which the Celtic languages are a part. Oppenheimer seems to follow Renfrew in postulating that these language families flowed across Europe via the expansion of the Anatolian neolithic.

However, it has to be said that the book was not easy to follow at this point (the depth of detail makes it easy to allow attention to lapse at times) so these sections might require a second reading - I won't try to summarise what I imperfectly understand.

So, we have a largely neolithic (though there are mesolithic aspects of the case) settling the Western sea ways and moving up the South Coast where they then meet a separate settlement process coming from Europe linked back to the Linearbandkeramik of Germany.

This latter takes over the North European plain and spreads north-westwards to meet the Cardial Ware settlers along the South Coast where it is no accident perhaps that Wessex, centred on Stonehenge, becomes prosperous on trade. Trade is what the British do after all.

With the chains of mountains dividing West and East and cultures dependent on waterways and avoiding forests until absolutely necessary, a different genetic stock, perhaps a third of the British today, peoples Eastern England and Scotland. These are our 'Anglians'.

There is a third wave linked back ultimately to the Ukrainian refuge which arrives, again along sea routes, from Northern Scandinavia to people the northern parts of the Western seaways - perhaps a reddish-haired strain moving down via the Orkneys and Shetlands.

Everyone starts to get mixed up through further mutations, secondary settlements, slaving, trade and war as well as the imposition of warriors, traders and various hangers-on from elite struggles for booty and advantage but the core lines derive from these primary neolithic movements.

The peoples who suffered under the Romans, Saxon warlords, Vikings and Normans were pretty well the same (genetically) as those who existed long before the Iron Age with the suggestion (beneath the later complexities) of two main genetic zones underpinning 'British' culture.

These two genetic zones seem to have a surprising cultural continuity throughout history with the Celtic and English speaking zones following the pattern even today regardless of the vicissitudes of subsequent history.

This raises the language question again because Oppenheimer is tempted to suggest that the peoples who pre-existed various warlord invaders might have had far more long term continuity in how they spoke than believed until recently.

His suggestion is that warlords (at least in the earlier period) arrived in part because they were already culturally like a population and that Roman Britain for example was perhaps not 'Celtic' at all but either Belgic and Germanic (North Sea).

The South Coast Saxons were in fact blood brothers to the Belgic and Frankish communities of Northern Gaul and North Sea Germany and the 'English' pre-existed as Anglians who were blood brothers to other North Sea peoples. Saxons were perhaps just later variants of Belgae.

Furthermore (though this is very speculative) such people spoke languages close to those of their continental neighbours and it is in this that English originated. There are, of course, other speculations on the Picts but the speculations are always well argued and plausible.

So, the British are divided naturally into their two halves, east and west, and then are further divided by geography within or just outside those categories north and south. Those divisions are very ancient and pre-date our historical records.

This raises an interesting question about 'race' because genetics increasingly is being shown to be linked to personality characteristics and cultures may be built on such predispositions - perhaps the free-born Englishman really is psychologically pre-set in that direction!

Oppenheimer is interesting on his own position. His name suggests German-Jewish ancestry and that is where it comes from but, in fact, his own Britishness represents by far the majority of his genetic code because incomers generally get overwhelmed by native genes as they marry in.

He has also done what I have done - married into an entirely different East Asian genetic heritage so his children, like mine (though mine have genetic antecedents from Europe through colonisation), are genetically diverse but the Asian will attenuate over time as they reproduce.

This raises interesting political questions about migration and Celt identity. Recent migration, for example from the Comonwealth and the EU, is not an invasion by warlords but a settlement process and these migrants often (though not invariably) reproduce within their community.

What we have (in England) is a core people going back to neolithic time battered periodically by elites (nothing changes in that respect) being faced by a quantitatively different intrusion where the levels of integration are ambiguous and the new settlers are concentrated in particular areas.

This might explain the unease of many English indigenes both about the fact of the matter and the lack of control or interest in their instinctive fears by elites (who, of course, see the majority around them as, basically, plunder, to all intents and purposes).

The reality is not as alarming as nativists fear but cannot be swept under the carpet. Many migrants will simply be happily absorbed into Englishness (though it is called Britishness to keep the Celts on side in a United Kingdom) but others will create new sub-groups of localised genetic difference.

This does not matter in the long run (though being identifiably different has caused problems in the past) but it does need managing. Successive Governments had and have an appalling record at matching sufficient cultural and linguistic integration with respect for indigenous concerns.

We must remember that whiteness really is an unusual mutation from the 'norm' of humanity, one which has had enormous global success in spreading for whatever mysterious reasons. But it is a marker and as the new genetics spreads into the population, its 'factness' may re-emerge.

We should be very wary of the new genetic history fuelling genuinely inappropriate interpretations of the data to suggest a 'white' community in danger. There is fortunately no sign of this at the moment but only because the English are notoriously easy-going and tolerant.

We cannot deny a genetic base to 'whiteness' or that it has some cultural meaning and the determined attempt to remove all meaning from it while giving dramatic cultural meaning to blackness and brownness has proved dangerously counter-productive in recent years.

Another political issue arises out of a debate about the Celts. The post-modern question is whether there is such a people as the Celts. The recent answer in archaeology has been in the negative but the genetics seem to suggest otherwise but within the revisionist framework.

The trend in the last few decades had been to dismiss the very existence of the Celts except as modern nationalist creations because the archaeology has disposed of the link between the La Tene and Hallstatt cultures and Britain.

La Tene and Hallstatt are now seen as elite cultural influences. The claim is that the people of the Western seaways were recipients of ideas but not linked with Central Europe's Iron Age Celts as described by the Romans. Oppenheimer suggests that we are dealing with a very red herring here.

He accepts fully the disconnection of Iron Age Europe from the modern day Celts but his genetic work demonstrates the distinctiveness of the people of the Western seaways (even in looks) and suggests a language base that gives the Celts genuine reason to consider themselves a people.

So we have two 'races' (to use an unpopular word), perhaps three if we take the Scandinavian neolithic entry into the north, who are biologically a little distinctive with different cultural attitudes formed by different environments. And if the 'Celts' exist then so do the 'Anglians'.

Of course, racialising and politicising all this is nonsense except that the history of elite struggles over these islands is the story of the domination of the seaways peoples by the 'Anglians' and then one of the Anglian elites abandoning their own people to build an Empire.

A gross over-simplification, to be sure, but there is a truth in it. The fraught politics of petty nationalism and the deep and growing resentments of the 'Anglians' who are not part of the elite within what is still an 'imperial' United Kingdom are derived from the working out of this history.

The political dynamic is thus a little different from what we have been led to expect - one not of ethnic cleansing but of successive elite replacements. The moral link between elites and mass, lord and peasant, starts to weaken as genetics show not race but power relations in operation.

Oppenheimer has an irritable introduction about ignorant media misinterpretation of his work and he is right to be concerned. The conclusion of the genetics is that difference is a fact but not a politically determinative one unless we allow it to be.

If a population has been in one place for a very very long time and absorbed elite invaders and traders rather than been displaced by them it suggests a basic resilience and tolerance. It also suggests that history has treated it as a tool and resource for highly organised out-groups.

This genetic work should be encouraged but it requires a determined effort to stop any nineteenth century racial interpretation emerging at the expense of one based on the political dynamic of native masses, uninterested in difference, being manipulated by cosmopolitan elites.

I cannot resist bringing Brexit into the argument as a paradox. The ancient history shows the 'Anglians' as the people most linked to the Continent by cultural ties and genetics and the Celts as independent seafarers building their own unique trading culture covering the known world.

Yet the position on the European Union has become the exact opposite because of the intrusion of imperial history. The English want out of the continental entanglement and the Celts equally tend to want immersion in it as guarantor of their own identity over and against the 'Anglians'.

This shows us both that the genetic base lines are still quietly working their way through our history, that underlying differences can be quite intractable and that particular positions are merely occasions for difference based on more recent history.

The book raises a question about the very concept of an elite-driven United Kingdom if it cannot balance the interests within it. The elite lost Ireland and may yet lose Scotland. The English often feel that they are culturally sucked dry for an empire. Neither side is very happy at the moment.

We can overdo this interpretation but this book is an intelligent and humane contribution to the debate on who we British are, in a country where ancestry has become a national pastime. It is welcome and should be read more widely.

Positive outcomes might be a renewed respect for the people we happen to have ended up calling Celts but also respect for the long-suffering English too, historically treated as cannon fodder in wars and milch cows for taxation. That worm may yet turn! show less

The main point of Oppenheimer's book is to show that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa and that all non-African humans throughout the world today are descended from one group of Homo sapiens who left Africa 85,000 years ago.

But Oppenheimer also engages in another debate which I find very interesting. This is the question of when fully modern human brains and behaviour first appeared.

Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) first evolved in Africa between 150,000 and 200,000 years show more ago, when they branched off from an earlier species of Homo. But until recently it seemed that sophisticated tools and art did not appear until 40,000 - 50,000 years ago. This led scientists like Jared Diamond and Richard Klein to claim that there must have been some sort of biological, genetic change at that more recent date which altered the structure of the brain, thus leading to fully modern behaviour, possibly through the development of language. This supposed dramatic change (which is invisible and unprovable) has been called the "Big Bang", the "Human Revolution", or the "Great Leap Forward".

Oppenheimer does a great job of shooting down this theory. Firstly, it assumes that behavioural change must be determined by biological change. But why does cultural change have to imply a change to the brain? It is more likely that the brain had become "modern" when Homo sapiens first evolved, and that the later cultural change took place for non-biological reasons. (After all, the development of farming 12,000 years ago, of cities and writing 5,000 years ago and of industry 200 years ago were also "Great Leaps Forward", but no one believes that these were the result of genetic changes to the human brain.)

Secondly, Oppenheimer shows that evidence of art and sophisticated tools has now been found which dates from much earlier than the time that the "Great Leap Forward" is supposed to have happened. For example, engraved pieces of ochre have been found in Africa dating from 75,000 years ago, and decorative beads have been found dating back 100,000 years.

Oppenheimer argues that language developed much earlier than the supposed "Human Revolution", and that humans were already fully modern when they came out of Africa. As he writes, "...humans came out of Africa already painting."

Not only are we all descended from African ancestors, but those ancestors, 150,000 years ago, were probably just as intelligent as we are now. show less

In November of 2023, I found myself standing between a lovely young lady and a dapper English gentleman. We three were part of a group of some 20 authors presenting our books at The Last Word bookstore in the Historic Savage Mill shopping center in Savage, Maryland. They made me look good, and I picked up copies of both of their books.

The woman was Kathleen Fine, who's novel Girl on Trial I will be reading next. The English gentleman was Stephen Oppenheimer. (No relation to the physicist. I show more asked, and Stephen said, "Thankfully not!") He was presenting his historical novel titled A Bone to Pick.

I say novel, because I thought it was. As I read, it became clear this no ordinary novel. Yet it wasn't quite a collection of short stories, either. The same characters appeared time and again, their lives unfolding in tandem but without the structure one expects in a novel. As a literary object, it's a bit of both, yet not quite either. When I asked Stephen about this, he told me a reviewer in the UK dubbed it "non-binary."

This in itself could make for a fascinating read, but that's only the start. The characters are well-drawn and full of surprises, the language is compelling, the historical background meticulously painted yet without drawing attention to itself. I expected to enjoy this book, since I'd heard Stephen read a couple of passages from it, but I didn't expect to find it so thoroughly delightful.

As for the story (or stories), it begins on the Queen Mary as it makes a transatlantic voyage. On board, Mr. Pettibone meets a cast of curious characters, delights in rubbing elbows with the English upper crust, and forges relationships that will last a lifetime. A pleasant voyage? Not entirely. There are domestic disturbances, hysterics, cheaters, thieves, and even a provoked murder on board. What takes place on that ship will influence the characters for the rest of their lives. Mr. Pettibone himself becomes entangled with Major Sir John Cylburn-Buller, who he first frames for certain crimes and then liberates by confessing. Against all odds, the two later become friends. Time passes. Old murders breed new ones. A pair of curious spectacles changes hands among the one-time passengers, enabling them to see things better left unseen. Life continues to unfold in unexpected ways. Such a journey could too easily slip into contrivance, but somehow Oppenheimer makes it feel thoroughly natural.

The only thing that marred the reading experience--and I'm not docking the author for this, because it's technical--is that something went awry in the typesetting. There are a number of places where paragraph breaks misbehave and where words on short lines get spread across the page. This is a bit distracting, but you can figure it out. Maybe these issues will be fixed in future editions.

Meanwhile, get this book and read it. You won't regret it! show less

Interesting content, but drowning in details. The epilogue brought it all together but only after many many pages.
So, much of the repopulation of Britain and Ireland after the ice ages came from Iberia, Basque and southern France, and much of the subsequent people movements came from Denmark and Norway. The Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes seem to be of very limited impact.