No, this isn’t about the causes of Brexit, I’m abbreviating the title of Large-scale migration into Britain during the Middle to Late Bronze Age by Nick Patterson, Michael Isakov, and a long list of coauthors ending with David Reich, published in Nature last month. At that link you can only get the abstract unless you’re a subscriber, so a more useful one is Juan Siliezar’s Harvard Gazette story about it:
New research reveals a major migration to the island of Great Britain 3,000 years ago and offers fresh insights into the languages spoken at the time, the ancestry of present-day England and Wales, and even ancient habits of dairy consumption. The findings are described in Nature by a team of more than 200 international researchers led by Harvard geneticists David Reich and Nick Patterson. Michael Isakov, a Harvard undergraduate who discovered the existence of the migration, is one of the co-first authors.
The analysis is one of two Reich-led studies of DNA data from ancient Britain that Nature published on December 22. Both highlight technological advances in large-scale genomics and open new windows into the lives of ancient people. […] The researchers analyzed the DNA of 793 newly reported individuals in the largest genome-wide study involving ancient humans. Their findings reveal a large-scale migration likely from somewhere in France to the southern part of Great Britain, or modern-day England and Wales, that eventually replaced about 50 percent of the ancestry of the island during the Late Bronze Age (1200 to 800 B.C.).
The study supports a recent theory that early Celtic languages came to Great Britain from France during the Late Bronze Age. It challenges two prominent theories: that the languages arrived hundreds of years later, in the Iron Age, or 1,500 years earlier at the dawn of the Bronze Age. Previous research has shown that large-scale movement often accompanied language changes in pre-state societies. The Reich team argues that this untold migration event makes more sense for the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain.
“By using genetic data to document times when there were large-scale movements of people into a region, we can identify plausible times for a language shift,” Reich said. “Known Celtic languages are too similar in their vocabularies to plausibly descend from a common ancestor 4,500 years ago, which is the time of the earlier pulse of large-scale migration, and very little migration occurred in the Iron Age. If you’re a serious scholar, the genetic data should make you adjust your beliefs: downweighting the scenario of early Celtic language coming in the Iron Age [and early Bronze Age] and upweighting the Late Bronze Age.”
There’s other interesting stuff (“the researchers found that the ability to digest cow’s milk dramatically increased in Britain from 1200 to 200 B.C., which is about a millennium earlier than it did in central Europe”), and I’m sure there are plenty of Hatters who will want to dig into it. Thanks, Bonnie!
While these results may be scientiically and historically interesting, we have to ask ourselves whether they are really worth it, given the way that the Celtic fantasists are sure to make use of these facts.
At least this doesn’t bring the Celts much closer to Stonehenge.
The Celtic fantasists were probably rooting for “1,500 years earlier at the dawn of the Bronze Age.”
Bah! My Celtic forebears were too busy levitating the stones for the Pyramids to bother with cheap knockoffs like Stonehenge.
Knowing as I do nothing on the subject of genetics but a thing or two on the subject of historical linguistics, I will say that, assuming that this 1200-800 BC population movement did indeed trigger language shift in (at least parts of) the British Isles (which seems likely, but is not certain), then this new language is unlikely to be the direct ancestor of any of the Modern Celtic languages (Both those of the Goidelic and those of the Brythonic branch). Because of this we have no way of knowing whether it indeed was Celtic or not (but see below).
The reason for my saying this is that it has proven well-nigh impossible to present even a single clear difference between reconstructed insular Celtic (spoken sometime between 100 BC and 100 AD) and its contemporary Celtic sister, Gaulish, attested (roughly) during the same time period. For this reason it is unclear, in fact, whether there are any solid grounds for treating Proto-insular Celtic and Gaulish as separate languages/dialects.
This is very unlike the situation when comparing Gaulish and its Southern Celtic sister language, Celtiberian: despite both being attested by very reduced/fragmentary corpora, there is a set of features setting Gaulish sharply apart from Celtiberian (The latter makes use of fully declined forms of the Indo-European relative pronoun *yo-, which in Gaulish + Insular Celtic is an undeclined verbal suffix (?clitic), for example).
If Insular Celtic had indeed descended from the language brought to the British Isles by these invaders, no later than 800 BC, I would expect Insular Celtic to be as sharply differentiated from Gaulish as Celtiberian is. Since it is not, I can only assume that Insular Celtic must have arrived in the British Isles at a much later date.
If my feet were held to the fire and I was forced to guess, I would say that the 1200-800 BC invaders probably spoke an Indo-european language and that this invasion was the first Indo-Europeanization of the British Isles (In whole or perhaps only in part): if this language was Celtic (which I think is extremely likely) it would have been far more archaic than Gaulish or Insular Celtic, indeed it might well have been quite Celtiberian-like (Actually, I would consider calling it Para-Celtiberian: PC). For these Early British Celtic/PC speakers Proto-Insular Celtic would probably have been an easily-learnt L2, so that we might think of the British Isles as having been Celticized in two waves: an Early British Celtic/PC wave associated with the 1200-800 BC invaders, and a much later wave (whether it left genetic traces or not will have to be determined by future research: mark you, since Proto-Insular Celtic would have been so easily learnable by Early British Celtic/PC speakers, a scenario whereby Insular Celtic spread via mechanisms of language spread other than demographic expansion is certainly possible), with the latter *and not the former* being directly ancestral to all Brythonic and Goidelic languages.
Cue the outrage from the Celtic fantasists in three, two, one…
Those sound like very reasonable ideas to me.
The immediate lesson is that Celtic probably came with the very front of Hallstatt-affiliated cultures rather than with later movements within Hallstatt. That will have implications also on the continent, but it may be too early to tell which.
I’ve not been able to find a draft version online, so it’s not much more to say except what’s said by Reich and Isakov in the Harvard Gazette.
Reich:
Isakov:
… and now recalibrating for what Etienne says.
[clicking]
It’s reasonable that Celtiberian spread with the front of Hallstatt, and that Core Celtic developed somewhere else in Hallstattia. Does this have to be a land-based region, or could it be centered around the Atlantic trade network and the Channel? And/or could there have been a back-migration into the European continent?
I’ll just caution against underestimating the diversity within “Gaulish”, i.e. Celtic within more-or-less-historical Gaul, which covers a lot of space and a noticeable amount of time.
It also seems clear that robust linguistic contacts between Celtic languages across the Channel continued well into Roman times.
Yes, that’s what I’m starting to wrap my head around. It’s so easy to assume that the insular Celts went off to the insulae and the continental Celts stayed on the continent and they never spoke to each other again. Brexit avant le mot!
I haven’t read this latest evidence, but if indeed it restricts the Beaker Culture replacement of inhabitants of Britain to 50% rather than the 90% which, if I recall correctly, was the figure given by Reich himself (in “Who We Are and How We Got Here”) my prejudices suggest it is less unbelievable.
I don’t think this means a downward adjustment of the 90% replacement. This is a later and more gradual migration that brought peoples with a higher proportion of European Farmer ancestry.
A 50% replacement after the 90% replacement? Blimey! DNA reconstructions of prehistory are fascinating and are gradually revealing some fascinating stuff. I will hang on to a bit of my scepticism, though. I think we are very much at the early stages of this research (the picture has changed dramatically since Bryan Sykes’ “The Blood of the Isles” just over 15 years ago, when we were told the bulk of our DNA was present here in the Neolithic at the latest) and it would not be surprising if there were vastly new pictures to come).
Exactly. It’s quite a thrill to be able to watch a science being so thoroughly revolutionized in real time!
Not so much being revolutionized as being built up from scratch, which means that the dots are few and får between, and there are still major discoveries to be made in the gaps.
It’s tough call to me. Yes, their sampled remains from Iron Age Britain have an unusual excess of old European Farmer ancestry (EEF) which has been reduced to lower levels in the British Isles during the earlier Bronze Age migrations. And the same kind of ancestry is also enriched in Urnfield remains they were able to sample.
But these interesting British samples came from a small area on the Channel’s shore and may or may not be possible to generalize to a wider swath of Britain (one could argue that different peoples may have traveled in the Channel without necessarily impacting the inland areas). And Y-chromosomes in England, as they existed in the subsequent era, are distinct from anything known in the early continental Celts so far. And generally Europe was rather thoroughly homogenized in Bronze Age, making predictions based on broad ancestral components somewhat less exact. One might need to seek confirmation in more narrowly specific DNA phenomena, like Y-chromosomes and especially sharing of autosomal haplotypes.
Substantial discussion also ongoing at Eurogenes, with similar reservations as Etienne how this is not at all necessarily the Insular Celtic spread event.
“793 newly reported individuals” sounds like a lot. You mean to say that only a few (late and local?) genomes actually show a shift towards European Farmer ancestry? I didn’t know that. But even so, the population level ⁷shift was already remarked upon in the previous study, so I understamd this to be more about being able to connect it to a timed wave of immigration rather than internal development. Not having read the paper, I may very well be wrong.
Etienne’s comments make a lot of sense. I’m still vaguely weirded out by the idea that Proto-Goidelic was the same language as gaulish / Brittonic as recently as ca. AD 1, just because Irish seems so distinctive. But, I gather that the Primitive Irish evidence indicates that Goidelic was undergoing very rapid changes in the first few centuries AD, so I guess that’s when it became distinctive. Perhaps the speakers of the gaulish dialect that became proto-goidelic had entered Ireland very recently prior to the primitive irish period. Perhaps their language underwent rapid changes at that point because of intensive contact with the earlier local language, which we just missed having direct evidence for. Who knows, perhaps that earlier local language was some kind of astounding Celtic-Afroasiatic creole that had developed after the late bronze age migrations of early Celtic speakers!
P.S. naturally, I’m mostly goofing when I say Afro-Asiatic specifically—no Vennemannian, I—it would be whatever language EEFs spoke. Could be AA, or Hurro-Urartian, or Hattic, or Sumeroid, or maybe even Elamo-Dravidian. Most likely if, by some near miracle, we recover written evidence of the last pre-IE language spoken in Ireland, it would not be discernibly any of the above (Vasconic would not be out of the question).
P. S. Patterson et al’s findings extend only to England and Wales, correct? So, I suppose any inferences drawn about the genetic or linguistic history of Ireland or Scotland on this basis are limited to the speculative.
But, I gather that the Primitive Irish evidence indicates that Goidelic was undergoing very rapid changes in the first few centuries AD, so I guess that’s when it became distinctive.
Yes. As I said here, “Primitive Irish looks reassuringly like Latin.”
Check out the first half of this comment and the replies to it.
>check out the first half
So just the first 15,000 words?
As I’ve remarked before, St Patrick (that famous Welshman) would probably have found Irish fairly easy to acquire. The changes that make Irish so very Irish largely postdate his time (and indeed, the sheer glorious irregularity of Old Irish itself shows that those changes hadn’t been around long enough for their effects to get smoothed out by analogy.)
Great comment, easily one of my top 500 favorite comments from that thread. Seriously, though, I’m fairly certain I read the first half of that comment before, half forgot about it, and had it in the back of my head. So I took this as an opportunity to read the next 25% or so. Fascinating stuff.
Yes 🙂
A clarification. 90% replacement and 50% Steppe are not in conflict.
Northern European BB (and British BB) have about 50% Steppe, 50%
European farmer (pre-Steppe or middle Neolithic) ancestry. The point is that there is little or no dilution of the Steppe ancestry in British BB compared with mainland European BB which means the replacement must be nearly complete.
Delighted to find this site – more like it are sorely needed.
This is a wonderful genetic insight, but cannot prove what they propose. The earlier dates were not made by linguists but geneticists, right? More than a bit cheeky for geneticists to try the same approach to re-adjust the goalposts.
If they are serious scholars, the linguistic data should make them adjust their beliefs and upweight the Iron Age. Fair’s fair …
I’ve got to stick this somewhere, so let this be the thread about the multiple peoplings of Britain,
Gretzinger, J., Sayer, D., Justeau, P. et al. The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature (2022). (Open access).
So:
There was not one Anglo-Saxon invation, but rather a long period of migrations across the North Sea, and even from Eastern Scandinavia, continuing into the Viking Era, This would seem to fit well with the (semi-)legendary accounts of the early Danish kings, and it would also give some context to the correspondences between Vendel and Sutton Hoo
There was a movement into SE England of “Franks”. This is of similar age and impact as that of “Saxons”. I would have thought that to be due to Roman Era mobility, but it’s apparently definitely Post-Roman. It’s taken as evidence for a migration that’s been hypothesised from archaeological culture in Kent and Sussex, alhough genetically, at least with current data, it’s even stronger in East Anglia.
The authors note with caution that most Scandinavian genomes in the set are from the Viking Era and thus potentially more admixed than the real source populations would have been centuries earlier. This would lead to misestimation of the Scandinacvian source relative to the Continental. I’ll add that there seem to be few genomes from north of Denmark in the set, and that there’s still probably a lack of ancient DNA from Western Norway that might otherwise have blurred the V-shape in the plot of ancient data even more.
Very interesting, thanks!
Would the study recognize any back-migration to northern Europe?
I usually hyperlink the title, but must have forgotten to add the link adress.
@Y: Back-migration was detected. Immediately before the Scandinavian caveat I paraphrased above it says.
I haven’t looked at all the supplementary material yet.
An extremely interesting outlier from the supplementary information:
(My emboldening.)
Worth Matravers:
So a person in Early Medieval Dorset who probably had a West (not North!) African grandparent.
(I hope they ruled out contamination from a volunteer excavator with a cold,)
So a person in Early Medieval Dorset who probably had a West (not North!) African grandparent
I be Africa man original.
(I no be gentleman at all o.)
For those unfamiliar with the oeuvre …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snIV_-IECsM
Thanks Trond,
460 medieval northwestern Europeans—including 278 individuals from England
… this ancestry accounts only for 3.4% and 2.4% in the mean England_EMA population
a small inhumation cemetery of 21 graves, containing 26 individuals,
I can’t help but feel that in any other discipline, these sample sizes would be considered too small to be statistically significant: ‘suggestive data, needs more research’. (I appreciate getting even this much DNA is amazing; I’m not sure whether any inferences are meaningful.)
How do we know these particular grave sites are representative of the population at large at the time? Does the very fact of preservation of the sites, and the presence of grave goods, show these _aren’t_ representative?
What estimates are there for the population of these parts of the country over the period? Would the burials of non-elites have been preserved so well? Are these the burials of dominant warriors/nobility, bringing their NorthWestern European wives and taking local concubines?
Does the very fact of preservation of the sites, and the presence of grave goods, show these _aren’t_ representative?
Excellent point.
Do any of these studies tell us much about the rest of mainland Britain at the time of immigration? They seem to be more focused on the south and east coast regions, fascinating though that is.
They probably represent a skewed sample, at least. That’s also evident from the rebound of indigenous ancestry later. We find the same effects with the First Farmers and the Yamnaya. An artifact of preservation, no doubt. But newcomers, even new elites, will not always and everywhere have burial rites that preserve their bones better. In those cases where indigenous cemeteries are over-represented, the intensity of the immigration event will be underestimated.
But it’s not just incoming rulers, their wives from the old country, and their local concubines, They find men of local ancestry with elite gravegoods, and so they conclude that it was a complex pattern of local strategies, with some local families being integrated into the new system, probably with regional and temporal differences that can’t be extracted from current data.
But I still haven’t read all the supplementaries.
AntC: How do we know these particular grave sites are representative of the population at large at the time? Does the very fact of preservation of the sites, and the presence of grave goods, show these _aren’t_ representative?
One of the points of the study, of course, is the degree to which they are not representative: This plot shows this for genetics. We see that England BA & IA (blue, right) fills roughly the upper (“British”) half of England present-day (blue, left). Similarly, Netherlands/Germany/Denmark BA & IA (yellow, right) fills roughly the upper right (“Saxon”) half of Netherlands/Germany/Denmark present day. This would seem to mean that both are representative for their era.
The IA graves studied here are all over the place from 100% “British” to 100% “Saxon” and to something else north and south. This is interesting, pretty self-explanatory, and also speaks to its own representativiity. Some few of the yellow “Saxon” dots fit in the mid-to-lower part of the “English” range and are likely back-migrations. Other outliers simply imply stray individual migrations in all directions. (I’d guess that the left wing extremist in the rightmost plot is our Dorset outlier.) Nobody asked the ancient specimens if all their grandparents grew up in the county.
When modern populations in both England and N/G/D are shifted down towards the tip of the V, it’s undoubtedly because there’s a millennium of European gene flow between the two maps.
The IA graves studied here
“The Early Medieval graves studied here”, obviously.
(Could be contamination from Norwegian, where the Iron Age turns Medieval with christianization and the establishment of the Norwegian kingdom around 1000 CE.)
Me: There was a movement into SE England of “Franks”. This is of similar age and impact as that of “Saxons”. I would have thought that to be due to Roman Era mobility, but it’s apparently definitely Post-Roman. It’s taken as evidence for a migration that’s been hypothesised from archaeological culture in Kent and Sussex, alhough genetically, at least with current data, it’s even stronger in East Anglia.
No, not exactly. Early Medieval “Frankish” admixture was strongest in Sussex and Kent. The “Frankish” contribution to the contemporary population is highest in East Anglia.
Thank you Trond for your patient diligence.
“Frankish” admixture was strongest in Sussex and Kent. … to the contemporary population is highest in East Anglia.
And migration from Europe never ceased all through the early to Norman to late Middle Ages.
I was debating what it is to be English/Anglian specifically — as opposed to British in general. I averred the English are European/their destiny is to re-unite with Europe. This seemingly caused horror amongst the xenophobia currently reeking havoc in UK.
Hey ho — I’m inexpressibly relieved to be a ‘world citizen’ living in a cosmopolitan country.
AntC: Thank you Trond for your patient diligence.
More like discontinuous reading and slow comprehension.
too busy levitating the stones for the Pyramids to bother with cheap knockoffs like Stonehenge.
This just in: A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge
We already knew the ‘blue stone’ inner ring was brought from Wales — indeed the exact spot has been identified.
But bringing a 6 tonne block from just about as far away as you could imagine within the British Isles seems … perverse. (For comparison, the largest stones in the Pyramids are 25~80 tonnes.)
But bringing a 6 tonne block from just about as far away as you could imagine within the British Isles seems … perverse.
Clearly people back then thought that the detrital zircon, apatite and rutile grains were important enough to justify the transportation costs.
“Back in my day, we didn’t even have detrital zircon, let alone yer poncy rutile grains!”
Huh, the OED gives the US pronunciation of rutile as /ˈruˌtil/ ROO-teel, /ˈruˌtaɪl/ ROO-tighl — not that I’ve ever heard the word (or even seen it as far as I can remember), but I would have said /ˈruˌtaɪl/ naturally and assumed that was the standard way. Do people really say ROO-teel?
(The UK version is /ˈruːtʌɪl/ ROO-tighl.)
(The UK version is ROO-tighl.)
That’s what I would say, although I’m pretty certain I’ve never heard the word or used it. I don’t even know what it means.
I suspect that decades of listening to Radio 4, long ago, permanently deformed my American vowels. It wouldn’t surprise me if folks back home considered my speech today to be a little … well, poncy. Or rutiligenous at best.
That’s what I would say
That’s what I say too — it’s the allegedly secondary US pronunciation, and what I’m wondering is whether it shouldn’t be the primary one.
“Rutile” kinda looks like it oughta rhyme with “futile,” and pronunciation of “futile” is variable in AmEng, with some speakers reducing the vowel in the second syllable to schwa and others using an unreduced PRICE vowel – and some reducing it in some contexts but not in others, depending on how much the word is or isn’t being emphasized in the discourse context. I guess I can see an argument that such vowel reduction is less likely for a fancy-scientific-register (or “poncy”) word, but I think we’re all speculating about a word we can’t say we’ve heard said aloud much less said aloud ourselves.
My classics-major firstborn minored in geology, so maybe she’s heard the word said out loud, but I’m not going to call her in the middle of her work day to inquire.
EDITED TO ADD: I am delighted to be informed by wiktionary that the lexicon of the minerology-jargon subvariety of English also includes “pseudorutile.”
“Rutile” kinda looks like it oughta rhyme with “futile,” and pronunciation of “futile” is variable in AmEng, with some speakers reducing the vowel in the second syllable to schwa and others using an unreduced PRICE vowel
Sure, and I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow if they’d given a pronunciation with schwa. It was was the eel in /ˈruˌtil/ ROO-teel that discombobulated me.
Huh. I always assumed the Only Correct American Pronunciation was “rootle”, to rhyme with the OCAP (that is, my pronunciation) of “futile”, but AHD gives the “teal” pronunciation first and the “tile” one second, with no others, and M-W gives only the “teal” pronunciation. They might know something.
(Here in New Mexico, I often hear “mobile”, “fertile”, etc., with the PRICE vowel in the second syllable. Likewise “organization”, etc., with the PRICE vowel in the antepenult. We’re being assimilated by the British, and you know what resistance is.)
I heard geologists speak of rutile many times (in the US), always roo-TEEL (as in Lucille, or Mobile, AL).
roo-TEEL (as in Lucille, or Mobile, AL)
MoBEEL, Alabama ? Didn’t know that stress. It sounds like what some Germans might say. They go for ArKANsas, for example – perhaps with Arkadien or Arkade in mind.
Convicts don’t live in a Konvikt, no matter how you stress them.
AHD gives the “teal” pronunciation first and the “tile” one second, with no others, and M-W gives only the “teal” pronunciation. They might know something.
I heard geologists speak of rutile many times (in the US), always roo-TEEL (as in Lucille, or Mobile, AL).
OK, the dictionaries know something and I don’t. But now I do — thanks!
I don’t think “Mobile” the toponym* has final-syllable stress but OTOH it doesn’t have the reduced final vowel of (in my ideolect) “mobile” the adjective** or “Mobil” the gas station brand.
*You know, the place one proverbially gets stuck inside with the Memphis blues again.
** Adjectival “mobile” has the PRICE vowel in the second syllable as sung by non-American Roger Daltrey. But perhaps he’s an honorary New Mexican?
Y: Thanks!
J.W.: From hearing Mobile, Alabama, mentioned on my brief visit to the non-Florida Gulf Coast, I agree with Wikipedia: moBEEL. Dylan got it wrong in the proverb.
But Calder’s mobiles, or the one hanging over the crib, are MObeels.
Speaking of getting things wrong (I’m not saying who, or Who), my understanding was that the normal British pronunciation had first syllable stress and the PRICE vowel. Yes, the OED says so. (What the heck? The IPA looks fine when I paste it in, but not after I save the comment.) However, Daltrey was singing with an American accent, and I think the British-style pronunciation was pretty rare in the U.S. in 1971, especially in the kinds of accents rock singers used. The part about rarity is the part I’m least sure about.
I should qualify and say that the secondary stress on rutile can be strong. But I also remember singing “rutiiial!” like Little Richard, and people getting the joke.
@Jerry Friedman: Perhaps Dylan was led astray by the first-syllable stress on “Mobile” used by Chuck Berry in the opening line of “Let It Rock”?* You just can’t trust these musicians for toponym-pronunciation accuracy, it appears. And Chuck sounds like he’s almost-but-not-quite reducing the vowel in the second syllable. At least in the studio version. I don’t have time right now to dig up a variety of live recordings to see how consistent he was.
*He rhymes “Mobile, Alabama” with “steel-drivin’ hammer,” the way you do.
So when the English took the Stone of Scone from the Scots, they just followed a tradition older than Britain itself.
Both red stones are described as Old Red Sandstone, but apparently the red sandstone of that Old Red Stone of Scone is from around Perth.
But seriously, I hope that chemical tests of the two stones have been taken with the same methods and compared under the same protocol to rule out* that hypothesis that we all want to be true.
* this is the scientific use of the intentional “rule out” as the suppletive intentional of “confirm”.
I’m def starting a Stonehenge coffee shop offering Altar Scones, blue scones, and Old Red Sandscones for the budget conscious.
Trond: the work on sourcing these stones is amazing. They dated dozens of single crystals of rutile, apatite, and zircon for the rock in question, and compared the age distribution to every possible provenance. It really looks convincing.
They mention a neolithic millstone transported from Normandy to Dorset, too. I haven’t looked at that paper so I don’t know how heavy it was, but surely pretty heavy.
Oh. It is great.
But it is expected. I mean, I understand that it is Hallstatt but markedly NOT La Tène time, but I have always been expecting this very time range: 1200BC or later.
Previous publications about the arrival of R1b (of supposed IE speakers) in the third millenium were perplexing because of certain unity of the Celtic world and languages and tribe names and everything.
Though if the R1b guys and their ladies were IE speakers it also means an IE substrate.
(it would be interesting to compare it to the chronology of tin trade and contacts with the Mediaterranean)
“too busy levitating the stones for the Pyramids to bother with cheap knockoffs like Stonehenge.”
Altamira is older. And bulls are still worshiped in the area (if we can call bullfighting and running and similar things “worship”). I don’t know why everyone is obsessed with those pyramids (also: did not they just land from space?)
PS. and a correction to the above: when I say “it is expected” I mostly mean, it is expected that it is not the 3d millenium:) Yes, of course attested languages suggest much later exchange than ~1ky BC – which would perfectly match the period of Celtic activity when they threatened rome and greece and everyone.
Yet for some reason I personally have been always expecting earlier exchange (which if true, can of course be not exactly Celtic or paraCeltic or whatever). But I think I need to reread about the archaeology of the period (for it has been… decades since I read about tit).
“and they never spoke to each other again”
Er.
But Brittany!?
But Britonia (Lugo in Galicia…)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britonia#/media/File:Britonia6hcentury2.svg
(one could also present Breton knights with William as some sort of P-Celtic revenge, but I’ll abstain)
I’d never knowingly come across the word before, but I could take a guess at its meaning because rutilante is fancy and literary but not quite dead in Spanish (and Italian and Portuguese, apparently)
Rutile has lovely crystals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutile
which I recall fondly from childhood rock-collecting. Not to mention star sapphires, titanium…
rutilante is fancy and literary but not quite dead in Spanish
Casi color Rocinante ? [un caballo de color castaño, con una melena larga y brillante.]
Y: Trond: the work on sourcing these stones is amazing. They dated dozens of single crystals of rutile, apatite, and zircon for the rock in question, and compared the age distribution to every possible provenance. It really looks convincing.
Sorry, I overlooked this. Yes, I trusted the conclusion. I meant that I hope they’ll do the same investigation on the Stone of Scone.
Rutilated quartz is lovely, too.
Trond Engen: “I hope they’ll do the same investigation on the Stone of Scone.”
They have. It is An Lia Fàil, the Stone of Destiny, a block of Old Red Sandstone on which kings of Scotland were traditionally crowned, till Edward I, hammer of the Scots, removed it to Westminster as spoils of war, for English use. It has been returned on loan to Scotland, in a probably doomed attempt to remove a Scots grievance; brought south briefly for Charles III’s coronation.
The mediaeval Scottish account was that their ancestress was Scota, daughter of Pharaoh King of Egypt, he who was drowned in the Red Sea. She with an Athenian prince fled to Spain, and their descendants sailed to Ireland, taking with them An Lia Fàil; and later generations travelled with the Stone to their final home in Scotland, led by Fergus mac Ferchar, 333 BC. Pure fabulation: there really are layers of red sandstone in Spain, but Scots geologists affirm that the stone matches very well the strata by the Abbey of Scone, after which the stone is often called.
Some Irish nationalists ignore such things and demand that, to remove one of their very many grievances, the Stone of Scone should be returned to Ireland. Doubtful: there is already an established Stone of Destiny at Tara.
What is the earliest attested Spanish connection?
Spain (A Coruña) is obviously where Breogán is from.
But it is also the location of Britonia so there was an actual perfectly historical communication complete with a city and a bishop – and one would expect it to be based on earlier continuous communication. Just as with Brittany. Geographically it also makes total sense (more so than historical communication between the Levant and Iberia or the medieval raids of Barbary pirates in Ireland and Iceland).
If modern Lebanese from Lebanon need to get out of Lebanon ASAP they will presumably go to one of those many places where there are Lebanese people already.
>one would expect it to be based on earlier continuous communication
Expect is much stronger than I would go. But the potential for pre-existing connections is interesting, whether with speakers of (some sort of) Celtic in NW Iberia documented long before refugees from the Anglo-Saxon invasions; or with Punic speakers in SW Iberia, where centuries later there were large numbers of Jewish people. Were there ongoing trade connections that sustained a tenuous linguistic tie and encouraged the choice of a site of refuge?
Ryan, it is my own default expectation for refugees – I expect them to go to a familiar place (but maybe I’m affect by the example of Brittany). So for me absence of communication is a marked/exotic hypothesis.
The area was Celtiberan in pre-Roman times (the people called Gallaeci/Callaeci, whence modern Galicia, galego).
________
I don’t know if anything can be made out of abundant use of Brig-/Brigant- toponims in the region. Such names can be found all over Gaul, but I think in Galicia especially. WP:Brigantii does not discuss the distribution of the name (merely mentioning Brigantii from the area of Bregenz, Austria) – to my surprise!
To add insult to injury, Pliny mentions Albioni (and a local stella certain Cariaca principis Albionum) in the very same area:))))
I definitely recall rutile with -teel as the second syllable, but I don’t recall how the geologists I knew stressed the word.
I suppose the sea is
– a highway rather than an obstacle for diffusion.
Not only because crossing land could be difficult: when you are crossing Sahara (assuming you’re say a trader) you’re less likely to stop half-way because you have found a suitable market for your goods.
– an obstacle for large migrations.
Thus we have Vikings in Sicily and they tried to colonise this coast of Spain too.
I suppose the sea is
– a highway rather than an obstacle for diffusion
Before the invention of the steam engine, transport by waterway was the only effective means of long-distance transportation for bulky goods, or armies. That’s one of the reasons why the expansion of the Roman empire basically ended when they ran out of Mediterranean (or places easily reachable from there by river or sea connections).
@Hans, what about
1. the migration period?
2. the Gaul/Spain
3. the Roman road network?
Though perhaps by “effective” you mean fast, with the situation when the army as such is not sufficiently large and you need to move your legions fast in mind.
For the logistics of armies in antiquity, see the series of blog posts starting here. The basic problem is that every source of transport available that was not powered by wind or water currents (porters, pack animals, animal- drawn wagins) consumed food, making it if not downright impractical, then at least uneconomic to transport bulk food over long distances over land, and prohibitively expensive to transport other bulky goods over long distances over land, except if they were very valuable.
The armies of the migration period, like other armies, too, solved the problem by pillaging the wealthy Roman empire. Spain is quite accessible from the sea; Spain and Gaul both were in the early phase of urbanization when Rome conquered them. Besides cities, they had extensive farmland that could be pillaged. This didn’t work with much less developed Germania, so Rome gave up on most of it after a couple of decades.
@Hans, thanks.
I did not think about supplies, because I was thinking of migrations. Several quistions arise here.
1. soldiers need to eat something. I wonder how much, compared to pack animals etc.
2. they need to eat something at home as well, so how feasible is just loading them with what they were going to eat anyway?
The overall cost must be reduced given that we need to maintain the army even when it does not move, and it is good to know how much.
3. how exactly does this apply to refugees and 4. tribes.
Not objections! But apparently when we’re reading about various ancient peoples (not necessarily armies) moving from here to there we need to include food in the model. Somehow. And I never thought about it from this perspective.
It also applies to something like “slaver’s caravan crossing Sahara”.
Even when it is 200 men and slaves, it is still hundreds/thousands miles and some (reduced for a slave) amount of food per person.
I don’t mean that we all should start looking at slave trade from this perspective (I’m not going to), I just mean we can’t leave all economy to military historians, “because it is army” and then consider long military expedition costly by default, migrations cost-neutral by default, slave trade profitable by default etc.
Apparently we need to include this in our model of any sort of travel of any number of people, from 1 to 100 000 (excpet that one traveller can in principle buy food with gold locally or earn it locally – while 100 000, however rich or skillful, can’t obtain more than the area can offer)
I imagine beeves driven on the hoof were the bulk of supply, supplemented by the cattle of those whose land was being traversed, friend or foe. 100 head of cattle a day would provide a pound of meat to 45,000 soldiers. They only fought for a season, so 10,000-15,000 cattle over the course.
I doubt Hannibal was getting most of his rations by ship from North Africa. I actually think this is backwards – I don’t think Classical era shipping could sustain that kind of logistical operation.
I don’t eat a pound of meat every day:/ Did Roman soldiers eat it?
It looks more like what nomads do: they have their (large) heards and need pastures.
Well, I read the ratio of civil war beeves to soldiers, and the weight, and assumed half wasn’t meat, but that wasn’t scientific.
But yeah, two half-pound burgers might what I’d want after pulling an 18-mile march with pack. Or one at dinner, one at supper.
Also, growing up on a farm in the 40s and 50s,my mom’s family raised a calf each year and butchered it, and that was the family’s meat for the year. Family of three. Hundreds of servings.
They didn’t actually farm their land. My grandfather was an autoworker, and they rented out the acreage to a neighbor to farm, but used the barn and pasture. I’m sure we could find acre-to-cow ratios online. Their pasture was maybe 100 x 100, and I’m not sure how/whether that was supplemented by grain, etc. Nor am I even positive the pasture was the same size as what I remember in the 70s.
I’ve sometimes wondered about the relative scale of Civil War armies, where northern soldiers did much of the logistics, while southern logistics was partially handled by slave drovers and carters, who likely weren’t counted. Is this accounted for, or were the armies more evenly matched in fighting men than is commonly written?
Ryan, I thought as long as Italians and others are agriculturalists they will feed their soldiers accordingly (and have mostly vegetarian soldiers of considerably smaller size than some of the barbarian herders).
(I still don’t understand why
(a) Vandal take over of Carthage is said to be such a serious problem because it fed Italy (produced grain specifically)
(b) modern Tunisia is not all fields of wheat and is importing rather than exporting grain.)
Food History: A Roman soldier’s diet.
modern Tunisia is not all fields of wheat and is importing rather than exporting grain.
The Soviet Union had the same problem.
@drasvi: Some sources (I’m not vouching for their accuracy) say that Tunisia was a net exporter of grain within the last century when it was under French rule but that the most efficient/productive parts of the agricultural sector were controlled and operated by colonialists who did not stick around post-independence and then the efforts of the new regime to reform and modernize the economy according to the latest scientific socialistic principles were a (predictable) disappointment. I daresay the various rulers of that part of Africa in between the end of Roman rule and the commencement of French rule probably varied considerably in terms of how well or poorly they sustained and/or rebuilt the various institutional preconditions for a healthy export-oriented agricultural economy.
>>I thought as long as Italians and others are agriculturalists they will feed their soldiers accordingly (and have mostly vegetarian soldiers
>Food History: A Roman Soldier’s Diet
Well Jesus Christ no wonder they got beat. Next you’ll tell me their intellectual elites were drinking a daily dose of brain poison.
@Ryan: Sherman has some things to say about the distribution of duties among his troops during the March to the Sea, when they were literally stripping all the grain and livestock off the land as they passed by and bringing it along to feed the army. There were also a fair number of freedmen who volunteered to accompany the army, handling some of the logistical work the march entailed.
@drasvi: questions 1 and 2 are addressed in the series of blog posts I linked to. It also discusses some of Ryan’s questions. Rations and diet in general were mostly grain-based, as meat was expensive and fruits and vegetables rotted easily; they were mostly supplied from local markets or by foraging / pillaging.
If you couldn’t rely on buying or pillaging, you had to bring your own grain rations, which seriously limited yout options for long-range campaigns.
Re 3) and 4), what did you have in mind?
I haven’t checked Hat’s link yet, and it’s past bedtime – maybe tomorrow.
@JWB, I wish I understood Maghrebi agriculture better.
A part of the problem for me is just my personal impression. I mean, imagine an ‘Arab country’
The norther coast of Tunisia and Algeria are significantly greener than what you have imagined.
Actually there are forests there which you can hike in much the same manner as Russian forests. And snow.
But Tunisia is definitely drier than your Russian swamp of choice.
@Hans,
3 – Britons in north Spain.
4 – just any tribal migrations.
But actually everything. As I said, any travel in Antiquity should be evaluated from this perspective.
@Ryan, what’s wrong with that diet?
@LH, unfortunately the article says little about relative quantities.
My comment was 85% snark, but it was you that pointed out those eating that diet were smaller than the barbarians they faced. I think it would be tough to get enough complex proteins from pulses for a vigorous life of marching and soldiery, though they must have had other sources that completed the protein complex. And without many fruits and vegetables a lot of problems take hold.
modern Tunisia is not all fields of wheat and is importing rather than exporting grain.
I looked into this desultorily once, many years back, and came to the conclusion that Tunisia + Algeria produce about as much grain now as at the height of the Roman Empire, but on less land and with a much, much bigger population. Out of all the crops that will grow nicely in a Mediterranean climate, grain is probably not the most profitable; in my home region, pretty much all the farmers just grow grapes now, and buy their grain from the world market. The question is, of course, also a political one; even Algeria can’t afford EU-style farmer subsidies, let alone Tunisia, so it’s hard to get farmers to do what the government wants them to.
ROO-TILE in Australia, and I’ve known the word since I was a kid. (Rutile is one of the minerals contained in mineral sands, which are found around the coast of Australia).
@br
Naively I expected REW-TILE. How do you say rule (rewl? rool?)?
Since “ROO” and “REW” are homophonous for me and I dare say for many others (and likewise RUE),* it might be illuminating if PP could find some other way of indicating the potential divergence of vowels he is asking about. Or is it perhaps a lack-of-yod-dropping-in-one-but-not-the-other thing?
*They all have the GOOSE vowel.
Or is it perhaps a lack-of-yod-dropping-in-one-but-not-the-other thing?
That’s how I interpreted the question, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard anyone say /rju/.
I try to say /rju/ in my trying-to-sound-authentic pronunciation of the toponym “Ryukyu,” but that’s a loanword from a language with different phonotactics. (Up to a point Anglophones can pronounce loanwords that violate the normal phonotactic constraints of English for its own “regular” lexicon, and I suppose it’s an interesting question how far that “up to a point” does and doesn’t extend.)
@Lameen, yes, growing what you can sell and buying what you want to eat is logical. (Algeria exported wine to the USSR when we were partners*)
“on less land” – among the three variables, two (increased yield, more people) must be true for almost every country except those that underwent desertification since then.
The third (“as much grain” “less land”) is not.
I still wonder why the region’s role in Europe and MENA has changed.
Diversification of markets and demand for grapes is one scenario.
If it was exporting grain to Italy, that means it was no less or even more suitable for growing it.
Likely better than the Gaul, either because of transportation costs or again more suitable for growing it.
*Apparently we’re partners again due to the cold-war spillover. Delegations of linguists attend events at the embassy and so on.
Also I’d expect a major medieval producer of grain to be an important center (like Egypt) but I don’t think many people know Aglabids (or Muhallabids). Fatimids indeed founded their first capital in Ifriqiya.
@hat, jwb
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/blue
I hear a difference in the UK and US versions, but the IPA is the same for both, so maybe the difference I hear is sub-phonemic. In the same dictionary’s entry for rule, I do not hear a difference between UK and US. A particular Dublin accent would make the difference more obvious, i.e., the vowel is extended to something like rew-al.
EDIT. As distinct from “skoo-al”.
I might spell it skyool vs. skoo-al. I do think it’s influenced by how the L is pronounced. But I find it impossible to repeat the skyool pronunciation with rule.
Yeah, /lj/ is an entirely different proposition — much easier than /rj/.
Also “rule” and “school” are CVC or CCVC monosyllable, whereas I’d assumed the first syllable of “rutile” was CV, with the /t/ being part of the next syllable instead. I’m not saying there aren’t maybe situations where the initial C of the following syllable has an effect on the vowel in the CV preceding syllable, but I wouldn’t expect one (for whatever my subjective expectations are worth, which may not be much) in “rutile.”
I only used ROO because it can be such a pain searching for the appropriate IPA symbols. I didn’t realise the consternation I would cause!
For ‘blue’, I can hear the difference that PP hears at the Cambridge dictionary site. The US version has diphthongisation (schwa followed by ‘u’) where the UK version is lacking that. But I would put that down to a general tendency to diphthongisation of the sound /u:/ in English. My feeling is that RP tends to resist diphthongistion (which makes it sound ‘British’ to my ear) whereas Australian English would use the diphthong — and my impression is that in both southeast British and Australian English, the stronger the diphthongisation the less cultivated the pronunciation.
In considering the pronunciation of words like ‘school’ or ‘rule’, I think you need to keep in mind that both /l/ and /n/ are notorious for affecting the preceding vowel: /l/ because it tends to force the insertion of schwa before it, /n/ because it can nasalise the preceding vowel and affect its quality and/or length. For instance, in my own pronunciation of (say) ‘cot’ and ‘con’, the quality of the vowel is quite different, to the extent that a non-native speaker might wonder how they belong to the same phoneme.
“… trying-to-sound-authentic pronunciation of the toponym “Ryukyu,””
Or you can pretend that you have athuthentic Okinawan accent:)
It’s a difficult word for me, even though each of syllables is easy individually (each is a word – Japanese again – in Russian and of course English: ryu “school”, kyu “grade, class, rank”).
Or not? Maybe it appears difficult because I mechanically try NOT to reduce the unstressed syllable.
The /rj/ pronunciation of ryu, Japanese for “dragon,” is common in Japan and somewhat less elsewhere. Over the course of my life I have been moving more and more toward saying the word that way.
I don’t know that I can pronounce the diphthong. I’d say Ree-yoo, attempting to clip the ee.
Harder than, say, Ryazan?
Based on IPA and forvo I have an impression that for many speakers it is not a diphtong.
Then the problem faced by English speakers must be similar to the one with Russian palatalised consonants, namely preserving the phonemic distinction wihotu being able to reproduse the sound.
I’m not sure the English approximant can be nicely palatalised while remaining a rotic and an approximant (perhap an alveolar approximant can) and anyway, palatalised consonants are not English.
Indeed, if you say Russian rʲumka as /ɹu:/ we won’t understand you. /ɹiu ~ ɹju/ will sound very foreign, but understandable, as the “softened” sequence of phonemes is marked (with a segment absent in Russian, but marked). Perhaps the same effect would have been achieved if you fronted the vowel instead, and perhaps it won’t be more un-Russian, just more un-English.
But is this Japanese vowel centralised (as opposed to back)?
Wiktionary IPA is [ɾʲɨ] with close central unrounded ɨ occuring in some English accents.
But I hear (1, 2) rounding.
Then perhaps here too the same effect can be achieved by changing the vowel to close central, round or not (and if you round your lips in the middle rather than beginning of the sound you will get something similar to /rju/ (but different from it))
If Ryazan is three syllables, then it’s the same for me as Ryuku. But if it’s two, then they’re equally out of reach. I’m with Drasvi that a palatalized rhotic approximant is asking a lot of one’s apparatus.
palatalized rhotic approximant
So you’re trying for a [ɹʲ], not a [ɾʲ]? That’s just picking the worst of both worlds.
Ryan, Russian palatalisation within a pair CʲV (say, Cʲ[i]) is about two things:
– [i] is more close than the English sound.
– Cʲ is pronounced in such a way that the tongue is already at the position that minimises tongue movement during the transition to /i/. This small ʲ does not designate any tiny intrusive sound (or anything like what ʰ designates when Cʰ is aspirated). Only the shape of your tongue as you’re articulating C.
Basically if I combine English /d/ with Russian /i/ or Russian /dʲ/ with English /i/ ([i:] as in beach, of course it will be even more true for bitch or pick), it will result in a diphtong – simply because of tongue movement.
Also we have two schwas:) One after soft consonants, the other after hard consonants.
As for Cʲa: in Rʲazanʲ it is unstressed, it is not an /a/, but some reduced front vowel.
Its quality depends on accent, but it would be the same if it were written Rezanʲ or Rizanʲ.
When there is an actual /a/ (or an /a/-like anything), which in modern literary pronunciation is only possible when it is stressed…creators of the Cyrillic alphabet treated such sequences as C-ʲa (same consonant, different vowel. Maybe it even sounded so back then, I don’t know), modern traditional phonology treats it as Cʲ-a (different vowel and generic /a/).
But phonetically the vowel is going to be fronted. When I say long Cʲaaaaaa I have a choise: retain this fronted quality Cʲяяяяяяя or make it a diphotong: Cʲяaaaaaa
Zircon crystals tend to contain trace amounts of uranium and the lead it decays into. They’re widely used for radiometric dating.
The Old Red Sandstone is Devonian in age, BTW, and full of fascinating fossils.
Simply ignore that and refresh the page. It’s a known unexplained bug.
When Asterix joined the army, he explained to Obelix what they were about to face: “The better the army, the worse the food! That keeps the warriors in a bad mood.” Then they actually got the food, which turned out to be “grain, bacon and cheese, everything boiled together for rationalization”, and Asterix grimaced in disgust: “I wouldn’t have thought the Roman army was that good!”
The Old Red Sandstone is, IIRC, one of the first widespread stratigraphic units to be described as such anywhere.
Zircons are wonderful. They start out with plenty of uranium but hardly any lead (good for dating), they contain lots of hafnium (good for characterizing magmatic sources), they are very hard (resistant to mechanical weathering), and very refractory (resistant to metamorphism and to dissolving in magma). A lot of geology has been done entirely with single crystals of zircon, the size of fine sand grains.
The oldest known one has been dated to 4.4 billion years ago, and various isotopes in it show that continental crust and an ocean already existed (contrary to what some had supposed). The rock it was found in is something like a billion years younger, IIRC.
The New Red Sandstone is Early Triassic in age, BTW, so some 150 million years younger than the Old one.
The existence and survival of those upper Hadean zircons is kind of mind boggling.