British genetic history

""English schoolchildren are taught that their history really begins
with the Roman invasion of 55 BC and Caesar's defeat of the Celtic
tribes who opposed him. The true bearers of English heritage, the
textbooks imply, are the Anglo-Saxons, later invaders whose Germanic
language was the ancestor of English. The defeated Celtic inhabitants
of Britain are assumed to have been pushed back into the hinterlands
of Wales and Scotland and largely disappear from most history books.

But a survey of British Y chromosomes shows that the Y chromosome
characteristic of Celtic speakers, far from having disappeared,
carried by a large proportion of the male population of Britain.
Nowhere does the indigenous population seem to have been wiped out,
either by Anglo-Saxons who invaded from Denmark and northern Germany
in the sixth and seventh century AD, or by the Danish and Norwegian
Vikings who arrived in the ninth and tenth centuries. (Two other
groups of invaders, the Romans and the Normans, probably arrived in
numbers too small to have left a demographic mark.)

The Y chromosomes common along Celts have a particular set of DNA
markers known to the geneticists as the Atlantic modal heliotype, or
AMH. AMH Y chromosomes are also found, it so happens, in the Basque
region of Europe. AMH-type Y chromosomes are particular common in
places like Castlerea in central Ireland, which no invaders ever
reached. This suggests that the chromosomes are the signature of the
first hunter-gatherers who arrived in Britain and Ireland toward the
end of the Pleistocene ice age 10,000 years ago.

Given the similarity between Basque and Irish Y chromosomes, some
geneticist suspect that people who had used Spain as a southern refuge
during the Last Glacial Maximum started to move northward as the
glaciers melted. Many may have traveled by boat up the west coast of
Europe, entered the waterway between Ireland and England and settled
on each side of it. So it is a puzzle that the chromosome is now
associated with Celtic, and Indo-European language that spread to
Britain only in the first century BC, along with ironworking
technology and agriculture (Wade 2006, p. 239-240)."

End quote.

The puzzle can be solved by equating the spread of Celtic languages
with the spread of farming in Europe as Renfrew has done. The Basque
speaking hunter gatherers must have adopted farming along with the an
"Indo-European" language when farming spread from Anatolia northwards.

Wade, Nicholas (2006), "Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History
of Our Ancestors," New York, NY: The Penguin Press.

M. Kelkar