--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "Gerry <waluk@...>" <waluk@...>
wrote:

> Who were the first aboriginal tribes to appear in
> England, for example? In my History of England classes I learned
> that the early tribes consisted of Angles, Saxons and Jutes (the
> Jutes kept changing but the A & S always remained constant).
> Nationalism has always raised its head at peculiar times.
>
> Gerry

If you don't want to count the Neanderthals (extinct), look at Table
5 in http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~macaulay/papers/richards_2000.pdf ;
it suggests that the Basques, Scandinavians, Balts, Finns and
Russians are the most native, with the West Europeans (excluding the
Italians) the least native. By the lax American standards, all but
recent or long-standing unintegrated immigrants count as 'Native
Europeans'.

The earliest *recorded* tribes in England are generally reckoned to
be Celtic, and thus their linguistic heirs are the Welsh, but the
English, high and low, now have a high proportion of British (i.e.
pre-English) blood in them. 'England', of course, means the land of
the Angles, though the Romans and our Celtic neighbours called us
Saxons. Torsten has, if I understand him correctly, proposed on
Cybalist that the Anglo-Saxons themselves were largely of
(continental) Celtic ancestry.

Incidentally, I understand that the Cornish aren't convinced that
Cornwall is part of England.

The key point is that there isn't really a separate group of 'native
Europeans', and probably hasn't been since the Neolithic reached
Scotland and Northern Scandinavia.

Richard.