Recent studies by the geneticist Rui Martiniano and the archaeologist Claire-Elise Fischer indicate that people living in the most remote and most "Celtic" regions of Ireland and Scotland today have "substantial genetic continuity" with people who lived in those places during the Iron Age, more than 3,000 years ago. Furthermore, thanks to the recent breakthrough in DNA research (by Reich and others), there is strongly contrary genetic evidence, since the modern-day inhabitants of Britain and Ireland "are not closely related to the inhabitants of central Europe," where the Celtic-speaking people who fought Caesar's legions came from. That was the standard narrative for most of the last 200 years, repeated in legends and histories and anthropological dissertations - and it flat-out didn't happen.Īs historian Jennifer Paxton puts it, in a lecture from her series "The Celtic World": "There's a clear lack of evidence in support of a Celtic invasion." She goes on to specify that there's no historical evidence, no linguistic evidence and no archaeological evidence. OK, that might be a bit too simplistic - but we can clearly say that the whole story about a distinctive ethnic or tribal or genetic group called the Celts who rampaged across Europe and into the British Isles during the first millennium B.C. You'll notice I didn't say that Newgrange was built "before the Celts." That's because there never were any "Celts" in the first place. Some of it is just white supremacist garbage. That design is found in exactly one place in Ireland, the impressive prehistoric passage tomb in County Meath called Newgrange, which was built roughly 2,000 years before any tangible evidence had appeared anywhere of the Celtic culture and Celtic languages that had spread across northwestern Europe by Julius Caesar's time. Let's take the ever-popular triple-spiral design motif, identified all over the internet as "Celtic," which is nothing of the kind. Nearly all the Celtomania of the last few decades, unfortunately, amounts to just making stuff up, or to a fantasy-novel mishmash of stuff that doesn't fit together. It's not always easy to tell where one ends and the other begins. But some of it is just white supremacist garbage. I mean, I get it, up to a point: Some of it is about the understandable and maybe even honorable yearning to connect with meaningful cultural traditions from the past, at a historical moment when many people in America and other Western nations (i.e., white folks) feel disconnected and rootless. Fintan O'Toole on Ireland's transformation - and the reverse version now underway in America
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