Are the Irish descendants of the Celts?

The map shows the similarity of the DNA found with the DNA of peoples inhabiting various places in Europe. The red part of the spectrum means the greatest match

The discovery of an ancient burial on the territory of Ireland can erase established ideas about the origin of modern Irish as descendants of ancient Celts. The results of DNA testing and radiocarbon analysis showed that the remains found belong to the ancestors of the modern Irish - despite the fact that they lived on this land 1000 years before the supposed arrival of the Celts.

For a long time, historians believe that the Irish are descendants of the ancient Celtic tribes who came to the island from the center of Europe. It is believed that they appeared in Ireland somewhere between 1000 and 500 years BC.

The appearance of the word "Celtic" in English occurred in the XVII century. Oxford-based Welsh linguist Edward Lluid drew attention to the similarities in languages ​​spoken in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. He called these languages ​​"Celtic" - and the name stuck.
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Mentions of Celtic culture are found everywhere together with the Irish. Irish English-speaking poet, playwright, Nobel Prize winner in literature, William Butler Yeats called his book Celtic Twilight. The word "Celtic" is also used to describe the style of jewelry sold in Irish souvenir shops. True, there is no evidence that such a design was invented by an ethnically homogeneous group of people.

But an analysis of the skeletons found genetically linked them with modern Irish, Scots and Welsh. At the same time, the time of their life in this territory dates back to the years preceding the intended years of the Celts settling this territory - namely, 2000 years BC. This is 10-12 hundred years older than the oldest Celtic relics found in the territories of modern Switzerland, Austria and Germany.

Whether this surprising discovery refutes the theory of the Celtic origin of the Irish depends on how to define the Celts. And today, there are two different reasons for refuting the theory.

The first concerns the language, since for linguists there is an obvious connection between the languages ​​of several peoples living in Ireland and Great Britain. Traditionally it is believed that their common linguistic ancestor came to this territory along with the Celts during the Iron Age.

But in recent years, a different opinion has emerged - some scientists believe that the so-called. Celtic languages ​​did not come to the islands from the continent, but, on the contrary, developed on the islands and spread to the western part of Europe, in particular, to the territory of modern Spain and Portugal.

Researchers have come up against this idea of ​​archaeological finds made in Portugal, which contain letters very similar to Celtic ones, and the finds date back to 700 BC. It turns out that the language from which the modern Irish (Irish Gaelic) grew out was present in Europe before the Iron Age began there.

The second argument concerns the findings of various archaeological artifacts, indicating that the Celtic culture did not spread, as previously thought, from continental Europe to its western coast and to Ireland. On the contrary, people who appeared in Ireland “exported” their culture to the mainland, and further east.

As a result, the new discovery provides food for thought for both archaeologists and historians, and linguists, and is the reason for a possible revision of the ancient history of Europe. But archeology does not give clear and simple answers.

“People definitely need a place on the map, which could be indicated and said: Here, the Irish people came from here,” writes the former archeology professor J.P. Mallory [JP Mallory] from the University of Queens in Belfast, author of The Origin of the Irish. - But it is impossible to do. Groups of people constantly moved to different places in Europe, and intermingled with each other. ”