Talk:Prehistoric settlement of the British Isles

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Origin myths - Ireland[edit]

The text in the section 'Origin myths - Ireland' says "The last of these was the invasion by the Gaels who came from Spain;" If correct (I assume that this is what the Book of Invasions implies), the text should either say "The last of these was the invasion by the Gaels, who came from the area now known as Spain;", or "The last of these was the invasion by the Gaels, who came from the Iberian Peninsula;". As that area wasn't really known as Spain until the 15th century. Yours, Daicaregos (talk) 08:51, 13 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Daicaregos (talk) 12:33, 14 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 2[edit]

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was no consensus. Also, this sounds like something too complex for a simple page move; a request for comment is probably the best way to go. —harej (talk) 23:05, 3 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Survey[edit]

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's naming conventions.

Discussion[edit]

Any additional comments:
  • As I read the discussion above, the article is supposed to give an overview of all significant groups that settled the British Isles from outside, "significant" meaning that it can be detected in the genetics of the modern population. Since this includes people who came after the Romans, the proposed move and trimming would probably lead to the recreation of such an article on settlement and genetics. --Hans Adler (talk) 11:17, 16 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • It looks as though we already have two articles that would include anyone coming after the Romans, I don't see the problem. Dougweller (talk) 12:47, 16 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • Ah, I see. This article is a bit of a content fork of genetic history of the British Isles, but also of Prehistoric Britain and Prehistoric Ireland. Yes, it might be a good idea to move it as proposed, remove the later stuff and most of the genetics stuff, and merge some of it into the other three articles. This would give us a much needed article tying the two prehistoric ones together; after all Britain and Ireland formed a single island for much of the prehistoric time. Is that the plan? --Hans Adler (talk) 13:06, 16 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        • I was more interested in the titles I mentioned, but now that you have provided more, to answer you question briefly, yes. --PBS (talk) 09:39, 17 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • No problem with moving to Prehistoric settlement, but what is the rationale behind also changing from British Isles? There is a series of articles under this heading. Fences&Windows 01:17, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Discussions around the term "British Isles" - or any alternative term such as "Great Britain and Ireland" - open up a whole big can of worms, as many editors here know. For this page, at this stage, in my view it is best to concentrate on the first couple of words, and I'd support an immediate move to "Prehistoric settlement of the British Isles". If there is a subsequent discussion here on the use of the term "British Isles", I'll reserve my position for the moment. Ghmyrtle (talk) 09:31, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Moving back to the name before the last move seems the simplest thing to do, withtout "open up a whole big can of worms, as many editors here know" --PBS (talk) 18:53, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The simplest edit is appending "Prehistoric" to the title. Let's just do that, which will address the concern raised about the scope of the article, and deal with the British Isles naming discussion elsewhere or another time. Conflating the two changes isn't going to help. Fences&Windows 20:25, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

as long as the article about the archipelago is at British Isles, it is only straightforward to keep the article on its settlement at "settlement of the British Isles". If there is reason to move the article on the archipelago, this article should follow suit after that move. Come on, there is no reason to duplicate a single debate on a dozen talkpages. Discussion on the standard name for the archipelago in question belongs on Talk:British Isles. The current title is just fine, thank you. --dab (𒁳) 20:16, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

My interest is in moving it back to the previous stable name because at the moment there is overlap wit other articles -- which was something that was not addressed in the previous moving debate. I seen no reason to moving it to yet another name as to quote another editor it will "open up a whole big can of worms, as many editors here know" --PBS (talk) 22:22, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
there should be (100%) overlap with other articles, this clearly being a WP:SS article. Each section should link to its {{main}} article. --dab (𒁳) 14:36, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Immigration to the United Kingdom since 1922 is a stand alone article with no overlap with either of the other two. I wouldn't go along with prefixing Settlement of the British Isles with Prehistoric as the subject matter of the article deals with the Roman period onwards and so are historical as opposed to prehistorical. However, there is considerable overlap between this article and Historical immigration to Great Britain and would favour its deletion following a merge of information with this one. --Bill Reid | (talk) 14:12, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    there is indeed undue overlap with the "Immigration until the Black Death" section of the Historical immigration to Great Britain article. This is easy enough to solve. Blank or dramatically shorten that section and link to this article instead. --dab (𒁳) 14:40, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    Once the article is move back to its older name then we delete from the "Historical immigration to Great Britain" anything before the Roman invasion, and add hatnote to this article. --PBS (talk) 17:42, 24 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Page rename[edit]

This article's change of name to 'Prehistoric settlement of the British Isles' does not seem to be what was agreed. Please change it back. Daicaregos (talk) 17:20, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There was no consensus to change it from its existing name. What are you referring to? --Bill Reid | (talk) 18:25, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The page move request was from Settlement of the British Isles to Prehistoric settlement of Great Britain and Ireland. However, the move has been made to 'Prehistoric settlement of the British Isles'. As you say, there was no consensus for this change. Daicaregos (talk) 06:51, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
There was a consensus for change to "prehistoric settlement", what there was not a consensus for was the ending. I personally thought it should go back to the name it had before (Britain and Ireland) but as there was not a consensus for that, I made the minimum change possible. --PBS (talk) 08:15, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Are you sure that moving a page to a name different to that of the page move request agrees with due process? I would support to a page move to that requested i.e. Prehistoric settlement of Great Britain and Ireland, but I do not support the name it has been changed to. Daicaregos (talk) 10:12, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes I am sure. If I had moved it to the name I preferred, (which is the same as you) then I can see that some people would have complained. The consensus above agreed with adding prehistoric to the name, but could not agree which name to move it too. As the name was already at British Isles, the name change was the smallest change I could make within the agreed consensus. --PBS (talk) 11:55, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'm happy with this change, the rationale that this was the smallest change within the agreed consensus makes sense to me. Dougweller (talk) 13:02, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with the move made to "Prehistoric..." Any further move to "...Great Britain and Ireland" (rather than "...British Isles") would be contentious and should be subject to a further discussion, though personally I'd support it. Ghmyrtle (talk) 14:39, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It may make sense, but any page name change should be explicitly noted on the talkpage before the change is made. Daicaregos (talk) 13:17, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The conversation in the previous section is quite acceptable, particularly as User:Dougweller and I have fallen into line with the others who expressed a preference for "British Isles", and as you also think "prehistoric settlement" is to be preferred over "settlement", which do you think is closer to your preferred name "settlement of the British Isles" or "prehistoric settlement of the British Isles" (given that "Great Britain and Ireland" is not on offer)? --PBS (talk) 14:14, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

For me, "Settlement of the British Isles" is correct. The article deals with historic as well as prehistoric settlement. --Bill Reid | (talk) 14:35, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(31.210.182.22 (talk) 21:56, 19 June 2017 (UTC))The content is outdated, we should review the article. Genetical research shows, that celtic population moved to the British Isles together with the Bell Beaker Culture, replacing about 90% of original population. [1] Now it is only written that 'A number of archaeologists, including John Waddell, propose that there may have been a "Celtic presence"[clarification needed] in Britain already in the late Bronze Age, i.e. in mid 2nd millennium BC'. This has been proven already. We sho1uld remove the statements about celtic conquest ib 6th century BCE as outdated and change the date of celtic conquest to mid 2nd millennium BCE.(31.210.182.22 (talk) 21:56, 19 June 2017 (UTC)) [unregistered][reply]

References

  1. ^ http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/09/135962

Content of current page[edit]

I have a few concerns about the content of the current page:

  • Genetic research. A section has been removed - I'm not clear why, although I do understand that some of the text related to post-Roman settlement. I suggest that relevant sections of that text be reinstated in this article, together with a pointer to the main article at Genetic history of the British Isles.
  • Origin myths. I think this is the wrong article for that section. Perhaps it should be a freestanding article?
  • Historic settlement. Surely that section should now be removed, with a WP:HN added to explain. (Incidentally, although there is Historical immigration to Great Britain, there seems to be no comparable article for Ireland. Have I missed something?)

Any comments? Ghmyrtle (talk) 14:31, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In reply to Bill Reid's comment in the last section. My reason for wanting to make the cut, and go back to the situation before the move in 2007, was it seemed to me we had articles that were content forks of each other. One solution was to merge this article and Historical immigration to Great Britain together, but that can cause problems for some with the concept of Ireland and Britain as separate entities, and I for one reckoned that that would probably lead to endless discussions without solving the problems of the content fork. If later people want to combine the articles then that can be debated and done if there is a consensus to do so, but at least the previous content forking will not be an issue.
  • I'm happy that we include only that genetic info from prehistory.
  • Origin myths. Not fussed. But I think it needs more consideration before yet more stubby articles are created.
  • Historic settlement, I'm not fussed if it is a hatnote or a Wikipedia:Summary style section at the end or both. That the Irish article is missing may or may not be a problem. There is a problem with this article because end Irish pre-history does not quite match most of Great British pre-history and the north of Scotland is more tied into Irish dates than GB dates in this respect. I was hoping that someone who knows more about those watersheds than I could write a paragraph on it.
--PBS (talk) 13:59, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Should have re-read the article before commenting above. Hadn't noticed that settlement of the islands since the Romans had been removed. Question on this: where was the consensus to do that? --Bill Reid | (talk) 16:16, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
That was implied by the name change. There is a clear Wikipedia guideline on this issue. --PBS (talk) 16:33, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes but I would have thought that discussion on which articles were going to have good information removed and which articles were then going to have this information merged. Can you show me that this has been done? --Bill Reid | (talk) 19:00, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Edit spats[edit]

Be careful folks, you'll get the article 'protected'. GoodDay (talk) 20:45, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Compromise[edit]

Hey ya'll. Instead British Isles, howabout Great Britain and Ireland? GoodDay (talk) 20:49, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Generally a good idea for modern articles, but over part of the period that we are covering this was a single island. And at the end of the period the Romans called the two islands collectively the Great Britain and Little Britain, based purely on their comparative sizes. Both together were Britain, or the British Isles. As happens usually in such cases, the larger entity acquired the name and the smaller entity developed a consciousness of being to some degree unrelated to the name. (Compare the relation of the Netherlands, and to a lesser degree Austria, to Germany.) But this happened after the period covered in this article. Therefore talking about Great Britain and Ireland isn't really appropriate in this article, especially not if done consistently. It's just like we don't talk about Ireland and Northern Ireland. Or like we don't talk about Germany, Austria and the Netherlands in an article on the Middle Ages. (We just call it "Germany".) Hans Adler 21:15, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Seeing as this takes place before 1922, in agreement. GoodDay (talk) 21:19, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Island or peninsula[edit]

I added a claim from one of our sources [1] that in the palaeolithic Ireland was already an island, while Great Britain was still separated. That's inconsistent with what I remember from Stephen Oppenheimer's Origins of the British (I think he says the land bridge between Great Britain and the continent disappeared first, and the separation of the two islands happened afterwards.) It's also inconsistent with what a later paragraph says. So I removed it again. I think this needs clarification. I am not sure that our source is reliable.

In any case I found a later Times article that makes it clear that the question of palaeolithic humans in Ireland is open. Hans Adler 21:04, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The land bridge between Europe and GB - Doggerland - existed until c. 6200BC, long after Ireland and GB separated - c. 12,000BC according to Prehistoric Ireland. Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:10, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I guess I just misremembered things. Hans Adler 21:19, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
'Fraid so - I've just checked Oppenheimer and he concurs with what I said - see maps in his ch.4. Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:20, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I am still leaving the sentence out, since the separation between the islands happened during the palaeolithic, so it would need a bit more formulation work. Hans Adler 21:24, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Seems like a bad idea. M. J. Kelly ("Ireland before 3000 B.C." in Ó Cróinín (ed) Prehistoric and Early Ireland) says: "It is now clear that the earliest occupation of Ireland dates to the middle of the eighth millennium bc..." (pp. 64-5). But Ireland and Scotland may still have been connected by a land bridge for a millennium after human settlement began as he also tells us (p. 59) that "it is now argued that the separation of Ireland and Scotland had already been completed before 6000 bc" and also (p. 67) that "it is not impossible that the first inhabitants of what came to be the island of Ireland arrived by walking". Angus McLellan (Talk) 21:27, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The British Isles have a long history of migration from across Europe?[edit]

I could understand if they had migrated from Laurentia Ref but across Europe? C'mon. Þjóðólfr (talk) 21:42, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

?? - please clarify. Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:48, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It currently reads as if the Islands, not the people, were migrating. Þjóðólfr (talk) 21:50, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Aha! Changing it... Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:53, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]


There are two stories 'in print'. One is that the indigenous people of most of Britain and Ireland are descended from people who originated from the Iberian ice-age refuge in the Mesolithic, as described here, with various cultural influences since then. This article describes the Mesolithic as a time when flint artefacts were miniaturised, without mentioning by whom, then goes on to describe the waves of bloody advance by Beaker people, Belgics, Celts from Central Europe etc. Since the first story is based on widespread and detailed genetic analysis and the second is largely based on 1950s schoolbooks, I know which one I believe. What I'd like is for somebody who actually has an overview of what is currently taught, and believed, in academia and Universities to sort it out for us. I tried to add something about genetics once and it was reverted with the comment that Oppenheimer was 'fringe'. Is that generally considered true? --Nigelj (talk) 19:11, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why is wikipedia allowing material which is no longer considerd valid? Even the scholars who carry out genetic surveys say using genetics studies to link genetic Haplotypes with historical events are not reliable! here's a quote from a <BBC article:>

<But Dr Capelli stressed that his study could not answer the question of when the ubiquitous R-M269 expanded in Europe, although his lab is carrying out more work on the subject.

"At the moment it's not possible to claim anything about the age of this lineage," he told BBC News, "I would say that we are putting the ball back in the middle of the field." "Co-author Dr Jim Wilson from the University of Edinburgh explained: "Estimating a date at which an ancestral lineage originated is an interesting application of genetics, but unfortunately it is beset with difficulties">

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/science-environment-14630012 234aaa (talk) 20:27, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's the opposite of "no longer considered valid": Rather, it is something that still needs refining to produce definitive results. Given that's true of just about every other source of evidence being used in discussion of British pre-history, I don't see how it is relevant.--96.251.65.222 (talk) 17:21, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Warning: paradigm shift and the term 'Celtic'[edit]

The news that DNA research is beginning to clarify migration movements in Europe is going to radically alter perceptions about the significance of 'invasions' to Britain. If 80% of the genes of white Britons can be traced back to an origen within the British peninsular before the land bridge was susumed by water after the last ice Age, then the significance of subsequent migrations is placed in a rather different context: that is, less significant.

The assumption that British agricultural advances had their origen in the Near East is being undermined by carbon dating.

Furthermore, the spread of Hallstatt culture appears to have reached further than migrations which could be said to have carried it. It is now assumed that the peoples carrying the Halstatt culture remained in central Europe. Basically, the spread of artifacts has been traditionally used as the basis of theories of large-scale migration. DNA and carbon dating, however, is helping to formulate an alternative pre-history. One of the casualties in the perceptual shift is going to be the term 'Celtic'. Without the underpinning of migration and the DNA results to confirm it, there is very little to physically link the Celts of central Europe with the so-called 'Celts' of the British Isles. The term 'Celt' as it is used in relation to Britain only came into vogue in the 19th century. As far as Wikipedia goes, a more neutral term for the peoples of the pre-historic British Isles is 'British', a term accepted by Scots, Welsh and to some extent, Irish, to denote all the peoples of the pre-Roman British Isles. Dismantling the term 'Celtic' and separating it from its purely artistic associations is too much for one person to do. But a plea to use the more neutral term 'British', or perhaps British and Irish when discussing the iron age populations of this reigon might go some way to restoring some objectivity. Cacadores (talk) 22:46, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This is my understanding also and I support Cacadores here. Dougweller (talk) 06:39, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Plenty of reliable sources define the Iron Age peoples of Britain as Celtic. And that they spoke Celtic languages. No suggestion that this is due to migration is made. Daicaregos (talk) 13:19, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Whatever migration means, eh? If there was a bunch of armed Celts who crushed down the original British nobility and their whole culture, took their women and their land just like the Angle-Saxons did hundreds of years later, a genetic trace of these invaders in less than 20 % of brits' contemporary gene-pool would still be plausible. The spread of Celtic language, religion, arts and techniques without an at least qualitatively massive invasion of "cultural imperialists", however, seems rather implausible to me. Even if today's white brits aren't all descendants of Celts, at least in any way Celts must have taken over the land. That is, a relativisation of the relativisation. Is there any expert/scholar who tells us more about that?--JakobvS (talk) 15:15, 26 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that whenever I come back to read this page the more bizare it becomes!The idea that the population of two relatively large islands would change their language just for a few swords and other items is just idiotic.234aaa (talk) 20:48, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We have two facts:
  • a.) The genetic makeup of the British Isles hasn't changed much since c. 6.000 BCE.
  • b.) At least two major language shifts have occured since then, first from ? (when Britain was still called Albion rather than Priten in P-Celtic aka Cruthin in Q-Celtic?) to Celtic around the 6th century BCE, then from Celtic to Anglo-Saxon around the 5th century AD.
(Waddell sez mid-2nd millennium BCE for Celtic languages on the British Isles? What's he basing his claim on? Paleolithic Continuity Theory that sez Europe hasn't changed ethnically *NOR* culturally since the Stone Age? Sounds a lot like racist ethnopluralism to me (which has it that you can't export alien cultures across ethnic divides without destroying a people, such as Islam to the West, or Western philosophy and human rights to the Orient), and I mean, c'mon, we certainly don't see Celtic appearing any prior to 800 BC (first Hallstatt culture, later La Tène culture) even on the continent!)
One hypothesis I've read in a certain adherent to Marija Gimbutas's to explain such a situation is that a relatively small group (compared to the population they're attacking) successfully invades due to more advanced technology and warfare and for a smaller or greater number of generations becomes a powerful ruling class, enforcing their language and culture upon the subjected aborigines also by means of a more advanced social system, until their minor genetic input disappears into the vast gene pool of the land they conquered like a drop in the ocean, whereas their cultural input remains.
I mean, look at the transition from pre-Roman Gaulish to Old French. Gaul was conquered by the Romans due to superiority of Roman arms and technology, fiercely ruled by ingenious Roman military, administration, and bureaucracy, and yet even after Roman rule had ended, the Gaulish (culturally, but not genetically the Gallo-Romans by then) and newly arriving Frankish tribes in the area stuck to Latin that over time they corrupted into a Romance dialect. And I'm pretty sure you're not gonna find much genetic evidence of close to half a millennium of Roman supremacy in what is modern France today. Okay, the Romans retreated to Italia when they'd overstretched their boundaries (and incensed their Germanic foederati by slaughtering all their women and children at home while the foederati soldiers were abroad in service of the Empire, plus the Huns were pushing the whole tribal map of Europe westbound), but you get the idea of how even such a small "genetic input" after an invasion can have a lasting linguistic and cultural influence.
Yes, we do also have historical examples where the linguistic and cultural result turns out the other way around, which is what occurs if invasion is successful but the conquerors bring no advanced technology and social system with them. For instance, we see that particular outcome with the Germanic tribes conquering Italia and the Western Empire; not too long after, the Langobards spoke the Gallo-Italic Lombard, the Franks Gallo-Romance, and the Visigoths and Vandals Ibero-Romance.
Furthermore, one beef I have with the article is that it currently claims that the Insular-Continental Celtic categorization would be more recent and somehow "more sophisticated" than Q-Celtic and P-Celtic, whereas the first is not only older but also merely a geographic handle for convenience that really has little to do with linguistic analysis. The original Proto-Celtic and Common Celtic were P-Celtic that developed in the centers of Hallstatt and La Tène in Northern France and somewhere around the Alps. From there, P-Celtic spread across Gaul, all of the British Isles, and the Iberian Peninsula. It was in eastern Iberia that P-Celtic first developed into Q-Celtic, and from there the shift firmly spread to Hibernia (see Milesians (Irish)) and Caledonia (see Great Conspiracy), and more gradually into Gaul, leaving most of Britain except Scotland P-Celtic, which was the situation at the dawn of the Anglo-Saxon settlement. All registered similarities among Insular Celtic languages developed by British-Irish contact after Q-Celtic from Iberia/Hispania had replaced older P-Celtic in Hibernia. --87.151.31.73 (talk) 04:02, 21 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Please folks, this isn't a webforum where you can simply discuss the topic of the article. If you have sources that specifically discuss the prehistoric settlement of the BI, please bring them here for discussion, but a general argument here is completely inappropriate. IP, please note what I've said about sources and read WP:NOR. Dougweller (talk) 10:10, 21 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The "Celtic" section is still broken. This is only a "paradigm shift" if you paradigm was flawed to begin with. The history of Gaul shows that you can install a small elite and the language can change entirely within 500 years. The "Celtic settlement of Britain" is nothing more than that. Nobody ever wondered how the French can speak a Latin language seeing that there was no "mass migration" of Romans to Gaul. Why should people wonder about the same thing happening in Britain?

If you care about "blood" so much, by all means, read these genetic studies and rest assured that Britons are essentially descended from the Mesolithic settlers. If you are interested in Celtic culture instead, you will have to recognize that this is a topic of the Iron Age, and that Celts did, for better or worse, install themselves as an elite and change the language, just as the Romans did in Gaul. I really don't see the problem (unless you are determined to ideologize it and make' it a problem).

Please keep the "Mesolithic" stuff to the Mesolithic section and the Iron Age stuff to the Iron Age section. It will not do to dwell on how Mesolithic everyone is in a section on the Iron Age. The Iron Age contribution is small, yes, but it is precisely this small signal which is the topic under discussion if you want to discuss "Celts". --dab (𒁳) 18:43, 31 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well see next section. Johnbod (talk) 19:50, 31 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Dab's sweeping changes[edit]

I am far from sure these are a good idea. One one point: John Waddell is a highly respectable Irish archaeologist prof, & Irish prehistoric specialist, now Emeritus from the NUI Galway (also once of the National Museum), & author of the standard undergraduate's introduction to The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland, 1997, now 2nd edn. At least in Ireland the idea of Bronze Age Celtic languages has been around for a good time, so I don't know why you boggle. At least he can write competent English, unlike those Russian geneticists. But if "Celtic presence" is a quote from him, I missed the phrase - the page numbers give the whole article. Johnbod (talk) 19:50, 31 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Mesolithic population[edit]

do we have a citation for the statements by Christopher Smith and Francis Pryor concerning the population sizes. The first set of statements in particular appear to be very specific, meaning citation is vital.Walker Slake (talk) 19:56, 11 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Chris Smith's estimate appears in Late Stone Age Hunter's of the British Isles and I'd guess that Francis Pryor stuck it in Britain BC] but it may be in his landscapes book too. They're both very speculative figures but you're right about citation (and archaeologists use the figures far too often!) - I'll try and pull up page numbers next time I have the actual books to hand. PatHadley (talk) 16:57, 12 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Absence during the AGM[edit]

The British Palaeolithic: Hominin Societies at the Edge of the Pleistocene World By Paul Pettitt, Mark White[2] "There are no convincing examples of human presence in Britain after -33 ka bp. An AMS radiocarbon measurements on several artefacts of bone and ivory from Paviland yielded underestimates and the remeasurement of one of the spatulae could still be an underestimation (See Text Box 7.1) and it has been noted above that the provenance of a human humerus from Eel Point, the age of which might suggest a dispersal -28 ka bp. is of questionable provenance and there are no late Gravettian artefacts known from Britain, at least based on continental parallels. Glacial ice had begun to buid up once more over the British Isles shortly after this (see Text Box 7.1). Presumably, after the brief but favourable conditions of Greenland Interstadial GI6, the climatic downturn ensured that no subsequent opportunities were available for humans to return until well after the Last Glacial Maximum, a period of absence of up to 18,000 years, assuming there was no Solutrean dispersal (see Chapter 8)." This contradicts the article, including what I added. Dougweller (talk) 12:40, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't blame them, AGMs are nearly always boring, though the garden ones are useful. AGM lists no relevant meaning; did we mean LGM? Johnbod (talk) 14:38, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This article is not needed[edit]

I do not see the point of this article. It is just a brief and unreliable summary of the information in Prehistoric Britain and Prehistoric Ireland. It mentions Neanderthal occupation of Jersey 250,000 years ago, but as the Channel Islands are off France they can only be considered part of the British Isles in modern political terms. The article then states that Neanderthals reached "the rest of Britain" (sic) about 130,000 years ago, citing Swanscombe and Bontnewydd. This is nonsense. Swanscombe is Heidelbergensis 400,000 years ago, Bontnewydd is 230,000 year old Neanderthal, and there were no humans in Britain between 180,000 and 60,000 years ago. I suggest making this a disambig to Prehistoric Britain, Prehistoric Ireland, Prehistoric Scotland, Prehistoric Orkney and any other relevant articles. That will be far more useful to readers than the present article. Dudley Miles (talk) 09:59, 31 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Dougweller, Johnbod, Ghmyrtle, Dbachmann you have commented on this page in the past. Do you have any views on my suggestion? Dudley Miles (talk) 17:44, 7 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Dudley Miles: I'm happy with that, anything useful should be placed in the correct article of course. It's not as though those who have this on their watchlists haven't had a chance to respond. Doug Weller talk 11:09, 18 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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