R-L21* in the Rhine Valley general areas

[Mikewww]

Eastern France and Western Germany down to Switzerland clearly have a line of R-L21* folks.    How do you think they got there?

I've heard stories of Roman Auxiliary troops with Britons in from the 2nd century AD.  I've also heard that Irish religious personnel  trekked into Continental Europe.    I personally don't think either of those historical period events would be significant enough, but I want to be open.  What do you think?

[rms2]

I think it's too early to tell for sure, but my GUESS is that area is the cradle of L21, or close anyway.

The "Roman Auxiliary" and "Randy Irish Monk" theories are lame, in my opinion, and amount to special pleading to defend the idea that L21 must have originated in Britain or Ireland.

I want to expand on this topic, but I'm out of time right now.

[rms2]

The historiography of the British Isles is interesting. There is the persistent idea that by the Neolithic Period there were people living there who are often referred to, especially in the older literature, as "Iberians". These are supposed to be the folk who built the "long barrows". They were a relatively small, long-skulled (dolichocephalic) people who are sometimes referred to as "Mediterranean". Then, beginning in the Bronze Age, other folk began to arrive from the East and South: first the Celts, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, etc.

Lately, since the 1970s at least, the role of the relative newcomers in the British Isles has been seriously downplayed. Some of the newer-fangled archaeologists and historians have argued that changes in language and culture were accomplished by means of "cultural packages" that were transferred from one place to another without the movement of very many people. The advocates of the "cultural package" have been somewhat derisively labeled "immobilists", a rather fitting appellation. For them, the basic British population remains essentially unchanged since the Stone Age.

So it seems to me, if R-L21 is indeed the most frequent haplogroup in the British Isles, especially in those western and northern regions regarded as having experienced the least impact from newcomers, we are faced with a choice. We can agree with the immobilists and see L21 as essentially indigenous to the British Isles, the y haplogroup of the Long-Barrow People, or we regard L21 as having been brought to the British Isles by some other group of males who came later.

I take the latter view, and I have what I regard as good reasons for it. But once again I am out of time this morning. I hope this weekend to expand on what I have written thus far.

[Mikewww]

...  So it seems to me, if R-L21 is indeed the most frequent haplogroup in the British Isles, especially in those western and northern regions regarded as having experienced the least impact from newcomers, we are faced with a choice. We can agree with the immobilists and see L21 as essentially indigenous to the British Isles, the y haplogroup of the Long-Barrow People, or we regard L21 as having been brought to the British Isles by some other group of males who came later.
I take the latter view....

If we can "rule out" alternatives that is helpful.  I think a key is what is the true age of R-L21?  If these MCRA calculations (the latest and greatest) are correct the Neolithic age is too early to be the possible method of spread for R-L21.   The early Bronze Age might even be too early.

[rms2]

]
If we can "rule out" alternatives that is helpful.  I think a key is what is the true age of R-L21?  If these MCRA calculations (the latest and greatest) are correct the Neolithic age is too early to be the possible method of spread for R-L21.   The early Bronze Age might even be too early.

That's true, but if R-L21 is regarded as indigenous to the British Isles, then you still face the same conclusion, unless it so young it could be the offspring of some branch of R-P312 that was Celtic.

[rms2]

Here are a few of the reasons why I think L21 originated on the Continent and was brought to the British Isles, at least at first, by the earliest Celts.

1.  The Gaelic or Irish language and its derivatives (Manx and Scots Gaelic) are Q-Celtic, and Q-Celtic is generally believed to be the older form of Celtic. How did it get to Ireland and become the language of the people there without some sort of movement of Celtic-speaking people? I'm sorry, but I find the idea of whole peoples switching languages so they can buy pots and various metals underwhelming in the extreme.

2.  Ancient Irish culture, religion, law and language contain numerous very archaic Indo-Europeanisms that are found almost nowhere else but Vedic India. This would seem to me to indicate the very early arrival of an Indo-European people who were able to impose their ways on Ireland.

3.  A recent study of the T-13910 lactase persistence allele in the British Isles found that it increases in frequency as one moves from southeast to northwest:
Lactase Persistence-Related Genetic Variant: Population Substructure and Health Outcomes. The T-13910 allele is thought to have arisen on the Eurasian steppe less than 10,000 years ago. If its gradient in the British Isles follows pretty much the same gradient L21 does, how is that, if L21 is "indigenous" to the British Isles"?

4.  The time to the "nodeman" of L21 and U152 is about 3500 years. That means their shared P312+ (L21-, U152-) ancestor lived about that long ago (allowing for the confidence interval of about a thousand years either side of that figure). If correct, that means L21 first appeared in the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. It could still be indigenous to the British Isles, but it would have had to have been preceded there by its P312+ progenitor.

5.  There is considerable evidence, it seems to me, that the so-called "Beaker Folk" began arriving in the British Isles from the Middle Rhine sometime in the 3rd millennium BC. They can be identified by their burial customs and artifacts and by their skeletal structure, which differed from that of the earlier inhabitants. Isotope testing of the teeth of the most famous of the Beaker Folk, the Amesbury Archer, revealed that he was born and raised on the Continent.

The eminent French archaeologist and linguist Henri Hubert, in his book, The History of the Celtic People, wrote that the Goidelic language arrived in the British Isles from Germany with the Beaker Folk and that later arrivals from the Continent introduced the new-fangled P-Celtic or Brythonic speech. Given what I wrote in items 1 and 2 above, that makes tremendous sense to me.

Okay, that's enough for one post.

[rms2]

I want to add a couple of things. For one thing, as Mike indicated above, the age of L21 makes a lot of difference. It might not be old enough to have been brought to the British Isles by the Beaker Folk, or at least by the first of the Beaker Folk. In that case, where did it come from? Halstatt Celts? Possibly.

Here is another thing. It doesn't seem likely that L21 is particularly Iberian. Thus far, the overwhelming majority of Iberian guys who were R-P312* before testing for L21 have remained so after testing for L21, having received an L21- result.

Obviously there are exceptions. We know of at least three R-L21* men of Spanish extraction, two of whom are members of the R-L21 Plus Project. No doubt there will be more. We should expect R-L21* in the Iberian Peninsula, since much of the Peninsula was settled by Celts. If it begins to turn up frequently in the areas that were inhabited by non-Celtic peoples, particularly in the South and Southeast, then that could be something of a game changer.

I would really like to see others comment on these things.

[GoldenHind]

I view the contention that all continental L21 is a result of immigration from Britain as theory looking for ways to try to explain away inconvenient facts.
I am also not yet convinced that all L21 was Celtic, though undoubtedly most of it was.

[rms2]

I view the contention that all continental L21 is a result of immigration from Britain as theory looking for ways to try to explain away inconvenient facts.
I am also not yet convinced that all L21 was Celtic, though undoubtedly most of it was.

I agree with everything you wrote above.

[susanrosine]

Here is another thing. It doesn't seem likely that L21 is particularly Iberian. Thus far, the overwhelming majority of Iberian guys who were R-P312* before testing for L21 have remained so after testing for L21, having received an L21- result.

Obviously there are exceptions. We know of at least three R-L21* men of Spanish extraction, two of whom are members of the R-L21 Plus Project. No doubt there will be more. We should expect R-L21* in the Iberian Peninsula, since much of the Peninsula was settled by Celts. If it begins to turn up frequently in the areas that were inhabited by non-Celtic peoples, particularly in the South and Southeast, then that could be something of a game changer.

I would really like to see others comment on these things.

Maybe we need to stop thinking of the Celts as one big organized nation--not that all of us do! Just because some Celts were obviously L21--come on, it's obvious, right? --doesn't mean that L21 had to be all over Iberia in huge numbers. Wherever L21 was born, and proliferated, those L21 just didn't make it into Spain (Iberia) in large quantities. Also, the men who tested R-L21* from Spain--we don't know when their ancestors came to Spain. It may've been before surnames started, but well after the glory days of the Celts.

So, in my mind,  P312* seems to be Beaker and some Celtic, and L21* seems to have arisen either in an area inhabited by some Beaker Folk, or an area of the Celts, and spread from there--but didn't spread everywhere. I see no way L21* could've originated in the British Isles.

I'm okay though if, as more data comes in, all this is wrong!! :-)

Time for more SNPs to be discovered  ;-)

[rms2]

I expect we'll see L21 turn up just about everywhere there were Celts and maybe in some places where there weren't so many Celts (we've already seen that - in Lithuania and Scandinavia).

It wouldn't surprise me if L21 turned up fairly frequently in Spain and maybe Portugal, too, but I think it will lag well behind R-P312* (before it gets broken into its component parts) and the other subclades there.

This may surprise some, but I expect to see L21 in a big way in France, if we ever can convince the French to test their y-dna.