Before I continue, can I seriously point out the differences in invasion, migration, integration etc!? I feel people get "migration and a change of culture and people" and "migration and completely replace previous dwellers entirely like a huge hole swollowed 'em up!" mixed up. I.e there's a difference between language and culture and DNA/ethnicity. For example, Spanish is labeled a Romance language because (among others) it's from Latin, does that then mean all Spaniards are Romans?
Wernicke said:
Moving on from this, I previously thought that the Brythonnic Celts were the first human beings to set foot on Britain some time around 5000 BCE and so formed the ancestry of all peoples populating the Isles before the Roman invasion and Migration Age, save for the Gaels (?).
As Éadríc pointed out, Britain had been inhabited for thousands of years before anything we recognize as being "Brythonic". It's widely assumed that what we know as Brythonic peoples, and pre-Roman Celts of Britain are from, more or less, the same stock as Gauls. Weather that means two branches of the same people, one settling in Gaul one in Britain and just so happens they are similar or that Gauls settled Britain.
Wernicke said:
But it seems that their roots are far older, some possibly completely unrelated to each other. According to Wikipedia human footprints were found in England ranging between 800 000 and 500 000 years in age. I'm sure some of you are knowledgeable on the subject concerning my next question, namely;
Do the Britons (that is, the peoples inhabitating the areas later known as England, parts of Wales and southern Scotland pre-Migration Age) share a common ancestry with the Picts whose culture and religion, barring the language seem rather alienated from each other?
Yes, their ancestry is possibly the same if you go back far enough. However, do the Picts and, say, very Southern Britons share anything other than a similar language, society and culture? Probably not.
Wernicke said:
It is why I reckoned the fable of the pre-historic Scandinavian settlers occupying some of the Scottish islands could maybe, perhaps, possibly, vaguely have some truth to it, despite the ludicrous grounding the theorists chose for it. If the Picts and Britons share a common ancestry and came upon the island (or landmass) from the same direction I couldn't comprehend whatever it is that differnated them so. Can't it then be more logical that they would not have the same roots?
While Scotland has quite a different geography from England and Wales, these slight alterations of the terrain can't be enough to warrant such a large difference between the two cultures, although it's hard to say what the terrain and even the climate was like such a long time ago.
What say you, word-warriors?!
As I said earlier, bull****. Geography is, ofcourse, not the
soul reason the Picts and other Brythonic peoples were so different. Culture and society is another, British Celts were very insular and inward looking. Taking care of their own and not travelling vast distances and therefore, in my mind, not sharing - and exchanging - huge amounts of similarities.
We have to remember also that the Picts were
never exterminated ethnically, just their culture, language and much of their history was. As such an air of myth and legend surrounds them making them much more
other,
different and
other-worldly than they actually were. Picts up untill their Gaelicization were Brythonic and it's thought a ancient Welshman and Pict would have conversed - with much difficulty - enough to perhaps trade or atleast get each others points across. Similar, I guess, to a Serbian and a Croatian conversing in their own languages to each other.