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The
Healing Stones of Cymru
THE ANCIENT
CELTIC MEGALITHIC CIVILISATION
In
the 20th Century unfounded myths were put forward
that the Celts were just undeducated barbarians whose
language was brought to Britain and Ireland by invasions
from continental Europe only a few centuries before
the Roman invasion. In these myths, the ancient stone
monuments like Stonehenge were said to be built by
a mysterious pre-Celtic people of unknown origin who
were said to have been annihilated by the alleged
Celtic invaders. The Welsh and Gaels were thus to
be denied any pride stemming from what would have
been their heritage from the Ancient Megalithic Civilisation.
Now,
in the 21st Century, the application of scientific
methods to the study of the evolution of language,
archaeology, DNA ancestry and place names are showing
that the Celts are descended from the builders of
the stone monuments like Stonehenge and the Cymraeg/Welsh
language is descended from the language of builders
of Stonehenge (who were part of the The Ancient Celtic
Megalithic Civilisation). 20th Century mythmakers
have been busted by 21st Century science !!! In the
following article, I will be compiling this scientific
evidence.
(Please note
that when reading Wikipedia and some other informational
links below that it takes some time for the latest
scientific evidence to be reflected in the information
provided and so may lag behind the evidence presented
here)
The Timewatch archaeological dig's progress
at Stonehenge has been published by the BBC at "Stonehenge
- The Healing Stones" web site.
The dig is lead by world-renowned archaeologists Professors
Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright (who was born in
Sir Benfro). With their discoveries combined with
a mass of other evidence that I have compiled, we
can now say even more emphatically that Stonehenge
is Celtaidd Cymreig (Celtic Welsh) and that us Cymro
and Cymraes (Welsh men and women) are the direct descendants
of the Celtic
Megalthic Civilisation that built it
whose language was Celtic.
This civilisation was of the Neolithic
(Agricultural) Stone Age. Add to this
the evidence that other major European Beaker,
Atlantic
Bronze Age, Urnfield,
Hallstatt
and La
Tene phases of European civilisation,
spanning the Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages were also
Celtic and the implications become profound for both
Cymru,
other Celtic
nations, England,
Britain,
and Europe
as a whole.
Read more about the Ancient Celtic Megalithic
Civilisation at the following sites:
The
Megalithic Portal and Megalith Map
Stone
Pages
Professor
Alexander Thom
Megalithic
Mensuration
Back to Stonehenge, to quote from "The
healing stones - a new theory for an ancient icon"
by Hugh Wilson on the BBC website:
"The whole purpose of Stonehenge
is that it was a prehistoric Lourdes," says Wainwright.
"People came here to be made well."
This is revolutionary stuff, and it comes from a
reinterpretation of the stones of the henge and the
bones buried nearby. Darvill and Wainwright believe
the smaller bluestones in the centre of the circle,
rather than the huge sarsen stones on the perimeter,
hold the key to the purpose of Stonehenge. The bluestones
were dragged 250km from the mountains of southwest
Wales using Stone Age technology. That's some journey,
and there must have been a very good reason for attempting
it. Darvill and Wainwright believe the reason was
the magical, healing powers imbued in the stones by
their proximity to traditional healing springs.
The bones that have been excavated from around Stonehenge
appear to back the theory up. "There's an amazing
and unnatural concentration of skeletal trauma in
the bones that were dug up around Stonehenge,"
says Darvill. "This was a place of pilgrimage
for people...coming to get healed."
Read further details in Hugh Wilson's following article
"Neolithic
medicine - better than a hole in the head?".
Please note the people's faith in the bluestones brought
from Mynydd Preseli in Sir Benfro in Cymru all the
way to Stonehenge in Witshire in England.
What evidence it there that Stonehenge was built
by our Cymreig ancestors and how did they perform
this amazing feat ? What is the evidence that the
builders of Stonehenge spoke ancient Cymraeg ?
- Place Names - the geographic features around Stonehenge
and the English West Country in general have many
Cymraeg names. Afon means river in Cymraeg and is
pronounced a-von. Avon
is the name of the following features near Stonhenge:
a) The river that runs south past Stonehenge to
the English Channel. b) The river that drains the
Downs north of Stonhenge west-north-west to Aber
Hafren opposite Cymru past Bristol. c) The County
of Avon (until 1996). Cwm mean glen or upland valley
in Cymraeg and is pronounced Coom. Coombe
is a town in the upland part of the Avon valley
just north of Stonehenge, Compton nearby has the
same derivation as does Burcombe and Coombe Bissett
south of Stonehenge. Mynydd means mountain in Cymraeg
and is pronounced meunidth. The Mendip
Hills are located to the west of
Stonehenge.
- "The
Boscombe Bowmen". Some of the
Cymro who built Stonehenge have actually been found
in an ancient grave with Beaker
pottery. Chemical analysis of their teeth have show
they were almost certainly born in Cymru.
- Cymraig Tribes (also called Brythonic) occupied
the area around Stonehenge as far back as has been
recorded. On this map
"Britain 500 CE"
you can see the Brythonic tribes in
black around Stonehenge at 500 AD and over all
Britain and Brittany except northern and western
Scotland. Thus,
Cymro, Brytwn, Brython, Prydeiniwr are all words
meaning a Briton or Welshman. Britain is named after
us as the indigenous inhabitants of the island.
Together with the Gaeleg/Goidelic
tribes shown
in blue/purple on the map in Ireland and western
and northern Scotland and the Pictish
tribes shown
in brown on the map in central and northern Scotland,
we form the Insular
branch of the Celtic peoples. Note
that the Saxon "lords" from Germania had
only conquered our people on the coastal fringe
well to the south of Stonehenge even at this late
stage in Stonehenge's history.
- Geochemical analysis has shown that some of the
bluestones from the inner horseshoe at Stonehenge
probably came from Carn
Menyn, Carngoedog, Carnbreseb, Cerrigmarchogion
and other sites in Mynydd Preseli , while rhyolite
fragments may have come from Carnalw and further
afield. Michael
Bradley in his article "Megalithic Movers"
explains from evidence of 15-20 metre cwch/curragh
"skin" boats and canal earthworks from
the northern Avon river how Cymro moved these stones
by cwch to within 3 km of Stonehenge. Professors
Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright have found the
ancient
quarry site on Carn Menyn where the
bluestones were sourced and a worked bluestone has
been recovered from the seabed where it was dropped
in transport to Stonehenge.
- By applying the scientific methods used in studying
genetics and evolution to the study of the evolution
of languages, researchers Peter Foster and Alfred
Toth in their 2003 paper "Toward
a phylogenetic chronology of ancient Gaulish, Celtic,
and Indo-European", found that
the ancient Insular
Celtic language which is the ancestor
of Brezhoneg,
Cymraeg,
Gaeilge and Gaidhlig
(Breton,
Welsh,
Irish
Gaelic and Scottish
Gaelic) arrived/developed in Britain/Ireland
around 3,200 BC (possibly as early as 4,700
BC) as a single language. This is when the continental
Celtic language Gaulish
and Insular Celtic start to become different from
each other. They also found that the Celtic
language subfamily is very ancient
indeed going back to the time of the start of the
spread of agriculture and animal husbandry when
it split from other Indo-European
languages at 8,100 BC (possibly
as early as 10,000 BC). This paper was published
in the prestigious scientific journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America. Note that radio-carbon dating
puts the date that the first bluestones were erected
at Stonehenge at 2,600 BC for comparison
so most likely the builders spoke the Insular Celtic
ancient Cymraeg language. In an ealier study using
a methodology similar to that used in evolutionary
biology, Gray
and Atkinson [“Language-tree divergence times
support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin,”
Nature 426, 435-439] compared 95
present and past languages of the Indo-European
family based on a list of 200 basic terms for each.
The results of all analyses, irrespective of the
initial assumptions were very robust:
"We test two theories of Indo-European
origin: the 'Kurgan expansion' and the 'Anatolian
farming' hypotheses. The Kurgan theory centres
on possible archaeological evidence for an expansion
into Europe and the Near East by Kurgan horsemen
beginning in the sixth millennium BP7, 8. In contrast,
the Anatolian theory claims that Indo-European
languages expanded with the spread of agriculture
from Anatolia around 8,000–9,500 years BP9.
In striking agreement with the Anatolian hypothesis,
our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with
2,449 lexical items produced an estimated age
range for the initial Indo-European divergence
of between 7,800 and 9,800 years BP. These results
were robust to changes in coding procedures, calibration
points, rooting of the trees and priors in the
bayesian analysis."
The branching pattern is also in agreement with
an independent linguistic analysis of Indo-European
languages [Rexova, K., Frynta, D. & Zrzavy,
J. “Cladistic analysis of languages: Indo-European
classification based on lexicostatistical data.”
Cladistics 19, 120–127 (2003)].
The estimated times strikingly confirm the Neolithic
dispersal theory, showing a divergence of Indo-European
languages from Anatolian ones, with an independent
branching of the mysterious Tocharian language
which spread eastwards, and the descent of all
other languages from what is almost certain to
be a Balkan homeland:
- In remarkable agreement with Peter Foster and
Alfred Toth's Insular Celtic starting date, radio-carbon
dating of burials and cremated remains of the dead
at Stonhenge have recently been dated from at least
3,000 BC by Mike Parker Pearson, archaeology
professor at the University of Sheffield in England
and head of the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological
Project in his study "Stonehenge
was a burial site for centuries".
In addition at nearby Durrington Walls seasonal
homes from this time occupied at Alban Arthan (Winter
Solstice) and Alban Hefin (Summer Solstice) have
been found: "The village also included a circle
of wooden pillars, which the researchers have named
the Southern Circle. It is oriented toward the midwinter
sunrise, the opposite of Stonehenge, which is oriented
to the midsummer sunrise." The picture below
shows the Stonehenge sunrise at Alban Hefin in the
northern hemisphere (Alban Arthan in our southern
hemisphere):
- DNA ancestry tracing is perhaps the most compelling
evidence of the antiquity of the Celts in Britain,
Ireland and Brittany. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical
geneticist at the University of Oxford, has traced
individual genes in mitchondrial DNA and on the
male Y-chromosome using the phylogeographic method.
"The geographical distribution of individual
gene lines is analysed with respect to their position
on a gene tree, to reconstruct their origins, dates
and routes of movement". In his article "Myths
of British ancestry" in Prospect
Magazine, Issue 127, October 2006, he states the
following: "The genetic evidence shows that
[around 80%] of our ancestors came to this corner
of Europe between 15,000 and [3,700] years ago [13,000
to 1,700 BC]... [A] wave of immigration arrived
during the Neolithic period, when farming developed
about 6,500 years ago [4,500 BC]...Celtic
languages and the people who brought them probably
first arrived during the Neolithic period...The
connection between modern Celtic languages and those
spoken in southwest Europe during Roman times is
clear and valid. That region, in particular, Normandy,
has the highest concentration of ancient Celtic
place-names and Celtic inscriptions in Europe. they
are common in the rest of southern France (excluding
the formerly Basque region of Gascony), Spain, Portugal,
and the British Isles...Given the distribution of
Celtic languages in southwest Europe, it is most
likely that they were spread by a wave of agriculturalists
who dispersed 7,000 years ago [5,000 BC]
from Anatolia [Turkey], travelling along the north
coast of the Mediterranean to Italy, France, Spain
and then up the Altantic coast to the British Isles.
There is a dated archaeological trail for this.
My genetic analysis shows exact counterparts for
this trail both in the male Y chromosome and the
maternally transmitted mitochondrial DNA right up
to Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and the English south
coast. Further evidence for the Mediterranean origins
of Celtic invaders is preserved in medieval Gaelic
literature. According to the orthodox view of "iron-age
Celtic invasions" from central Europe, Celtic
cultural history should start in the British Isles
no earlier than 300 BC. Yet Irish legend tells us
that all six of the cycles of invasion came
from the Mediterranean via Spain, during the late
Neolithic to Bronze age, and were completed
3,700 years ago [1,700 BC was the LAST one].".
A critique of of Dr. Oppenheimer's work was published
in the New York Times titled: "English,
Irish, Scots: They're All One, Genes Suggest"
by Nicholas Wade: "...Other geneticists say
Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction is plausible...“Once
you have an established population, it is quite
difficult to change it very radically,” said
Daniel G. Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College,
Dublin. But he said he was “quite agnostic”
as to whether the original population became established
in Britain and Ireland immediately after the glaciers
retreated 16,000 years ago, as Dr. Oppenheimer argues,
or more recently, in the Neolithic Age, which began
10,000 years ago.
Bryan Sykes, another Oxford geneticist, said
he agreed with Dr. Oppenheimer that the ancestors
of “by far the majority of people” were
present in the British Isles before the Roman
conquest of A.D. 43. “The Saxons, Vikings
and Normans had a minor effect, and much less
than some of the medieval historical texts would
indicate,” he said.
His conclusions, based on his own genetic survey
and information in his genealogical testing service,
Oxford Ancestors, are reported in his new book,
“Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots
of Britain and Ireland.”
...another geneticist, Christopher Tyler-Smith
of the Sanger Centre near Cambridge...As to the
identity of the first postglacial settlers, Dr.
Tyler-Smith said he “would favor a Neolithic
origin for the Y chromosomes, although the evidence
is still quite sketchy.”
A summary and discussion of Professor
Bryan Sykes's research team's findings
is published under "Celts
descended from Spanish fishermen, study finds"
and "Now
we are all Celts!" . The summary
is a copy of an article "We're nearly all Celts
under the skin" by Ian Johnston (Science Correspondent)
published in "The Scotsman" on Thursday
21 September 2006. Professor Sykes, who acknowledges
his own Celtic origins, comments: "If one thinks
that the English are genetically different from
the Scots, Irish and Welsh, that's entirely wrong,".
"In the 19th century, the idea of Anglo-Saxon
superiority was very widespread. At the moment,
there is a resurgence of Celtic identity, which
had been trampled on. It's very vibrant and obvious
at the moment."
For an Irish take on this research read this
article: "Blood
of the Isles Exploring the genetic roots of our
tribal history".
To quote from Professor Sykes as reported in "Celts
descended from Spanish fishermen, study finds:
"Britain's indigenous population is descended
from a tribe of Iberian fishermen who crossed
the Bay of Biscay 6,000 years ago.
DNA analysis has revealed the Celts have an almost
identical genetic "fingerprint" to the
inhabitants of coastal regions of Spain, whose
own ancestors migrated north between 4,000 and
5,000BC, a team from Oxford University has found.
The discovery, by Bryan Sykes, professor of human
genetics at Oxford University, will herald a change
in scientific understanding of Britishness.
People of Celtic ancestry were thought to have
descended from tribes of central Europe. Professor
Sykes, who is soon to publish the first DNA map
of the British Isles, said: "About 6,000
years ago Iberians developed ocean-going boats
that enabled them to push up the Channel. Before
they arrived, there were some human inhabitants
of Britain but only a few thousand in number.
These people were later subsumed into a larger
Celtic tribe... The majority of people in the
British Isles are actually descended from the
Spanish."
Professor Sykes spent five years
taking DNA samples from 10,000 volunteers in Britain
and Ireland, in an effort to produce a map of
our genetic roots.
Research on their "Y" chromosome, which
subjects inherit from their fathers, revealed
that all but a tiny percentage of the volunteers
were originally descended from one of six clans
who arrived in the UK in several waves of immigration
prior to the Norman conquest.
The most common genetic fingerprint belongs to
the Celtic clan, which Professor Sykes has called
"Oisin".
OISIN
Descended from Iberian fishermen who migrated
to Britain between 4,000 and 5,000BC and now considered
the UK's indigenous inhabitants.
ESHU
The wave of Oisin immigration was joined by the
Eshu clan, which has roots in Africa. Eshu descendants
are primarily found in coastal areas.
RE
A second wave of arrivals which came from the
Middle East. The Re were farmers who spread westwards
across Europe.
WODAN
Second most common clan arrived from Denmark
during Viking invasions in the 9th century.
SIGURD
Descended from Viking invaders who settled in
the British Isles from AD 793. One of the most
common clans in the Shetland Isles, and areas
of north and west Scotland.
ROMAN
Although the Romans ruled from AD 43 until 410,
they left a tiny genetic footprint. For the first
200 years occupying forces were forbidden from
marrying locally."
So to summarise, by far the majority of the population
of Britain and Ireland is Celtic in origin and
most of these Celts came to these Celtic Isles
either as fishermen in the Epi-Mesolithic or as
farmers/pastoralists in the Neolithic from Portugal/Spain
(via Brittany probably - La Hoguette culture)
but with the early Celtic speech being brought
there along the north coast of the Mediterranean
from the Balkans-Greece (via Liguria and Apulia
in France and Italy) and ultimately from south-eastern
Anatolia (Turkey, Syria). We are a mixture of
peoples of a number of different origins as shown
in the maps below:
The map below shows the distribution of R1b (Welsh
flag Red) and R1a (Pink) as a proportion of the
population (Black is for other Y-haplogroups): 
Labels: AL Altaians DR India, Dravidian population
ES Eskimos GE Georgia and
Armenia GM Germany
HA Han Chinese IB
Iberian peninsula IS
Iceland IN India, Indo-Aryan population
IT Italy KG
Kyrgyzstan KT Kazan Tatar KZ Kazakhstan MA Mideast
Arabs MO Mongols MY Malaysia NE Nenets NW
Norwegians PE Persians (Iran) RU Russians
SA Saami SC Scotland
SL Selkups TB Tibet TU
Turks UG Uygurs
UZ Uzbekistan
As the Wiki article on R1b says, one of the areas
of R1b diversity [that is, possible origin] is north-west
Spain (incuding Portugal)]. Further, latest research
published on the R1b Wiki dispels the notion of
a pre-Celtic Basque stratum so it would appear we
started off as Celts as Professor Sykes maintains.
This also corresponds to reaction from Basques I
recieved on soc.culture.basque (before they abandoned
this newsgroup) to suggestions that they were related
to Celts when the idea was first floated - they
actively discussed it among themselves in Euskara
and denied it as a possiblility. To quote from the
R1b Wiki:
'However, linguistic-historical studies performed
by paleo-Hispanists, and also some genetic research[6],
the latter focusing on the lower R1b1b2 (R1b1c)
diversity among Basques, disputed either their assumed
remote Hispanic origins or their position as the
group who has best conserved their Paleolithic European
genetic ancestry, and deny Basque territory represents
a mayor focus of expansion:
"Contrary to previous suggestions, we do not observe
any particular link between Basques and Celtic populations
beyond that provided by the Paleolithic ancestry
common to European populations, nor we find evidence
supporting Basques as the focus of major population
expansions"'
The map below shows the spread of R1b west-northwestwards
(Celtic spread), north-northeastwards (North Caucasus-Ural
spread) and east-northeastwards (Tocharian "part
of the Uyghur" spread) from the eastern Anatolian
region:
R1b is now typical of people of Atlantic Europe
(Welsh 89%, Basque 88%, Irish 81%, Northern Portuguese
81% Portugal, Catalan 79%, Scottish 77%, English
75%, Dutch 70%, etc.), but also the Bashkirs of
Perm 75%, the Bagavalins of North-East Caucasus
67.9% and the Uyghur descendants of the Tocharians
in Xinjiang, North-West China.
- DNA
Trail of domesticated animals and plants such as
goats and wheat brought from Anatolia to the Atlantic
Celtic shores by early Celtic speakers:
On the map
you can see the rapid (10-20 km per year) sea-borne
trail westard by cwch/curragh toward the Atlantic
Ocean along the northern coast of the Mediterranean
Sea taken by the agricultural/pastoral early Celtic
speech/speakers (shown in various shades of gray)
that Dr. Oppenheimer mentions. This early Celtic
culture is called the Impressa-Cardium culture because
of their characteristic pottery impressed with cockle
(Cardium) shell imprints as decoration. It must
be emphasised that this same route is an ancient
fisherfolk trading route pre-dating agriculture
connecting the ice-age refugium peoples of the Atlantic
with those of the Mediteranean during the Epi-Mesolithic
era where fishing people typically lived in caves
near the sea or rivers. The DNA evidence shows the
goats carried on the boats originated in the south-east
Anatolia region (Byblos culture). From that same
region wheat was first cultivated on the slopes
of the Karaca shield volcano just 20 miles from
the
world's the oldest Megalithic structure at Göbekli
Tepe. There is also a trail of early
Celtic speech/speakers into Greece and the southern
Balkans which acted as a new centre of spread (after
Anatolia) westwards. In another movement north-westwards
from the mouth of the Danube eventually up past
the Iron Gates of the Danube the early Celtic speakers
also spread from which the Italic (Baden Terramare
culture) and Germanic languages (Corded Ware culture)
developed.
- Archaeological Trail of the early Celtic speaking
Impressa-Cardium pottery people and earliest Megalith
builders.
You guessed it - look for the Red and Green colours
from the Welsh flag for our origins on these 2 maps
following:
- Place Names, Family Names and Traditions and Language
Inscriptions along the trading route from Anatolia-Greece
to Britain via Iberia.
- Historical accounts of origin of later phases
of Celtic culture in agreement.
- Evidence from Celtic language syntax and grammar.
- Striking correspondences in Celtic Mythology as
recorded in ancient poems and manuscripts.
to be continued...
Bob
Jones
May (Updated August) 2008
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