Deep Genealogy, DNA, and Ancient Celtic Histories

The Storms River Mouth Cave was very likely one of the shoreline abodes of some of my ancient stone age ancestors. Though I had never been there before, it was a very familiar place, a place of epiphanies like Elijah's cave. My roots in Africa are very real. It is equally real on other distant shores: Scotland, Ireland, going back even to the Black Sea! Once, sitting on a beach on Mull looking across to the sacred island Iona in the Hebrides there were the same familiar feelings that "this was home".

The reason for this excursion deep into my own personal history is simple. Calvin Miller in The Path of Celtic Prayer expresses it well, "I wanted to find the flame again. For it is sometimes by looking at the past that the present amends its dead soul, and there is a chance that the future is born with new vitality." (p.6)

To confirm these connections, I arranged a Y-Chromosome DNA analysis tracking my paternal line down time and back some 30,000 years into my own misty antiquity. The results were intriguing. This was a far deeper cave...

"Haplogroup R is defined by a DNA marker known as M207. Everyone who carries this marker today descends from a common paternal ancestor who lived about 30,000 years ago in west Asia. To date, over thirty subclades of haplogroup R have been identified, of which, R1a1-M17 and R1b1b2-M269 (historically called R1b3) are the most well described. Both of these subgroups are indicators of European ancestry with haplogroup R1a1-M17 most representative of Eastern Europeans and R1b1b2-M269 most characteristic of Western Europeans.

"R1b1b2-M269 is found at very high frequencies (50-80%) throughout western Europe particularly in the Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, Portugal, France, Germany, and northern Italy, with diminishing frequencies towards the east although representation stretches as far as central Asia and India." (Genetree CGG Report)

R1b1b2 Celts is thought to have arrived in central and western Europe around 2300 BCE, by going up the Danube from the Black Sea coast. The migration must have been on a massive scale, maybe due to pressure from other Indo-European people from the north. There might have been several consecutive waves across the Black Sea to the Danube, but the largest one between 2500 BCE and 2300 BCE. From there they moved in Britain. http://www.eupedia.com/europe/origins_haplogroups_europe.shtml#R1b-subclades

That is genetic history and it is pretty technical but the romantic in me warms more to the stories of the bard, storyteller, and ancient historian. For instance, William Livingston writes in his 1850 Vindication of the Celtic Character ...

"The Celtic race were the first known inhabitants of Europe, which was occupied throughout by various tribes or clans. The appropriate name which this remarkable race gave themselves was Celtae; but the terms Galatae, Galatians and Galli, were appellations by which in later ages they were usually distinguished. They covered all Europe to the western extremities. The Keltoi inhabited to the farthest west. The Cymrig Gauls carried their arms along the Danube, Illyricum and Dalmatia. They took possession of the Alps, and colonized the whole north of Italy."

Livingston describes their spread across Europe challenging the Greek and Roman empires. He then links them, with reference to Josephus, to Biblical genealogy...

"Gomer was the father of the Gomarians who are now called by the Greeks, Gauls. Filii autem Japhet septem numerantur ex quo Galatae id est Galli.... Gomer, the eldest son of Japheth, and the father of the Gomarians, who anciently inhabited Galatia, Phrygia, &c. &c., either by the east end of the Euxine, or by crossing the Hellespont, penetrated into Europe, and peopled the countries now called Poland, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Scandinavia. Gomer's sons settled themselves in Spain and Italy as early as 142 years after the flood.... they were contemporaries of Abraham and his father Terah.... Here is antiquity for you, equal to that of the ancient patriarchs. Nor do the ancient Scots or Irish appear of a different original. The Phoenicians, another branch of the Celts, inhabited the coast of the Red Sea."

Modern historians may well attribute much of that to fable, legend, mythology, and the imagination and yet there is a strange concurrence with the DNA record. White South Africans are acutely aware of how Genesis 10 and Josephus Bk 1, Ch 6 came to be misapplied to under gird our dubious racist doctrines. Discovering that I was also of Khoikhoi descent was a helpful corrective to any presumed supremest attitudes I might have entertained. Just as the Zulu and the Lemba take pride in their ancient traditions so I find my own origins both humbling and enriching.

Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream puts such romance down to fantasy and imagination...

I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
      - William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", V, I, 4-17

To which, with Hippolyta, I reply and point to a reality and a Joy far beyond the superficial joy of our sometimes mundane world:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigur'd so together.

...for I'm a romantic at heart. Caves and DNA, Celts and Khoikhoi fire the imagination, transfigures the mind.

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za