Bill, thanks for showing us that piece on Celtic DNA.

Linguist and historian Jean Markale,in his book The Celts uses common words in the remaining Celtic languages (Cornish,Welsh,Breton,Irish,Manx,and Scots Gaelic) to identify place-names throughout Europe,to gauge the extent of Celtic settlement which reached it's peak just prior to the expansion of the Roman Empire.He uses coins found in archaeological digs throughout the continent,whose characteristic Celtic design includes concentric circles,chevrons,and triskels, to further determine the presence of a Celtic Culture.That it was a tribal culture,disunified and with war commonplace among the separate segments,does not negate the fact that there existed a commonality of culture,language,and likely of racial characteristics among the people we now call the Celts.Markale believes that these people migrated out of the area south of Jutland,over thousands of years supplanting the aboriginal inhabitants of Europe. Markale believes that these aboriginal people,the Tuatha Danaan of Irish legend as an example,were the monument builders who erected Stonehenge and the hundreds of standing stones and stone circles still found throughout Europe.These people were driven to the fringes of Europe,its wildernesses and Western Islands,and became the gods and heroes of the Celtic myths.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire,the Celts in turn were driven to their island,peninsula, and mountain sanctuaries by the westward migration of the Germanic tribes.In Britain,for example,the western and northern extremes of Ireland,Wales,Cornwall and Scotland were the last vestiges of the British Isles held by the Celts as the waves of Saxons and Angles swept in from the east. There is additional evidence that this westward mass migration also influenced a Celtic exodus to Armorica,or Brittany.