AH Challenge: Wipe out the Celtics

The "Celts" of Britain and Ireland are not actually Celts. They're a separate "British" race. Celtic culture dominated Europe in the way "western" culture dominates it now.

That's a good analogy. The "Celts" in question came to the British Isles from the Iberian region. They share similar R1b with the Basques. I'm not sure how they became Celtic in culture and language, though.
 
That's a good analogy. The "Celts" in question came to the British Isles from the Iberian region. They share similar R1b with the Basques. I'm not sure how they became Celtic in culture and language, though.

That is because language=/=genetic descent. Therefore, they are Celts. They are ethnic groups that each speak a Celtic language tailored to their culture. It would be ridiculous to say they aren't Celtic.
 
That is because language=/=genetic descent. Therefore, they are Celts. They are ethnic groups that each speak a Celtic language tailored to their culture. It would be ridiculous to say they aren't Celtic.

You misunderstood what I wrote. We all know about Celtic culture and language in the British Isles. I asked how the people, who moved from the Iberian region to the Isles, came to adopt them. Language does *not* equal descent. If it did, a lot of French and German people would speak the same root language. Just look at the USA for the best example of why what you said is patently false. The "Celtic" people of the British Isles had to get their language from some place. My original question still stands.
 
You misunderstood what I wrote. We all know about Celtic culture and language in the British Isles. I asked how the people, who moved from the Iberian region to the Isles, came to adopt them. Language does *not* equal descent. If it did, a lot of French and German people would speak the same root language. Just look at the USA for the best example of why what you said is patently false. The "Celtic" people of the British Isles had to get their language from some place. My original question still stands.
I took from this that we were talking about the Romanization of the tribes of Britannia at the time of Claudius' Invasion going forward. You really can't count Julius Caesar's raid since nothing permanent was done to the makeup of Britannia at the time. To destroy (assimilate) the entire whole of the British Isles requires a lot more that Rome was willing to do.

However, if the politics are right, and there are no serious distractions for a LONG time (yes, I can see this meandering into ASB territory), it is doable. It requires that the Roman Army in Britannia be kept up to the solid four legions of regular Roman Legions plus Auxiliaries, Engineers, and Fleet units to support operations to the north (especially on the western coastline). With an uninterrupted series of major campaigns (keep those [$] Talents coming):( in progress, ala Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, it CAN be done.

The trick is, Roman tradition allowed for tribes to submit to Roman rule, if they were sufficiently beaten down. Refusal by the Romans (The Army's refusal?) could cause political problems back home. Forces in the Senate (and even the Tribal Assembly) could start demanding a "Roman Peace", since the tribes were offering to submit anyway. So doing a "Blitzkrieg" just wasn't always in the cards.

Unless, of course, the tribes themselves were foolish enough to refuse submission. In strictest military terms, it still takes a long time for Roman legions to conquer places like Cornwall, Devon, Wales, Lindsey, and parts of the territories of the Brigantes and Strathclyders. Not to mention the Pictish and Caledonian (Broch-builders) lands. The Broch-builders include the people of the Hebrides and Orkneys.:eek: Such places are not hospitable to Roman legion warfare (One reason Gaul fell and Germannia didn't). It's costly, and legionnaires don't like attrition warfare very much.

After all this, you are talking about a whole new campaign(s) in Hibnernia! A Roman general could find himself "fragged":eek: if after all that he says: "Ok everybody! Now lets take all these Roman ships, designed for the Mediterranean, and sail them with our legions across the Hibernian (Irish) Sea and start a whole new series of invasions! Why? I love redheads! Hey, put down THAT SWORD*---"

All right, lets say all the Romans like redheads!:D:p To conquer Britannia itself, and HOLD it, you are talking a century long campaign (including roadbuilding, fortification, city building, romanization, and so on. Even if we are in a Roman Empire that gives such a priority to a Britannian Conquest, conquering Hibernia is a matter that may simply be beyond the limits of the Imperial Roman Fleet.

It may require not so much conquest as settlement, with a Roman population coming in and bribing local "Kings" to ally with Rome against other local tribes. I don't know whether the logistics involved in dealing with the Irish Sea will allow a "Hibernian Conquest" before, in fact, the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes become an issue.

In this scenario, the "Celts" of Britain, Wales, and Scotland may be gone, but it is problematical for Ireland. I don't see anyone coming AFTER the Romans being such a threat to Ireland except possibly the Norsemen?
 
You misunderstood what I wrote. We all know about Celtic culture and language in the British Isles. I asked how the people, who moved from the Iberian region to the Isles, came to adopt them. Language does *not* equal descent. If it did, a lot of French and German people would speak the same root language. Just look at the USA for the best example of why what you said is patently false. The "Celtic" people of the British Isles had to get their language from some place. My original question still stands.

Clearly, Celtic tribes conquered the Atlantic Coast peoples, and the language of the upper class became the language of the people.

Also, I just said language doesn't equal descent. The symbols =/= mean "does not equal." I'm not an idiot.
 
The Celtics team plane crashes? Another way to get rid of the Boston Celtics would be to not have the Celts/Celtic peoples be so well known. Have them be one of the minor peoples of Europe, perhaps even a footnote of history. :D
 
The only minor point of disagreement that I have is on the matter of the Saxons. Their genetic legacy can be found in the individuals who live in the southeastern areas, such as Kent.

My understanding (this was from Sykes most recent book) is that Lindsay shows the strongest Saxon genetic influence, but overall, no more than 20% of English DNA is "Saxon," and it doesn't even predominate in the south.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Celts_in_Europe.png
All I want is those dark green/green places gone.
I'll try once again, this time with references as to where I'm pulling stuff, carefully selected for your review.

RMcD94 - To get them gone, you have to get rid of the lighter green that, to coin a phrase, gave birth to them too, do you not? I guess you could go ASB and toss a comet at them or something, but that wasn't the point, right?

Plague, war, etc. will only rid you of them if you stretch those disasters, as witnessed by the thoughts of other posters in the thread. Strengthen the Romans, bring in plague, etc. -- all covered previously.

That's for the 0-1000AD time stretch (I guess you might add Viking genocidal colonization as a possibility? Or Christian vs Pagan genocide? Still stretching those too, right?)

Before 0AD however, there might be an opportunity.

Let me first discuss 'what is a Celt' - something necessary for the following discussion. Besides, if you're committing genocide, it's good to know the background of those you are obliterating.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts
Celts (pronounced /ˈkɛlts/ or /ˈsɛlts/, see names of the Celts) is a modern term used to describe any of the European peoples of antiquity who spoke a Celtic language.[1]
The historical Celts were a diverse group of tribal societies in Iron Age Europe. Proto-Celtic culture formed in the Early Iron Age (1200 BC-400 AD) in Central Europe (Hallstatt period, named for the site in present-day Austria). By the later Iron Age (La Tène period), this Celtic culture had expanded over a wide range of lands, whether by diffusion or migration: to the British Isles (Insular Celts), the Iberian Peninsula (Celtiberians), much of Central Europe, (Gauls) and following the Gallic invasion of the Balkans in 279 BC as far east as central Anatolia (Galatians).[2]
From http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/993530/history_of_the_celts_of_continental.html?cat=37
It is important to note, however, that the term 'Celt' is not an ethnic one, but a linguistic one. The thing that bound the Celts was not race but that sharing of the same language, Celtic. Celtic, a descendent of an older language known as Indo-European (whose other children included Sanskrit and Latin), has not survived except in place names. Its children, however, still survive in the modern languages of Irish, Scottish, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.

Please note - the actual 'factual' origins of the Celtic Culture (not the Celts, defined by language) is debatable and no firm consensus has been reached by the experts. Some say Iberia, some say Danube, some even say BOTH - IMHO, it makes more sense to spread the language (and maybe culture) from the Danube west.
The majority view, at the moment, seems to be for an Iberian explosion to the west. However, this makes less sense if you consider the Hallstadt Culture, which becomes the heartland & source of Celtic Culture from 400 BC onward, is in modern Germany.
The truth may be complex enough to never know for sure.

I will skip over the issue of Celtic appearance as unnecessary.

Now, specifically, your areas of the dark and darker green are referred to as 'insular' Celts.
From http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Insular+Celtic

A branch of the Celtic languages comprising those spoken or having originated in the British Isles and divided into the Goidelic and Brittonic groups

From http://wapedia.mobi/en/Celt (which shows a copy of your map)
By the early first millennium AD, following the expansion of the Roman Empire and the Great Migrations (Migration Period) of Germanic peoples, Celtic culture had become restricted to that of British Isles (Insular Celtic), and the Continental Celtic languages ceased to be widely used by the sixth century.
Insular Celtic culture diversified into that of the Gaels, the Welsh and the Bretons of the medieval and modern periods. A modern "Celtic identity" was constructed in the context of the Romanticist Celtic Revival, mostly in Great Britain and Ireland

So it is these, the Gaels, Welsh, and Bretons that you are targeting for Elimination. (I still wince at the though of no more Scottish!!)

Now, I've constructed the above to illustrate precisely what you wish to eliminate, and where it came from.
This creates a secondary option, if acceptable. The first being destruction of their language between 0 and 1200 AD - only possible if conquered and/or absorbed or removed from the face of the planet. None of these seem too likely at first consideration, as has been posted in other replies.
(Although I had a thought from a question elsewhere, when someone asked what would happen to Britain if the Romans never invaded -- Would the Anglo-Saxons keep pushing west, overruning all Celtic language with their own? Would it work here?)
The second option, however, is to interfere with their development in such a way as to bar any Celtic speaking population from making their way out there to your dark & darker green areas.
Now to do that, you'd have to do some research based off the surrounding cultures during time periods.

Look at all the PRETTY maps!
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/neolithic_europe_map.shtml


Now you might be able to play with those cultures, push one a little more strongly and the others push more westward, until you get to a point where the Hallstadt/Celtic language ends up in Iberia and not in the Briton Isles... but even that's a bit dodgy if the Iberian Celts had decent water going technology and just sailed north (as some have indicated to me, but I haven't found ANY indication of this)
 
Please note - the actual 'factual' origins of the Celtic Culture (not the Celts, defined by language) is debatable and no firm consensus has been reached by the experts. Some say Iberia, some say Danube, some even say BOTH - IMHO, it makes more sense to spread the language (and maybe culture) from the Danube west.
The majority view, at the moment, seems to be for an Iberian explosion to the west. However, this makes less sense if you consider the Hallstadt Culture, which becomes the heartland & source of Celtic Culture from 400 BC onward, is in modern Germany.

I don't think anyone thinks Iberia was where the celtic languages were founded. However, it's looking more likely that all *current* celtic languages (or, the Irish-influenced ones at the very least), came to the British Isles via Iberia, not across the Channel.

Also, it should be noted that the idea of "celticness" is really recent. It wasn't until linguistics discovered that Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Manx, and Breton were all related to each other and to the languages spoken by the "celts" of Greco-Roman times that the idea of pan-Celtic identity developed.

To the OP, I'm still unsure what you want. Do you want to ensure there are no mother-tongue speakers of celtic languages? This is damn easy - it already happened in Man and Cornwall, and is probably going to happen in Ireland and Scotland within a few generations. Eliminating the idea of being "celtic" is even easier, as I outlined above, since no one thought of themselves in that way 200 years ago. Eliminating the ancestors of the present-day inhabitants of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Brittany, Cornwall, and Man is ASB - just isn't going to happen unless you have a POD in the Paleolithic.
 

Ah, now I know where your odd view of Celts as Anatolians comes from. It's from the map of the R1a Y-chromosome haplogroup dispersal.
My apologies for thinking you were a "cryptohistorian/revisionist".

I will however politely point out that it would help to have dispersal maps of the other Y haplogroups to get a more full pattern.
Plus maps of Y halpogropups are only of the dispersal of men and their sons and since culture (including language) tends to be transmitted by the primary caregiver which is usually women, dispersal patterns of mitochondrial haplogroups might be more informative on ancestry :D.
 
Clearly, Celtic tribes conquered the Atlantic Coast peoples, and the language of the upper class became the language of the people.

Also, I just said language doesn't equal descent. The symbols =/= mean "does not equal." I'm not an idiot.

I see. I wish that there was a character key for that, as I would have recognized it. Still, I'm not sure why you said that culture and language don't equal ethnicity. I never implied that they do. That's likely what threw me. That aside, I agree with your theory on how a stronger Celtic group imposed their culture and language on a weaker group. Who comprised the stronger group? Where did they settle?
 
My understanding (this was from Sykes most recent book) is that Lindsay shows the strongest Saxon genetic influence, but overall, no more than 20% of English DNA is "Saxon," and it doesn't even predominate in the south.

I greatly enjoyed Sykes' book, but keep in mind that he didn't divide the Oisin clan. He put all R1b carriers in the same clan. One could get the idea that the Saxons were either in the Sigurd clan or the Wodan clan. Some of them were in the Oisin clan. You can separate the Celtic type from the Saxon type (pardon the clumsy terms) by looking at a gene marker. IIRC, it's at 390. The Celts show a 24 or 25 while the Germanic tribes show a 23. A gene map demonstrated that the latter is concentrated in the "Saxon regions" of England.
 
I see. I wish that there was a character key for that, as I would have recognized it. Still, I'm not sure why you said that culture and language don't equal ethnicity. I never implied that they do. That's likely what threw me. That aside, I agree with your theory on how a stronger Celtic group imposed their culture and language on a weaker group. Who comprised the stronger group? Where did they settle?

I meant to quote 67th Tiger. Sorry about that.

On the actual topic of who these Celts were and how they came to conquer the British Isles: We don't know. The Celtic languages of modern times are traced back to somewhere in Central Europe, not Iberia.

It is true that genetic studies show significant Iberian descent among the various British peoples, but the same is true for much of Europe, as Iberia was an Ice Age refugee. Keep in mind that at that time the Indo-European languages, of which the Celtic group is a member, had not yet formed.
 
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I meant to quote 67th Tiger. Sorry about that.

On the actual topic of who these Celts were and how they came to conquer the British Isles: We don't know. The Celtic languages of modern times are traced back to somewhere in Central Europe, not Iberia.

It is true that genetic studies show significant Iberian descent among the various British peoples, but the same is true for much of Europe, as Iberia was an Ice Age refugee. Keep in mind that at that time the Indo-European languages, of which the Celtic group is a member, had not yet formed.

That's true, but the "most Celtic" British and Irish people closely match the Basques in the Iberian region. Granted, their language is far from being a close match, but their historical base seems to be the same. My guess is that some individuals from this base, at some time, adopted the various lingistic idioms of the Celts from the north. They then brought the Brythonic and Goidelic dialects with them to the Isles, and this was adopted by or forced on the aboriginal individuals who already were there in Britain and Ireland.
 
That's true, but the "most Celtic" British and Irish people closely match the Basques in the Iberian region. Granted, their language is far from being a close match, but their historical base seems to be the same. My guess is that some individuals from this base, at some time, adopted the various lingistic idioms of the Celts from the north. They then brought the Brythonic and Goidelic dialects with them to the Isles, and this was adopted by or forced on the aboriginal individuals who already were there in Britain and Ireland.

It would seem to me that it is far more likely that Insular Celtic is more closely related to Gaulic Celtic than Iberian Celtic. The drift from Iberia to Britain took place thousands of years before Celtic even existed. Whereas the migration of Central Europeans into Britain took place after, so it makes more sense that those were the people to bring the language there.
 
It would seem to me that it is far more likely that Insular Celtic is more closely related to Gaulic Celtic than Iberian Celtic. The drift from Iberia to Britain took place thousands of years before Celtic even existed. Whereas the migration of Central Europeans into Britain took place after, so it makes more sense that those were the people to bring the language there.

That could be true. OTOH, there seems to be some disagreement on whether or not the Central Europeans brought Celtic culture and language to the British Isles. One theory claims that the ruling class became Celtic, so the rest of society followed suit. There doesn't seem to be a lot of CE genes in the Celtic zone.
 
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