Kent

Reich's lab has gotten around to publishing That Talk from last month. Which, as noted, constrains the theories on the Coming Of The Welsh - so far.

We start with that county on the opposite side of the island from the Welsh. "Kent" is a Celtic term. The BBC tell us Kent was founded by Celts 1400 BC, as Sims-Williams conjectured last year. 1000 BC is when the Kentish genes swamp what's now England and Wales. Sparing Pictland and Ireland.

Some moron on Twitter was sneering at the "irony" that the Scots and Irish aren't real Celts but, bah to that. Everyone knows Q-Celtic ain't P-Celtic. Even the English know that. I'd give a fairer hearing to theories that Q-Celtic and P-Celtic are like Baltic: perhaps less interrelated of themselves, as being two branches of a three branched tree, Italic being the third branch of Celtic, like Slavic be the third branch of Baltic. But I shall leave that to actual linguists.

Barry Cunliffe is saying that the Q-Celtic languages should have arrived earlier, but I don't buy this (yet). Q-Celtic (albeit more conservative, closer to Old Latin) could have been brought - and preserved - by a sea-route from the Spanish and Breton coasts. Sims-Williams by "Celtic" may mean specifically P-Celtics like Welsh and (northern) Gaulish. Lara Cassidy is with me on this one, that Ireland's DNA needs to be next up for study.

As to the success of Irish: Tocharian should have taught us that more-conservative languages are not necessarily spoken by the more-decadent people. Toch-A (for Agnean) was the innovative branch. Its manuscripts are swamped by Toch-B (for, er, Kuchean). Latin is more conservative than Greek. Arabic is arguably more conservative than any of the other West Semitics. And so on.

What the researchers conjecture about lactase-persistence in the British Isles, being a result of crisis, is near-proven for the spread of Old Irish in Ireland, that it followed a turn-of-millennium crisis.

EUROGENES 12/23: Smoke if you got 'em.