Picts and Atlanto-Meds

[Krampus]

Thread moved from Racial Classifications/Anthropology (Physical) to here ~ Milesian


I've noticed quite a few references to the ancient Picts being Atlanto-Med in sub race. If Atlanto-Med's are tall and every Pictish skeleton I've heard about measured a bit over 4' is there a correlation between the two besides darker hair/eyes? Picts were in fact the original inspiration for the Leprechaun and fairy folk myths, which included them stealing young children and raising them as their own. How do we know Celtic invaders of the British Isles didn't have Atlanto-Med's among them prior to encountering Picts? I was also under the impression that Picts only resided in the Scotland area and coastal regions.

There is another view, which claims Picts were not a short and dark people, but tall and of Germanic origins. This comes from the description Tacticus gives of the Caledonii(where they are described as tall and fair). If you subscribed to this view you would have to explain the skeleton remains of these other small people who lived in the Orkney Islands/Shetland Islands in small underground houses and passed their time making combs all day. You would also have to conclude the Atlanto-Med type existed among the Celtic invaders already when they started migrating to the British Isles.

I suppose the height factor could be diet related, but the Pictish diet as found in Orkney Islands consists of shellfish and had to be high in protein, perhaps they lacked other vitamins which stunted their growth. The confusion might lie in the fact the term “Pict” is being used to describe more than one group of indigenous people of the British Isles. It would be hard to imagine 4' invaders giving the Romans enough trouble to require them to build a wall to fend off invasions or that Scots would find such an alliance with such short people worth consideration.

I’d like to hear you folks opinions on Picts and how they relate to the Atlanto-Med sub race. Do you think they are direct descendents, possibly a hybrid race or do you feel their were Atlanto-Med’s among the original Celtic settlement of the British Isles. I’d also be interested of any DNA comparison of Picts and current British Isle residents, to my knowledge no one has done any research in this area.

[Milesian]

Current theories seem to hold that the Upper Paleolithic people's were the first modern humans to settle in Briatin and Ireland. The Atlanto-Meds arriving sometime after (they were Neolithic people, I believe).
The Celts are supposedly an Iron Age people who invaded in times later (although I believe they orginally arrived as Bronze Age Halstatt culture, before transforming into an Iron Age La Tene civilisation later).
Current models then hold the Picts as being Atlanto-Meds who were living in these lands before the Celtic arrival.

However, the Irish legends tell us a slightly different story.
In these, the Picts (or Cruthin) as they are known, are relative late-comers. Long before their arrival, a people known as the Fir Bolg were in possesion of Ireland. Their description is strikingly similar, fairly short in stature, dark hair and eyes, etc. Later, the Milesians (likely Halstatt Celtiberians) conquered the land. According to the legends , it was after this time that the Cruthin came from Iberia also and asked the Milesians for some land to settle. The Milesians refused but sent them to Scotland to colonise instead. It is true that Picts were present in Scotland and North-East Ireland.

I would imagine that the Picts are probably Atlanto-Meds related to the Basque people and they both may be related to these earlier - Fir Bolg.
I believe Tactitus was likely reffering to the Upper Paleolithic people or perhaps even Brythonic Celts when he spoke of the Caledonii, not the Picts.

As for DNA, a recent study showed that the "Celtic" people of Britain and Ireland (ie. Scottish, Irish and Welsh people from verifiable Celtic bloodlines) showed a DNA marker which only showed a similarity among Basques and is supposedly representative of Europe's indigenous pre-farming hunter-gatherer peoples.

[Euclides]

Cornwall, which is the darkest county in England and an ancient Keltic
linguistic stronghold, contains, like Wales, strong vestiges of a
pre-Keltic population.... A large-bodied, muscular type, with a head which
is frequently brachycephalic, is common here, and must be attributed to the
Bronze Age invasions.... Besides having medium or tall stature, and a
tendency to brachycephaly, they are said to be heavy-bodied, lateral in
build, thick-necked, with features of a somewhat Armenoid cast, dark, curly
hair, thick eyebrows, and eyes which are frequently brown. This
type...may...be associated with the strong local belief that the Cornish
are descended from Phoenicians.
The majority of the brunet dolichocephals, however, belong rather to the
Long Barrow race of Megalithic introduction from the eastern Mediterranean
shorelands.

If we grant the small Mediterranean type a mean stature of 163 cm., a head
length of 193 mm., and the lower facial and higher nasal indices, it
assumes a metrical character which can easily be duplicated in the
countries in which this type is more numerous and more easily identified,
for example, Arabia and North Africa. (The Races of Europe, Chapter X,
Section 3, Great Britian, General Survey)

http://www.geocities.com/racial_myths/aryanmyth.html

........................


The Mediterranean racial subgrouping virtually no longer exists today - the
first of the three White racial sub-groupings to disappear from the earth,
submerged into the gene pools of surrounding races. The Mediterranean sub
grouping was predominantly (but not totally) characterized by dark hair and
eye color, slim (Nordic) or solid (Alpine) body build and either long or
round skull shapes.

The only place in Europe where occasional glimpses of this original
Mediterranean racial subgrouping can still be seen, is in the Celtic
fringes of Britain, most notably in Wales and Devonshire, and in the Basque
territory of Spain. In these regions there exists a short dark strain -
remnants of the original inhabitants of Europe.

http://www.white-history.com/hwr1.htm

........................................ ..............

... To sum up this chapter, the natives of South Britain, at the time of
the Roman conquest, probably consisted mainly of several strata, unequally
distributed, of Celtic- speaking people, who in race and physical type,
however, partook of the tall, blond stock of Northern Europe than of the
thick-set, broad-headed, dark stock which Broca has called Celtic, and
which those who object to this attribution of that much-contested name may,
if they like, denominate Arvernian. Some of these layers were Gaelic in
speech, some Cymric; they were both superposed on a foundation principally
composed of the long-headed dark races of the Mediterranean stock, possibly
mingled with the fragments of still more ancient races, Mongoliform or
Allophylian. This foundations layer was still very strong and coherent in
Ireland and the north of Scotland, where the subsequent deposits were
thinner, and in someparts, wholly or partially absent ...

Here follows a Comparative Table of Mongoloid and Africanoid Types.

... It has been noted that the great development of the brows, and the
transverse furrow on the forehead above them, are shared by this type ["the
men of the British bronze race," which persists, according to Beddoe, in
"the West of England and in Wales"]

... That in the absence of trustworthy evidence as to a change of
colour-type in Britain, in the direction from light to dark, it is best to
rest upon the undoubted fact that the gaelic and Iberian races of the west,
mostly dark-haired, are tending to swamp the blond Teutons of England by a
reflux migration. At the same time, the possible effects of conjugal
selection, of selecytion through disease, and of the relative increase of
the darker types through the more rapid multiplication of the artizan
class, who are in England generally darker than the upper classes, should
be kept in view ...

That sundry important problems respecting the Picts; the origin of the
modern Gaelic type, and particularly of the prognathous element therein;
the complexion of some of the "Celts" of history ... &c., &c., remain yet
unsolved ... The physical type of the modern Gael in Ireland and Scotland,
and of their apparent kinsmen in parts of Wales and the wets of England,
is, on the whole, best accounted for, perhaps, by a cross of the Iberian
witha long-faced, harsh-featured, red-haired race, who contributed the
language and much of the character ... The great geographical extension of
this type in the British Isles makes it more likely that it was generated
by a crossing effected on the Continent than that it was produced in situ ...

http://www.fikas.no/~sprocket/snpa/


............

The Paleo-Atlantid takes an intermediate morphological and anthropometric
position between the Mediterranean and Nordish types involved in its
formation, but the former elements predominate, and the impression is more
usually of a "nordicized Mediterranean" than an "exotic Nordish" one.

Pigmentation is darker than with the North-Atlantid group, and dark brown
and black hair is unsurpassed in the majority. The eye pigment is often
heavier than what is typically Nordish, and brown and dark-mixed eyes are
the rule. The skin is not seldom darker than the northern European mean,
and tending more towards a southern European Mediterranean color.

http://www.fikas.no/~sprocket/snpa/

....................................

To investigate the degree of paternal genetic continuity in the British
Isles through the Neolithic and the development of Iron Age cultures, we
compared the Welsh and Irish samples with 50 Basques (28, 29). The Basques
are widely believed to be descended from the Paleolithic inhabitants of
Europe for reasons including the following: (i) Basque is a
non-Indo-European language with some features suggesting a distant
relationship with the North Caucasian language family (30, 31). (ii)
Analyses of classical markers consistently place the Basques as genetic
outliers in Europe. For example, the Basques have the highest frequency in
Europe of the blood group O and of rhesus cde, which is thought to
represent the contribution of Paleolithic Europeans (32). (iii) An analysis
of European mtDNA estimates the Neolithic component in the Basques to be
the lowest for any region in Europe. Although the criteria used to identify
Near Eastern founder types are somewhat heuristic and involve many
assumptions, the relative number of types in different European populations
should still be informative, and the Basque component, estimated at 7%,
clearly lies outside the distribution for the rest of Europe, estimated to
range between 9% and 21% (33). We also sampled 68 and 72 unrelated, adult
male Anatolian Turks and Syrians, respectively

In summary, we have identified markers of paternal Scandinavian influence
in the British Isles that suggest the Viking settlement of Orkney involved
substantial genetic as well as cultural replacement. Accepting the widely
held view that the Basques are representative of pre-Neolithic European Y
chromosomes (32), we have also shown that Neolithic, Iron Age, and
subsequent cultural revolutions had little effect on the paternal genetic
landscape of the Celtic-speaking populations (there has been continuity
from the Upper Paleolithic to the present). However, comparison with mtDNA
and X-linked microsatellites reveals that at least one of these cultural
revolutions had a major effect on the maternal genetic heritage of the
Celtic-speaking populations

http://www26.brinkster.com/archived/...D=644191920757

........................................ ............................

Genes show Welsh are the true Britons

http://www26.brinkster.com/archived/...wsID=927150250

[Awar]

Maybe the 4' inhabitants of Britain were Homo-Erectus ( erectii :-D) who somehow survived until the early medieval times, or at least they were a mix between the H-E and UP types that later came to Brittish isles.

I don't know how much truth there is to the claim that these little people were late comers to Britain. Picti is a Roman name used for tribes who painted/tattooed their bodies, not for some exact ethnicity. There were probably various tribes/phenotypes who painted themselves, and thus became known as Picts.

I don't know why you think that Fair Haired=Germanic. There are millions upon millions of Europoids who are fair, yet have no relation to Germanics. In any case, when you're speaking about bronze-age Britain, this is a time when Germanic languages didn't even exist.

[Krampus]

Milesian-

I would imagine that the Picts are probably Atlanto-Meds related to the Basque people and they both may be related to these earlier - Fir Bolg.
I believe Tacitus was likely referring to the Upper Paleolithic people or perhaps even Brythonic Celts when he spoke of the Caledonii, not the Picts.

As for DNA, a recent study showed that the "Celtic" people of Britain and Ireland (ie. Scottish, Irish and Welsh people from verifiable Celtic bloodlines) showed a DNA marker which only showed a similarity among Basques and is supposedly representative of Europe's indigenous pre-farming hunter-gatherer peoples.

This actually makes the most sense that Atlantid types are related to Basque, and the Cruthin are the "Picts" we think of as being darker phenotype. After checking out a few websites I've realized what a controversial subject Picts are. Some Ulster-Nationalist even claim they have a right to land in Northern Ireland because their ancestors were Cruthin. http://www.ulsternationalist.freeservers.com/

There is also some controversy as to who the Caledonia were if they were related to the Cruthin or a different tribe altogether. http://www.tartans.com/articles/pictdecline.html - website on Cruthin/Caledonia

http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/mesolithic.htm - Orkney Island Picts
I'm starting to think the skeletal remains of Picts found on Orkney or the Shetland islands are extremely short just because of nutritional defects or perhaps a genetic defect in a mostly homogenous population? I wish there was some sort of DNA testing done on them. I am having a hard time finding anything to do with DNA research on Pictish skeletal remains, anyone have info on this?

AWAR-

I don't know why you think that Fair Haired=Germanic. There are millions upon millions of Europoids who are fair, yet have no relation to Germanics.

I don't know why I said that either, bad habit I suppose. The theory that Caledonian people could of been "Germanic" is actually an old one based more less on physical description of Tactius in , but also on the ease at which Saxons and Caledonians united to attack the Roman presence in England/Scotland. Admittedly there is a political reason for this theory as well presented on this website- http://www.writersbbs.com/members/gabriele/Research.htm

AWAR-

In any case, when you're speaking about bronze-age Britain, this is a time when Germanic languages didn't even exist.

My intent wasn't to limit this discussion to the Bronze-Age period in Britain, if I were I'm afraid we wouldn't be able to discuss any kind of Pictish people and certainly not any Roman/Pictish conflicts. Picts as a people/culture existed somewhere around 700BC-850AD and the Bronze-Age was 1800-600BC as you well know.

[Milesian]

Milesian-


This actually makes the most sense that Atlantid types are related to Basque, and the Cruthin are the "Picts" we think of as being darker phenotype. After checking out a few websites I've realized what a controversial subject Picts are. Some Ulster-Nationalist even claim they have a right to land in Northern Ireland because their ancestors were Cruthin. http://www.ulsternationalist.freeservers.com/

There is also some controversy as to who the Caledonia were if they were related to the Cruthin or a different tribe altogether. http://www.tartans.com/articles/pictdecline.html - website on Cruthin/Caledonia

[.

Don't listen too much to Ulster Nationalists (ie Loyalists).
Their "right" to the land is based on driving the rightful owners of the land off, confiscating their lands and forcing them to suffer under centuries of cruelty and injustice. In any case, what they call "Ulster" is in fact the 6 counties of "Nothern Ireland" which is an artificial state deliberately gerrymandered in the 1920's so as to ensure (or so they thought) a permanent Unionist majority. In fact Ulster, in actual historical terms, consists of another 3 counties (Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan) which are in fact part of the Republic of Ireland. Therefore you can't really speak of Ulster without including these 3 counties of the Republic. But for Loyalists, using words like Ulster and trying to find some way to legitimise their presence and actions in those 6 counties (whether by using the Cruthin or whoever) is part of their way of covering up the truth of their past.

The fact is that the Picts were assimilated into the Scottish and Irish kingdoms, and became the one and same, so trying to pretend they still exists as some kind of seperate entity is inaccurate and unrealistic. Also from my experience, most "Ulster Nationalists" don't look very "Pictish" ;-)

[Milesian]

Milesian-


AWAR-


I don't know why I said that either, bad habit I suppose. The theory that Caledonian people could of been "Germanic" is actually an old one based more less on physical description of Tactius in , but also on the ease at which Saxons and Caledonians united to attack the Roman presence in England/Scotland. Admittedly there is a political reason for this theory as well presented on this website- http://www.writersbbs.com/members/gabriele/Research.htm
.

I think the Caledonians were, as I mentioned previously, either Upper Paleolithics or Brythonic Celts (like the Britons).
Also, I don't believe that the Saxons fought alongside the Caledonians against the Romans. The Saxons arrived after the Roman withdrawl from Britain. In fact, I don't think the Caledonians ever allied with the Saxons. Even in the centuries afterwards - Scots, Picts, Britons and Norse allied against the Angles and Saxons.

[Oengus II]

Current theories seem to hold that the Upper Paleolithic people's were the first modern humans to settle in Briatin and Ireland. The Atlanto-Meds arriving sometime after (they were Neolithic people, I believe).
The Celts are supposedly an Iron Age people who invaded in times later (although I believe they orginally arrived as Bronze Age Halstatt culture, before transforming into an Iron Age La Tene civilisation later).
Current models then hold the Picts as being Atlanto-Meds who were living in these lands before the Celtic arrival.

The Picts are thought to be by most the indigenous population of Scotland, probably a combination of the Arcadians and the Beakers.

The Picts are described as more Nordic than most of the Celts.

However, the Irish legends tell us a slightly different story.
In these, the Picts (or Cruthin) as they are known, are relative late-comers. Long before their arrival, a people known as the Fir Bolg were in possesion of Ireland. Their description is strikingly similar, fairly short in stature, dark hair and eyes, etc. Later, the Milesians (likely Halstatt Celtiberians) conquered the land. According to the legends , it was after this time that the Cruthin came from Iberia also and asked the Milesians for some land to settle. The Milesians refused but sent them to Scotland to colonise instead. It is true that Picts were present in Scotland and North-East Ireland.

Dark age propaganda is most likely the best description for the creation myths.

As Professor Duncan states the central point of this legends contain Irish (tribes) propaganda piece setting out claims regarding Pictish territory

The Cruithn are thought to be the Irish Picts by Sythm and again a pre-Celtic people.

I would imagine that the Picts are probably Atlanto-Meds related to the Basque people and they both may be related to these earlier - Fir Bolg.
I believe Tactitus was likely reffering to the Upper Paleolithic people or perhaps even Brythonic Celts when he spoke of the Caledonii, not the Picts.

How so?

The territory of the Caledoni was the territory of the Picts not the Britons base of Dumbarton.

As Professor Alfred Sythm states Argentocoxos was a Pict, then it is true for the Caledonian leader Calgacus in Warlords and Holymen.

As does Jackson, Anderson and most others state that the Caledoni (in all forms) were indeed Picts.

It is quite widely accepted that the Picts were the pre Celtic Broch builders of Scotland.