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This is an page about history. But it's not the history we read about in textbooks, based on archaeology and written records. This is a history hidden within us all, and it's written in a book which resides in our very being - our genes. New technology is today unlocking their secrets before us and changing many of ideas about who we are and where we came from.
DNA is telling us a great deal about the origins and movements of our ancestors. Some Westcoasters, for example, show that they have Korean ancestry, although no-one knows how this happened. It can show us our origins, right back to the origins of modern humans in Africa about 100,000 years ago.
But why is this important? Does it have any bearing on our lives today? Well, apart from the old adage, so beloved of school history teachers: "you can't know where your going, until you've seen where you've been," modern studies tell us that up to 70% of our behaviour is defined by our genetics. So in some sense our ancestors leave us some of their spirit inherited thought their offspring.
Given these new advances, it is time to look again at what modern science is revealing of our origins here in Hebrides, how it related to known historical fact, and about the many connections we share with other peoples around the world.
With the end of the ice age and retreat of the last glaciers around 12,000 years ago, Northern Scotland became habitable once more. It may have been inhabited long before this; primitive man - Homo erectus or Neanderthals, lived in England half a million years ago. But if Scotland was inhabited, the ice has scoured all traces away.
Modern man, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago, but the first sure signs of human activity in the Western Isles only date from about 5000-7000BC. The variety of archaeology on the Islands indicates the presence of several different peoples between that time and the arrival of Norse and Gaelic culture between 400 and 800AD.
The first of these people appear in the age known as the Mesolithic. At that time the islands was probably covered with patchy scrub, primary of Birch, Willow and Hazel, with some Scots Pine and even occasionally (when the climate was warm enough), Oak and Elm. There are no known Mesolithic sites in the outer Isles - although there are in the inner Isles, but there is little doubt that these peoples populated most if not all of the islands. Traces of them have either been buried in the peat (which started taking over about 2000 years ago) or submerged by rising sea levels, what was the Mesolithic coast, in some places, now lies 1.5km offshore. The Mesolithic peoples were hunter gatherers and another reason for the difficulty of establishing their presence is that they seem to have built their dwellings of non-durable materials; perhaps appropriate for their semi-nomadic lifestyle.
Interestingly, a recent genetic study has revealed that some of our closest relations, are the Basque people of the Pyranees. Basque is not related to any other language (it is a so-called Isolate) and there are now several indications in culture, genes and linguistics that it is a direct descendant of the languages spoken 40,000 years ago by the very first modern humans to enter Europe. These people painted the famous ancient cave art of France and Spain. One amazing recent discovery is that the cave paintings show star-maps in which some the constellations are those still current today. Genetic maps show that the genes originating in the Basque area are one of the principle underliers of European genetics (although they are more prominent in places like the Western Isles and Ireland). It's therefore not an unreasonable bet that some of the early people of the Islands may have spoken a language related to modern Basque.
Everything changed with the arrival of the Neolithic period around 3000BC. This change in culture is associated with the spread of farming, a settled lifestyle and more complex technology like pottery.
The Neolithic started in the Fertile Crescent (the Near East) around 6000 - 8000BC and expanded outwards. The revolution has long been apparent in the archaeological record, but can now also be seen in the Genetic one. It was once thought that these changes in culture were due to bloody invasions, but recently, the prevailing view is that they mostly involved the migration of smaller numbers of people - but more ideas. This means that the inhabitants of an area are often direct descendants of the original settlers. We can see this operating in the Islands today, where the cultural change, from a Gaelic to an English way of life and language, is associated mainly with "seeping culture" rather than an invasion of English speakers. For some time, the Mesolithic and Neolithic peoples lived side by side, but gradually the Neolithic culture dominated.
Unlike the Mesolithic peoples, the Neolithic left their mark on the landscape, with stone tombs like passage and gallery graves (their houses seem to have been made of less durable building materials). One theory claims that the more settled lifestyle of farming lead to the emergence in these cultures of the first really recognisable "social order" - their tombs certainly seem to indicate this.
The next big cultural change was the Bronze Age. It takes place against a background of worsening climate (blanket bog started to take over around this time) and arrived in Scotland around 2000BC.
Although the several different cultural shifts take place over this period, it is perhaps most associated with the arrival of the "Beaker Folk". Archaeological evidence pointed to their origin in the south of Spain, and genetic evidence does indeed show a migration, starting from that region and progressing outwards. No other cultural change in Europe spread so quickly.
The Beaker People brought personal adornment, archery (they seem to have been a warrior race), their distinctive pottery (after which they are named) and perhaps alcohol. They seem to have been a quite different culture from the Neolithic even replacing Neolithic crops like wheat with their own, Barley. The interface between the Neolithic and Bronze ages is where we see the emergence of the great stone circles. A change in society is also witnessed by the abandonment of communal burial sites, like the chambered tombs of the Neolithic peoples. And the appearance of single cists - indicating a more individualistic attitude to life.
In the early Iron Age, which started late in the islands, perhaps 300BC, society became even more orientated towards the individual, with the Bronze Age communal way of life being abandoned for separate dwellings.
The great Broches, as exemplified by Dun Carloway, stand as a magnificent reminder of this era. They are restricted to the Western and Northern Isles, indicating a unique culture in these areas and one of the first of many historical connections between these two groups of Islands. Smaller and less spectacular structures called Duns are also in evidence from this period. Latter in the Iron Age, immediately pre-Gaelic and Norse, we find the "wheel houses" which look a bit like subterranean brochs, and it has been suggested that it was the same people who built them. Again these are found only in the Western and Northern Isles.
This last period is often referred to as Pictish, and lies right on the border of prehistory (before writing) and history (when the first contemporary accounts of life appear). However, the "classical" Picts, as reported by the Romans and others, with their beautiful carved stones, had their homeland in central and eastern Scotland. Very few symbol stones are present in the West Highlands and Islands and it is quite likely that these peoples were from a different ethnic background to the Picts.
Pictish language has caused a huge amount of argument over the years. Many authors arguing that the Picts were a branch of the Celts and spoke a Celtic language (related to Welsh rather than Gaelic). There is certainly plenty of evidence that this type of Celtic was spoken in Northern and Eastern Scotland, but there is also some evidence that some of the older languages and cultures had survived and this is very likely in the west and the Islands.
Everything changed again with the invasion of Britain by the Romans in AD54. Finally, history would be recorded by literate contemporary authors. The Romans found Scotland divided between different peoples. In the South, in the kingdom of Strathclyde, there where Celts speaking a language related to modern Welsh. These people were the Britons, and held sway over the whole of the British mainland, with the exception of the far north. Central Scotland was the domain of the Picts already discussed. Unfortunately, the Romans took little interest in the tribes of the far north and west, which leave us with some tantalising holes in our evidence and we should therefore not draw too many conclusions about these people's culture.
Of course, the people who had the most impact on our culture and way of life over the period of our written history where the Gaels. And the Gaels are part of a greater cultural and linguistic force known as the Indo-Europeans. The Indo-Europeans had a huge influence not just in the island, but throughout the world, so it's worth spending a moment or two looking at who they were and where they came from.
On the 27th of September 1786, an Englishman, Sir William Jones, gave a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta. The paper compared the ancient Indian language Sanskrit (from which the modern North Indian languages are derived) to Greek, Latin, Celtic (which includes Gaelic) and Germanic languages. He pointed out that the similarities between these languages were so great that, at one point in the distant past, they must have derived from a single parent language and therefore a single parent people - the Indo-Europeans.
Since the time of Jones, many thousands of scholars have worked on the problem of where the ancestral homeland of these Indo-Europeans was. Eventually linguistic studies of Gaelic and the other related languages pointed to an area to the north of the Caucasus Mountains and to people who left burial mounds there, called "Krugans".
Much argument raged between scholars on the subject, but now, again, genetics has come to the rescue. It has shown decisively that one of our genetic underliers originates in just this area. This is the true homeland of the European and West Asian races, including the Gaels. All these peoples emerged from here about 5000BC to begin their long expansion, which would take their culture eventually to a windswept island at the periphery of Europe.
Not only did linguistics point to the Indo-European homeland, so did many cultural traits. It may seem that the Gaels are different to the Germans, the Romans and the West Asian peoples, but their culture does derive from a common source. This can most clearly be seen in the area of religion.
The original Indo-European religion had a polytheistic pantheon (many gods). The most famous example of which are probably the Roman and Greek deities. The Germanic gods like Thor and Wotan are also well known; but, what about the Gaelic ones? These include the gods, Lugh and Nauda and the goddesses Danu and Brigit (later adopted by the Christians). We may think that this ancient religion is long dead, but actually it is alive and well in the form of Hinduism.
The Hindu pantheon had exactly the same Indo-European origin as the Gaelic one. It has changed over the millennia and been influenced by the pre-Indo-European Dravidian culture of the Indus Valley and surrounding areas. But, never the less, you can still see in its earliest writings (the Vedas) the common bond to the old Gaelic Gods. The religion of the Gaels was probably also influenced by the preceding peoples of the Islands, and this may explain the nature worship (for example, wells) which is not so strong in the other branches of Indo-European religion. It has long been noted that some of these pagan beliefs still survive in a Christian context, for example "Patterns" and other sunwise rotations.
Another interesting link with the "Indo" branch of the Indo-Europeans concerns language. The people, today commonly referred to as Celtic (a much abused name, which historians prefer to avoid), were among the first to leave the ancestral homeland and populate Europe. At the same time, others were heading Southeast to Persia and the Indian subcontinent. Because these peoples both left their homeland early, the words of their languages diverged more; but interestingly, probably because they left at a similar time, the sentence structure has remained similar. You can see this if you compare the use of Tha in Gaelic with Hai in Hindi/Urdu and the many other similarities between these two, apparently distant, languages. The Romany (Gypsy) peoples also speak a version of this language, having left Northern India about a thousand years ago.
The Celts settled in Central Europe perhaps around the Upper Danube and were the first substantial European race in written history. They spread throughout the continent into Italy, Spain and Asia Minor (Galatia). Another Indo-European race, which seems to have common cultural connections (they even wore a tartan-like cloth), and spoke a language which one early scholar considered a member of the Celtic languages, lived on the western fringes of China and spoke a language today called Tocharan.
Successive invasions of other Indo-Europeans, particularly the Latin and Germanic races forced the Celts back to the Islands of Britain. It was once thought that the Gaelic peoples came to Scotland from Ireland around the 5th century AD, but newer evidence strongly suggests that they inhabited their Argyll homeland long before that and they were simply bolstered by Irish immigration. In fact, Argyll may have been populated by Gaelic speakers from their arrival on British shores.
Of course, the Gaels were famous for turning quickly to Christianity and keeping its scholarship alive during the dark ages. Much has been written about Celtic Christianity, and its origins and influences are particularly interesting. The early church was modelled on the Coptic Church of Egypt.
This was the church that established monasticism, its monks travelling far into the deserts of the Near East to seek tranquillity and meditate on the nature of god (as Jesus had done in his 40 days in the wilderness). The emphasis on the individual may have been influenced by Gnosticism. The Copts split from the Eastern Orthodox Church after the 451 council of Chalcedon, because of arguments over the Monophysite heresy. Celtic crosses carry carvings of the Desert Fathers like St Anthony and there is little doubt that in this period there were close connections between the Gaelic world and Egypt. One example of this is that there were none of the famous "Celtic interlace" patterns in Gaelic art, before Christianity came to the Gaelic world - but there was Coptic interlace. If these wide connections seem far-fetched for such a long time ago, consider the many treasures found in Gaelic monasteries - including Lapis Lazuli from Afghanistan and silk from China.
There are also many strange connections between Gaeldom and East-North Africa. Several writers have pointed out the similarity between words in Gaelic and some languages in Kenya and Ethiopia (whose Church is Coptic). Interestingly, Gaelic myths and legends sometimes point to the origin of the Gaels in Egypt.
To the early church fathers in the Celtic church, lacking the convenient deserts of their Coptic kin, the sea was the "desert place" where they could retreat to escape the distractions of the world. Hence, in places like the Flannen Isles and St Kilda we find the remains of their dwelling places. The growth of the Roman Church, however, soon overtook the old church and cut off its connections with the east. At the synod of Whitby in 664, the old Celtic teachings were finally replaced by Latin ones. The Copts are still alive in Africa however; so just as one can look to Hinduism to get an idea of pre-Christian Celtic beliefs; you can still look to the Copts to see the inspiration behind our first, unique, church.
In 795AD the Vikings Attacked Iona. The status of the Outer Isles at this time is not clear. Gaelic Culture was confined traditionally to Argyll, but there are cellular structures of this period in the Outer Isles and these are associated with the Gaels. In any case, there were certainly Christian hermits of the type described earlier, living in the Island "deserts" at the time. The Vikings spoke an Indo-European language of the same family as English (the Germanic family). In fact modern Icelandic is so close to this language (called Old Norse) that modern Icelanders can still read their famous sagas, some of which are contemporary. It's interesting to note that, if Gaelic hadn't established a foothold by that time on the Outer Islands, a Germanic language predated it - so perhaps English isn't quite as "foreign" after all. In archaeological terms, Viking dwellings tend to be rectangular structures of which there are several good examples in the Islands.
The evidence from placenames, folklore and many other sources, all indicate heavy Viking settlement in the islands. It should also be remembered that although the Vikings were a foreign people to the Gaels, back in the mists of time, they had both originated in the same Indo-European homeland described earlier. And perhaps these invaders may not have been quite so foreign. It certainly didn't take long for them to interbreed and form the "Gall-Gaidheal", of half-Viking, half-Celtic ancestry. The pagan Viking religion was, after all, another branch of the Indo-European one.
One great legacy the Vikings left us was mastery of the sea. Their clinker built boats were in marked contrast to the Gael's Curachs, which were built of animal skin stretched over a wooden frame. The Norse boats were built for the open ocean and took them down the Volga and across the Atlantic to America. The Longships gave way to the Birlinns of the Lords of the Isles, which gave way to local designs like the famous "Sgoth" and others.
If Viking culture and language was of such importance in the Islands, why then did it disappear so suddenly? Old records tell us that, when Norway lost control of the Isles after the battle of Largs in 1266, many Hebrideans of Norse descent gave up in disgust and left for Iceland. And indeed, the genetics bear this out. About 20% of our genes show relationships with the Norse (as opposed to 40% in the Northern Isles and 15% in Man), but many more of the Icelanders' genes show that they emigrated from the Isles. Time and language have pushed us away from some of our closest relatives.
The Norse left an enduring legacy in the form of the Gall-Gaidheal - people with mixed blood descended from both groups. The culture was basically Gaelic with certain Norse aspects to it, and they were certainly proud of the Norse part of their heritage as well as the Gaelic part. It is from these people that the modern Hebrideans are descended. They had achieved mastery of the sea through their development of the Viking ships and were basically in control of the Western Seaboard.
In 1140AD we first hear of Somerled, the founder of what led to the lordship of the Isles, he and his descendants united the individual clans of the Gall-Gaidheal. They formed the Kingship and later Lordship of the isles. The strength of the lordship was such that it often antagonised the Scottish kings and eventually that lead to its downfall. A similar legacy lives on in the Isle of Man, which managed to keep its independence and stands as a reminder of the autonomy Western Isles could have had, but for the quirks of history.
The Seven Daughters of Eve, Bryan Sykes, Corgi Press.
Genes, Peoples and Languages, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, Penguin Books.
