Talk:Prehistoric Britain
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Is there a more detailed article on the Cheddar Man and Targett case? Seems as though there should be. --Ian Lancaster 11:50, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I'm going to blitz this article tomorrow as its hopelessly out of date. I feel it ought to be moved to Prehistoric Britain too as it sounds more encyclopaedic. adamsan 22:20, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
"They drove elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses over the tops of cliffs or into bogs to more easily kill them" - What is the evidence for this? And is it conclusive enough to state it as a fact? Kernow 12:22, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
Facts are somewhat thin on the ground. What is known for certain is that a Mastadon (which is no small beastie!) was attacked by hunters armed with flint knives. If the creature had maximum mobility and freedom of movement, it is unclear if such an attack could have succeeded. Wounded by knife cuts, it would have gone berserk. That is about as far as I believe our certainty really goes. I believe the rest to be conjecture on the basis that it is a technique other societies have used when facing powerful opponents. At best, this makes it a hypothesis worth examining.
The Southeasterners who used knives seem to have been wiped out by a rival group that had mastered axe-building and over a relatively short space of time. Not something one would expect from a society skilled in manipulating and terrifying superior opponents.
I would want substantially better evidence than currently exists before I could support the theory of driving such animals into bogs. Particularly as the southeast is heavy on the chalk and chalk areas aren't usually where you find the really thick bogs. The really good peat bogs are all in the gritstone regions, much further north.
(I can, however, say one thing for certain. Elephants were NOT present. Mastadons and Pygmy Mammoths very likely roamed Essex and Sussex. Plenty of other members of that family have been found in Britain. The specific sets of subspecies we know of as elephants (less than half the size of the Mastadons found in Britain) almost certainly did not reside there. Those articles I have seen that claim otherwise are generally very bad journalism. JD
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[edit] The Neolithic
This section, in common with much of the article, is hopeless short of references or any kind of evidence base. The DNA analysis can be interpreted in a variety of ways - in particular, low percentages of indiginous Y-chromosome markers would suggest aggressive invasion irrespective of mitochrondrial numbers (i.e. kill the men and rape the women or at least take them as wives. Such work has been done e.g.:
- 'Statistically indistinguishable'
- He and his colleagues looked at Y-chromosomes, passed from father to son, of Celtic and Norwegian populations. They found them to be quite different.
- "But we also noticed that there's something quite striking about the Celtic populations, and that is that there's not a lot of genetic variation on the Y-chromosome," he said.
- To try to work out where the Celtic population originally came from, the team from UCL, the University of Oxford and the University of California at Davis also looked at Basques.
- "On the Y-chromosome the Celtic populations turn out to be statistically indistinguishable from the Basques," Professor Goldstein said.
- "In this context, pairwise comparisons (FST values) of the Basque samples with other European populations based on haplogroup frequencies show that Gipuzkoa-1 has its closest affinities with the Irish and Welsh."
European Journal of Human Genetics (2005) 13, 1293–1302
All of which would suggest that invaders seldom penetrated into Wales, Ireland or the Basque country but decimated men throughout the rest of the British Isles. Other data from language and culture support this hypothesis.
Laetoli (talk) 16:31, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Language
Is there any idea of what types of languages were spoken before the Celts came in? Badagnani 05:36, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
- There are no written records of the time and spoken language doesn't fossilise. Some people suggest that that Basque might have been used widely throughout pre-Neolithic Europe but this is just conjecture Laetoli (talk) 03:45, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Timeline
Are we certain that the parameters for 'Prehistoric Britain' should end with the Claudian invasion of Britain in AD 43 and not the Caesarian 'conquests' of 54 BC?--Chopin-Ate-Liszt! (talk) 15:59, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Beaker People/Culture
This is an obsolete concept and needs to be changed to reflect modern archaeological thought. Anyone else up for it? At the moment I may put a template on the article to warn people it isn't accurate.--Doug Weller (talk) 10:10, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
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- On thinking about it, what it really needs is cleaning up as it seems to contradict itself. I wish I had access to Antiquity because it, like most of the article, needs a lot of referencing. I've tagged it for that instead of an accuracy template.--Doug Weller (talk) 10:36, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Vandalism
There's been quite a bit of vandalism on this page. Dcooper, thanks for your help. I noticed that my revision didn't catch all the vandalism, so I reverted to an earlier version. I wasn't reverting you. Applejuicefool (talk) 19:01, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
[edit] The Late pre-Roman Iron Age (LPRIA)
This just a request: can anyone add more to the LPRIA? I'm looking for the degree of sophistication, language and writing before the Romans arrived. If anyone can help please let me know? Thanks
LookingGlass (talk) 16:12, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
