A History of Britain – Bronze and Iron (2200 BC – 800 BC)

The Bell Beaker people arrived in Britain from the lower Rhine around 2,500 to 2,300 BC with copper tools and weapons, horses and their Indo-European language and nearly completely replaced the Neolithic farmers who were still in the Stone Age. Over the next few centuries, there was a gradual transition from copper to the use of bronze tools and weapons.

The Bronze Age lasted in Britain from around 2,200 BC to 800 BC. The forests of the Paleolithic were cut down with bronze axes and the land was parceled up and converted into mass farming systems. The population exploded. Elite groups emerged and ruled over more complex societies. Then around 1,200 BC, the climate in Britain became significantly wetter and there was a period of cultural decline as agriculture became more difficult and the population shifted into the fertile river valleys from the uplands and lowlands. The Atlantic bronze networks collapsed and people increasingly began to dispose of bronze tools as offerings in wetlands. The population of Britain seems to have declined in this Dark Age which lasted until around 800 BC.

Fundamentally, little has changed in Britain since the arrival of the Indo-Europeans around 2,500 BC. Celtic languages spread into Britain during the Iron Age before the Roman conquest, but there was no replacement of the population. The Romans came and brought their Latin culture and similarly had little genetic impact on the population. Only the Anglo-Saxons left their mark and even they didn’t replace the preexisting British population. The Britons and the Anglo-Saxons were both descended from the same Bell Beaker population and had only diverged two thousand years before. The Vikings came but had almost no genetic impact on the population either because the English and the Danes had only diverged four centuries before.

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5 Comments

  1. The Paki grooming rape gangs, are more of a threat to whites, than the Neolithic framers wiped out by pre Roman pagan inhabitants of the UK many moons ago on cuck island’s !

  2. They didn’t so much “replace” the farmers so much as they mixed with, and assimilated them into the dominant Indo-European language, and culture. (Especially the IE men taking and intermarrying with the aboriginal women – which essentially happened in EVERY civilization – with the conquers and the conquered, since time immemorial.)

    I agree with many tenets of Nordicism, but sometimes it does go a bit overboard.

  3. None of these so-called experts are capable of telling us anything about the pre-Celtic peoples who inhabited Britain and how they managed to construct those mysterious megaliths like Stonehenge and Avebury. The ancients referred to such structures as the dancing or singing stones. That offers a clew as to how they were built.

  4. The limited availability of useable farmland due to the changing weather conditions in the late bronze age and the initially low population numbers probably had a large role to play in the individualistic but clannish and more or less egalitarian nature and private property-mindedness of the British people. When you then consider the legalistic Roman mentality, and then the aristocratic notions of the invading Aryan Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings/Normans, it is easier to get an idea of how the distinctive British character developed over the millennia.

  5. “horses and their Indo-European language and nearly completely replaced the Neolithic farmers ”

    I have studied this, one of the main things to consider here is how sparsely populated Europe was, even the MED World was sparsely populated 600BC, the Greeks were establishing colonies, new city states, on prime real estate of their choosing in the MED.

    They were the first major wave into Europe of IE.

    During the Greek Classical Age Northern Europe is largely unpopulated, it is , but it is very sparse, there are no major cities, or administration centers, maybe trading posts, that’s it.

    During the Roman period, the Romans were largely moving into unpopulated territory, central Europe is this, the Germanics well into AD move into much of this territory.

    IE came in numbers over time, successful, militaristic, with mass herds, moving in waves, if you study the Greeks of which we have a great record, you can extrapolate, same
    systems applied to all of Europe. Much of the Greek language
    standardized is not Greek, and we know that, same with the
    belief systems, mythology etc.

    Some general brush strokes, studying Indo European Languages, books going back 100 years even , the
    archaeological record, and modern DNA, there is incredible
    correlation. The original scholars studying language gererations
    ago were quite incredible.

    Another major point, the Celts, there are a few separate Celtic
    languages in the UK, LANGUAGES, NOT dialects, this tells you that they were separated over time and space and their language evolved separately, thes movements of populations did not happen at one time. This applies to all of Europe but this is a great example to show this. If you consider the Greeks, the very first IE Wave into Europe 2200 BC, large numbers of people, it is one language, various dialects.

    Why IE movements, successful population explosion of successful society, systems, etc, and maybe changing
    weather conditions at times, fights for resources etc,
    again study the MED, non of this is new.

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