Red hair found in [Gaelic] Celtic populations comes from Scandinavian influences; it is not a traditionally Celtic trait. The “prototypical” Celtic genetic stock is pale skin and dark or black hair. Nor are Celts albinos; they do have melanin.
The original Europeans may have been any number of people, but it’s certainly not clear that they were Celts (and that’s not even a particularly likely hypothesis by anything I’ve heard.)
I always read those little sheets that come with prescription drugs. Some eyedrops I’m using can permanently change my eye color to brown. So apparently there is more to eye color than genetics.
Yeah, I always thought that the Celtic languages were rather close to Latin, although I’d be interested in more information.
I’ve heard the opposite. Scandinavians have type 2 skin and celts have type 1 skin, and have little or no melalin, and so which makes them fairer. No they are not albinos, they just have a different polymer, made up of another amino-acid, called cysteine. Which gives them the red hair.
The Celtic languages are not close to Latin. The closest that the Celtic group of languages gets to Latin is that both the former and the Italic languages (of which one is Latin) are descended from Indo-European. Modern Celtic languages survive in two groups: Brythonic (Breton, Cornish and Welsh) and Goidelic (Gaelic [Irish, Scottish and Hiberno-Scottish] and Manx).
Of course they weren’t only ones, they were just the largest group at one time.
Humans without melanin (note the spelling) are called albinos. Cysteine is an amino acid found in the stomach lining and in the immune system, not the skin. I am not aware of any scientific taxonomy for skin “type 1” or “type 2.”
However, I will concede that my reference to red hair not being a Celtic trait might have been hasty. My lone RL reference is not backed up by searches on the web. Reasonably authoritative sites indicate that it is believed that red hair is in fact an ancient Celtic feature.
Actually, the short-lived Celtic dominance of Europe fragmented mostly because they were numerically inferior to the natives. On most of the continent, they were never a majority, nor even a significant minority, of the population.
Huh? Are you saying the first people to set foot in the continent were Celtic? And how do you show this (and how do you even define this)?
Yes, they have dermatologist webs sites that have such info, and some will tell you that Cysteine is what makes them red. Your skin, as well as detoxification of your body, requires cysteine. The skin type rating is from the The American Academy of Dermatology and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Ok. So there’s a language. We today only know it as “Proto-Indo-European”. We don’t know where it was spoken, or when - somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, in Western Asia is about the nearest I’ll hazard.
Now, PIE was spoken by a group of people who gradually split apart and became the ancestors of many of the tribes in Europe. The Celts, the Germanic tribes, the Slavs, the Italic people, the Greeks, and even the Aryans of India (among others.) Each of those is a separate branch off of PIE, and each branch is composed of several languages. Not enough is known to definitively say which branches are closer to which others. There are some old theories that link the Celtic branch to the Italic branch, but they’re not seriously believed anymore.
No, the Celtic languages are not rather close to Latin - certainly, there is zero mutual intelligibility between them.
Link to it, then. And a cite arguing that it’s particular to Celts.
Meanwhile, cysteine is an amino acid that’s present in most or all proteins. It’s responsible for the sulfur-sulfur bonds that give protein its third-level structure. Cysteine is responsible for the basic physical characteristics of most proteins; it’s not a pigment in the skin, although it probably is present in skin pigments.
interesting, I remember it was because of the romans and the and other rival barbarian invaders. It could be that ‘Gaul’ was probably just a reference to all lands not within the roman empire., and it just lumped celts and other groups together as ‘gauls.’
Link to it, then. And a cite arguing that it’s particular to Celts.
Never said it was particular to celts, They just have more of it, and makes their hair red.
Sorry, kiddo, that’s just not how amino acids work - especially cysteine, since like I said it’s present in virtually all proteins and responsible to a very large extent for their shape. It makes about as much sense to claim that Celts have more of it as to claim that they have more water in their bodies.
That was pretty much all I needed to know (I’ve had a basic PIE primer already in Latin 101 - which is where I heard that the Celtic and Italic languages are more similar to each other than either to Germanic). Thanks for the info, I’ll go dig up more on my own, lest I hijack this any more than has already been done.
Excal…um, i was just told that by a teacher and a dermatologist, it’s not my deduction. But sure, there are others stories out there about how they got their red hair, such as it was just a ramdom genetic accident. I guess it’s just a theory of someone’s, and never said it was gospel…so there.
How do you explain the Picts then? Those who are known as “dark Celts” or “Dark Irish”?
I didn’t think it was known for certain whether or not they were actual Celts.
I’m unable to find the exact article I’d read on this subject, but I did find quite a few others. This Wikipedia article isn’t nearly as in depth as what I’d read, but it shows how the linguists found the Germanic roots(way back) in the “Scots” language. (I’d understood that they had found similar links in Welsh, but may have misremembered) Some believe this mummy is evidence that people had trade routes across the Alps over five thousand years ago. (Which is about how far back they placed the proto-Germanic roots.) Not the most recent article on this mummy btw, here is another.
This, is what I was thinking of when I stated the Celtic language has “Germanic” roots, I mistook there, it’s proto-Germanic I believe.
Excalibre, my comments about the Picts and “Dark Irish” were seperate, twofold. The Picts were described as short, with dark hair and dark eyes, and today there is what is called the “dark Irish” or “dark Celt”, which means dark hair at the least, if not also dark eyes.