Which type of people came into England before the Celtic people?

Question

Which type of people came into England before the Celtic people?

Answer 1

The Celtic people were the first into Britain after the ice sheets receded at the end of the last ice age.

This is thought to have been about 11000 years ago or 9000BC.

The Celts crossed the Irish Sea to settle Ireland some 2000 years later and the languages gradually drifted apart slightly so that nowadays the closest to original celtic is Welsh.  Irish celtic became Irish gaelic, and when the irish invaded the west coast of Scotland they conquered the Celts living there and the language became Scottish gaelic.

So the Celtic peoples came to an uninhabited Britain.  In fact the name Britain comes from the Celtic name of Ynys Pridain which is Isle of Pridain in Welsh or Celtic.

The British isles only became seperate nations when the Romans, Saxons and Normans invaded.  After the Romans the Celts were driven northwards and westwards forming the areas of Wales and Scotland, and in the 6th century AD a bishop refered to modern Welsh as the British.  A fact we know thanks to a surviving diary entry!

Answer 2

Recent DNA matching has suggested that the first settlers came from the area of Europe which is now Spain.  Possibly fishermen.

Prehistoric Man was a great traveller (which is how we got out of Africa) roaming quite far North even during the Ice Ages, but generally settling for the "Spanish" cave areas which may have marked the snow line.

DNA has shown that one of the cave dweller's remain found in the Cheddar Gorge (Somerset) is an ancestor of the school headmaster in Cheddar (so that family didn't move around much!)

My own earliest DNA ancestors, it seems, were found in Asia, but that was around 20,000 years ago.

Answer 3

Pre Celts ? Some older scholarship has speculated that Attacotti were an aboriginal, pre-Indo-European substratum of the population of northern Britain.

http://www.experiencefestival.com/attaco...

Generally speaking, the Celts were an Iron Age culture meaning when we talk about pre-celtic Britain, we mean the time before the seventh century BC.

http://www.etrusia.co.uk/precelts.php

England is named after the Angles, the largest of the Germanic tribes who settled in England in the 5th and 6th centuries, and who are believed to have originated in the peninsula of Angeln, in what is now Denmark and northern Germany. (The further etymology of this tribe's name remains uncertain, although a popular theory holds that it need be sought no further than the word angle itself, and refers to a fish-hook-shaped region of Holstein.

Britain was in fact inhabited at least 500,000 years ago, (before the last ice)  500,000-year-old hominid remains were uncovered in Boxgrove, West Sussex, in 1993. and cave paintings reveal that the English caves at Creswell Crags, may hold the most elaborate Ice Age cave-art ceiling ever discovered. Up to 80 carvings of animals, dancing women, and geometric patterns have now been discovered

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...

So it seems probable that at least parts of Britain were inhabited before the end of the Ice Age, and possibly even during it !

The name Britain originates from the time when Greek and Roman writers, during the first century BCE and the first century CE, described the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland as Priteni, the origin of the Latin word Britannic. Etymologicum Genuinum and Parthenius, mention of Bretannus (the Latinized form of the Ancient Greek ?????????) as a Celt forefather of the Britons. It has been suggested that this name came from a Gaullish description meaning "people of the forms" referring to their practice of tattooing or painting their bodies using blue woad. By 50 BC Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanik? as a group name for the islands. However, with the Roman conquest of Britain the Latin term Britannia was used for the island of Great Britain.

Answer 4

Normans, Saxons, possibly even Romans?