Talk:Pre-Celtic Europe

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this could be made into the main article of Celts#Origins (Celticization, Celtic expansion, Origins of the Celts). dab (𒁳) 11:40, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

If the Title is just "Pre-Celtic" it would logically attract information on what happened before Celtic emerged and about affairs that were NOT yet Celtic. And anywhere on the planet. No wonder it is incoherent. So why not start again, as "Pre-Celtic Britain" . Meaning Britain approximately pre-1000 BC. Now that we could handle. If History, mostly Greek and Roman reports and hearsay. Then there is oral tradition. For example, in the (Brythonic, Welsh) Mabinogion, from oral tradition, there is an account of the arrival of the domestic pig in Britain. Archaeology gives that as 6000 BC. Derinos (talk) 22:57, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Emergence of Proto-Celtic

The date for the emergence of Proto-Celtic may well be much older than the expansion of the Celts, perhaps 8000-6000 BC. The expansion is more likely to be the date of the break-up of Proto-Celtic and more old than suggested, perhaps 1200 to 800 BC. Adresia (talk) 12:29, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

If by "Proto-Celtic" you mean something recognisable as the last common ancestor of all Celtic languages (as Latin is to the Romance languages – and no, no reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European I've ever seen would be recognisable as direct precursor to either Celtic or Romance languages, so I don't think you mean that, either), it is really implausible that its emergence would have predated its break-up by millennia. That would require 5000–7000 years of stasis. Even the oldest estimates by Gray/Atkinson and Forster/Toth don't go back 10,000 years; only the Paleolithic Continuity Theory would assume a Proto-Celtic as old as the end of the Ice Age, which is an incredibly marginal view. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:07, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Megalithic culture

It is an assumption that the pre-Celtic populations were the bearers of this culture not a fact. Adresia (talk) 12:29, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

That is certainly true, but any attempt to interpret the so-called megalithic cultures as Celtic-speaking would run into serious problems. As far as I'm aware, even John T. Koch doesn't do that. Especially since the idea of a "megalithic culture" and the very term has been abandoned as making little sense. Many diverse cultures around the world have built megalithic structures. They are no more defining than pyramid-like structures; there is no characterisation of Egyptian, Mesoamerican and Sumerian civilisations as "pyramidic cultures", for good reasons. --Florian Blaschke (talk)

The term "Megalithic Culture" should be reserved for a defined specific style of human artifacts, known also by location and dating. Such artifacts, on the time-scale alone, will transcend any anecdotal evidence of language and other non-artifactual cultural features. For example the timescale of the Stonehenge monument, seen as a multimillennial period of development and "final" construction, ends before the known dating of Celtic language emergence in Britain. Judging by the newly exposed richness of the larger site, many changes in language, mythologies, and social attitudes must have washed over the human generations giving direction and service to this zone of construction activity. (Just as we have all seen such changes in our own shorter time.) Derinos (talk) 22:26, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Lusitanian

Lusitanian is considered by some scholars to be a Celtic language. Adresia (talk) 12:29, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

But that view, among other things, fails to account for the retention of *p-, which is why it is a clear minority position. The Lusitanian inscriptions don't resemble Celtic particularly in any way, which is why it's not even clear that it could be a relatively closely related non-Celtic language. --Florian Blaschke (talk)

The Genetics section

I am very unsure about the Genetics section here. I don't know a huge amount about these things but the R1b cannot possibly be associated with an expansion from the steppes. This is the main haplogroup in Atlantic Europe and all experts are agreed that this has been the case since the last Ice Age, when the bearers of these genes came out of the Iberian refuge and spread northwards throughout western Europe. The R1a is certainly a candidate for being an expansion of steppe peoples. Can anyone else (with a deeper knowledge) confirm or refute what I'm saying here? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Saineolai (talk • contribs) 21:10, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

For new references see Irish people. They can be added to this article eventually. R1b is now estimated to have entered Europe in the Neolithic. Apparently the earlier dating methods were flawed and hugely overestimated the age of the haplogroup. DinDraithou (talk) 00:12, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Celticization

Hello i made a new page Celticization, i used a redirect from here.Please contribute ,it has a future.Megistias (talk) 22:31, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Incoherent Article

The introduction looks okay, but the article then jumps about between different, not all relevant and sometimes controversial ideas - a bit of genetics, then a mention of Tyrrhenian and Minoan (in areas not really part of the Celtic cultural/linguistic continuum) then the Anatolian Hypothesis for PIE and finally a mention of the Irish Book of Invasions. The whole page needs re-writing with some semblance of order. Paul S (talk) 01:26, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Map

The map has four colors; the key has three (that sort of match with three on the map).Kdammers (talk) 03:22, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

The etymology of the term “pre-Celtic” needs to be byworded.

Whomfrom did the term come from? Why was it needed? How is it possible that “pre-Celtic” is NEVER brooked anent Gaul/France?

Also, someone needs to track down an small learned online pdf setting out the pre-Indo European cognate etymologies between a bing bunch of English and German rivers. 2A00:23C7:2B13:9001:C5C5:4144:FFFD:D76A (talk) 02:38, 11 April 2023 (UTC)