The Germani
The Germani entered Roman consciousness as unknown enemies, sud-
denly looming from the misty distance. Not that the Romans had a
collective ethnic name for the tribes who swooped upon them in 113
BC, driven by the flooding of their own lands to look for a new homeland.
Only as the frontiers of the Roman empire expanded up to the North
Sea in the next century were the Cimbri securely located by Roman
geographers in Jutland and the Teutones within Germania.
The Germani were not a unified people. But they did have a language
in common. Linguists have reconstructed that language — Proto-Ger-
manic, the parent of a family of languages that includes Danish, Dutch,
English, German, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. Modern linguists
named the branch after the most common Roman name for these
peoples — the Germani, first mentioned by Julius Caesar.When Tacitus
(AD 56-117) enquired of the Germani the origin of their name, he was
informed that it just happened to be the name of the tribe who first
crossed the Rhine and pushed into Gaul. While the tribe had since
renamed themselves the Tungri, the terror-inducing name Germani had
stuck in the minds of their enemies, and had also been recently adopted
by the Germani themselves as the collective name for all their tribes.31
The geographer Ptolemy described Germania as bordered by the Rhine,
the Vistula and the Danube rivers, but in Greater Germania he included
Jutland (as the Cimbrian peninsula). Also included was the Scandina-
vian peninsula, described as a very large island called Scandia.The
ancient Greeks and Romans did not penetrate deep enough into the
Gulf of Bothnia to realize that Scandia was actually linked to Finland.
The Germanic genetic mix
The Germani apparently sprang from a mixture of peoples, so it is no
surprise that they did not have just one predominant genetic marker, to
judge by their descendants. If and when scientists find ancient Y-DNA
from men whom we can guess spoke Proto-Germanic, it is most likely
to be a mixture of I1, R1 a I a, Rlb-P312 and Rlb-U106, to name only
the most common haplogroups found in speakers of Germanic lan-
guages today. All of these are far older than the Germanic languages
and some are common among speakers of other languages too.
I1 may have appeared in the region among hunter-gatherers (see
Chapter 4, 'Mesolithic DNA'). R1a1a is shared by Germanic, Baltic,
Slavic, Iranian and Indic speakers, but its subclade RI ala lb 1 a3 (S221/
Z284) seems notably Nordic in distribution.33 Rlb-P312 peaks in west-
ern Europe and correlates best with the former Celtic- and Italic-speak-
ing zone. [97] Its subclade Rlb-121 is strongly concentrated in the more
northerly former Celtic-speaking region [see 75]. So the presence of
Rlb-P312* and RI b-L21 in present-day Germanic speakers no doubt
largely reflects the fact that Germani spread out over parts of the former
Celtic area, such as the Alps, the Netherlands and lowland Britain,
absorbing existing populations as they went. There has also been mi-
gration from former Celtic areas into Scandinavia over the centuries —
for example Scottish communities in 16th- and 17th-century Bergen
and Gothenburg.34 Some of the 121 in Norway falls into subclades
rarely seen outside the British Isles and can be presumed to have arrived
from there. Yet most of the L21 in Scandinavia does not. So it is
reasonable to assume that some Rlb-P312* and L21 arrived in Scandi-
navia with Bell Beaker folk, or in Bronze Age trade. We should not
imagine an impassable genetic divide between overlapping and inter-
acting cultures. Some subclades of Rlb-P312 have a distinctly Nordic
distribution. Those defined by L165/S68 and 1238/5182 are found in
Scandinavia and the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland, which
suggests that they are Norse markers which arrived in the Isles with
Vikings.35
Rlb-U106 has its peak in northern Europe and a distribution which
correlates fairly well with Germanic speakers, past and present. [98]
Countries with a linguistic division are particularly interesting. The level
of U106 in German-speaking northeastern Switzerland is much higher
(18.8 per cent) than in French-speaking northwestern Switzerland (3.7
per cent).36 In Britain U106 levels are higher in eastern England (25 per
cent) than in Wales, where a Celtic language survives. The lowest level
is in northwest Wales (9 per cent), which has the highest percentage of
Welsh speakers.37 The influx of French speakers into Dutch-speaking
Flanders at the end of the 16th century is recent enough to be traced
through surnames. U106 was found in 26 per cent of a sample of men
with authentic Flemish surnames, but only 12 per cent of the sample
with a surname of French origin, which is not much higher than the
level in adjoining regions of France.38 As with other correlations be-
tween a Y-DNA haplogroup and language, it is not a one-to-one rela-
tionship with no possibility of cross-over. Such a divide would be as-
tonishing in the real world. There was plenty of human movement in
Europe before the fall of Rome. The fact remains that U106 seems to be
a helpful clue to the movements of the Germani.
A sprinkling of men within that distribution carry the parent Glade
R lb-L11*, opening up the possibility that R1 b-U106 arose from Rlb-
L11* in northern Europe. On the other hand, its density of distribution
there suggests that it arose at the head of a wave of advance into the
region.
Proto-Germanic
Linguists calculate that Proto-Germanic was spoken around 500 BC."
A language develops within a communicating group. In the days before
modern transport and the nation state, a communicating group could
not cover a vast territory. The area in which Proto-Germanic evolved
was far smaller than the spread of its daughter languages today. We
would expect a linguistic boundary also to be a cultural boundary. So
the finger points at the Nordic Bronze Age (1730-760 BC) as the cradle
of Proto-Germanic. It was a comfortable cradle for many a year. The
Nordic Bronze Age began in a welcoming warmth. An earlier climate
shift made southern Scandinavia as warm as present-day central Ger-
many. Groups of people from the widespread Corded Ware and Bell
Beaker cultures had moved north into Jutland and the coasts of what
are now Norway and Sweden. There they melded with descendants of
the Funnel Beaker and Ertebolle people into a rich Bronze Age culture.40
The wealth and technical excellence of its bronze objects is impressive.
Trade was important to this society. So was seafaring. Voyages linked
Jutland and Scandia into one communicating web.41
However, the climate gradually deteriorated, bringing increasingly
wetter and colder times to Jutland, culminating in so steep a decline in
the decades around 700 BC that much agricultural land was abandoned
and bog built up.42 Pollen history reveals a similar picture in southern
Sweden. Around 500 BC forest encroached on areas that had long been
farmland.43 Meanwhile an influence from eastern Sweden reached the
southern Baltic shores in the Late Bronze Age, providing a clue to where
some of the Scandinavian farmers were going.44
Scandinavia was not utterly deserted in this period. Hunters and
fishermen could survive where farming failed. The Saami even expand-
ed. The original homeland of Proto-Saami is deduced to be southern
Finland. Around 650 BC Kjelmoy ceramics spread west into Scandinavia,
probably marking the arrival of the Saami speakers.45 Between AD 400
and 1300 they lived over a larger area of Sweden than they do now.46
Farming continued on some dry ridges, but it seems that many
farmers shifted southward.47 If pre-Proto-Germanic speakers began
spilling south out of Jutland, they would soon encounter the iron-
working Celts expanding northwards. The Jastorf and Pomeranian cul-
tures seem to be the result. These were Iron Age cultures in what is now
northern Germany and Poland. [99] Though dearly evolving out of the
Nordic Bronze Age, elements of the (Celtic) Hallstatt culture are detect-
able. This was probably the time in which Proto-Germanic borrowed
the Celtic words for 'iron' and cking:48
So Proto-Germanic in the end was crafted out of crisis. It seems that
its final development was in the compact region of the Jastorf and
Pomeranian cultures. But by the time Tacitus was writing, Germania
covered a far larger area. The border between the Roman empire and
Germania was the River Rhine.49 An expanding language tends to split
into dialects as the spread becomes too wide for constant communica-
tion. Eventually these dialects develop into separate languages.
Branches of the Germanic tree
The first language to split away was East Germanic.50 The Goths, Gepids,
Vandals and Burgundians all seem to have spoken forms of East Ger-
manic, though the only written record is of Gothic. No language survives
from this group.
From 200 BC to AD 200 a warm, dry climate favoured cereal
cultivation once more in Scandinavia.51 As farmers were enticed north-
wards, the dialect that developed into Old Norse broke away from the
core. It was recorded in runes from around AD 200 onwards. This was
not a society with any great need for writing, but contacts with the
Romans had familiarized some Germani with the Latin alphabet, which
was converted c. AD 150 into a runic alphabet suited to the Germanic
language.52 By around AD 1000 Old Norse was dividing into eastern
and western dialects that later evolved into the modern Scandinavian
languages.53
Western Germanic evolved from the rump of Proto-Germanic, and
began to split into separate strands with the migrations westwards. The
earliest split came around AD 400 as groups of Angles, Saxons and Jutes
left for England, where Old English developed. German, Dutch and
Frisian are among the other living languages on this branch. Upper
German is spoken in southern Germany, Austria and large parts of
Switzerland; this whole region was once Celtic-speaking. Thus some of
the most famous Celtic Iron Age sites, including Hallstatt and La Tene,
are now within the Upper German-speaking zone. [100]
Originally Posted by TheTank
Re: Are Germans a mixed peoples?
Tiro
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