Here's my big picture of Europe's haplotypic divide. The Nordic people - Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Vikings, Prussians - have spent the past millennium expanding west (pushing the Celts to the very fringes of the continent) and east (the Drang nach Osten). South they couldn't go because of the Alps - but between the Alps and the English Channel they'd push.
Grunwald - 1410 - the Poles and Lithuanians held back the Teutonic Knights as they pushed north-eastwards. The Germans got theirs back at Tannenberg in 1914, but then again they got slaughtered by the Slavs in 1944-45.
[Nordics and Latins - that's what Belgium (strange place!) is all about. An artificial (and indeed useless - viz. 1914, 1940) buffer between two European haplotypes - it has no true justification to exist. Saw it in half - give Wallonia to the French and the Flemish-speaking bit to Holland, I say.]
Grunwald Station (Dworzec Grunwaldzki). Now that would be a great name for Warsaw's central station (Waterloo Station, Trafalgar Square).
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The Celts are really another of those 'messy bits'. The word has been misused for centuries as a catch-all to describe the indigenous population of Europe prior to the Nordic, nomadic and Slavic incursions. Many of Europe's Celtic cultures shared neither language nor genes. Don't forget that these 'Celts' were based not just in NE Europe but stretched right across to Anatolia in modern Turkey, and they were 'squeezed' between all the other races. So perhaps the Celts and your other messy bits should be linked in the middle? (But this too is an oversimplification, as many societies would have gradually intermingled peacefully.)
Oh, and then there are the Basques... who seem to have another story entirely.
Don't forget that Slavs themselves have pushed themselves into place (Greece, the Balkans.) Most Greeks today are partially Hellenized Slavs, just like most northern Italians and Iberians (plus the French) are mixed Latinized Germans. Strange, no?
Another setting for the Latin vs. Nordic types is of course the USA.
Here the Nordic team is represented by what might be considered Latins in Europe, while the Latin side are 94% American Indian.
correction: at least some of the Nordic side.
I don't want to be nosy, but I'm looking forward to a summary of th discussion Toyah and you were supposed to have on Friday. Of course I'd be most delighted to read two accounts from two different points of view, in two different languages.
Hope you didn't end up at each other's throats.
The problem with the big picture is that it doesn't fit the small elements. The Anglo-Saxons invaded Romano-Celtic Britain around the 5th Century - the first millennium AD. The Vikings were also 1st millennium, but sufficiently late that they had little impact on the marginalisation of the Celts, largely displacing other Nordic groups, as you call them. They also moved east from England to France, becoming the Normans (ie Norsemen). The inhabitants of much of today's Poland (various names, but I prefer to think of them as Vandals, followed by Goths) are generally thought to have been 'Germanic', although I am not clear what that means. The Slavs came into existence in around the 7th Century in South-east Poland and around. Who did they push out, if not Germanic/Nordic people? Didn't the Prussians later move east to regain these old Germanic lands? Was there any time in the 2nd millennium before Grunwald when the Prussians were not in these lands - Old Prussians being there before the Teutonic Knights?
The real trend of the 2nd millennium actually appears to be the Slavs displacing the Nordic groups. It is not even obvious to me that the Celts were significantly displaced in this period.
Old Prussians being Balts and not Nordics, of course.
It is hard to say that the Slavs "arose" at any time. People back then had a very different sense of identity than that which we ascribe to them today. Balts and Slavs came from similar sources, and a while before that, so did the Nordics.
I have recently heard the opinion of students of these issues that the changes from one society to another, as with Slavic to Nordic say, was not so much a shift of populations, migrations or ethnic cleaning or whatever, but more a change of culture, language, religion, philosophy, or even their stupid pottery styles, while the majority of the population stayed put. This might tie in with Michaels observations about the patterns of DNA accross the region.
Ryszard - an intriguing point - that peoples tend to stay put but their cultural influences spread - religions, architecture, metalwork, etc.
Incidentally, this would make the African-American (whose invention, Rock'n'Roll swept the world) the most culturally significant haplogroup of the 20th C.
Strangely enough, I'm awaiting a reliable analysis of English DNA to see what extent the Anglo-Saxons may have physically displaced the Brittonic peoples in England. The written histories closest to the time show minimal actual arrivals and it is possibly that it was primarily the Brittonic leadership that was eliminated, with a significant part of the local population being culturally sublimated by their new lords exactly as Ryszard describes. However, my understanding for the Slavic peoples is that there is already significant evidence that they have a different genetic pattern from western - don't know about southern - European types. (I don't consider my knowledge to be reliable.)
Even without DNA evidence, I find it difficult to believe that the whole westerly migration pattern of the 1st millennium AD, as evidenced by modern language and the whole range of archaeological information (including pottery), has been primarily cultural rather than population change. Britain should be considered exceptional because its sea coast presented a greater barrier than anything across the central swath of the European mainland - even the great Roman army in its prime had problems.
The problem with Belgium is that the Walloons hate the French and the Flemish hate the Dutch. On top they hate each other. You cannot also forget about the German-speaking Belgians who have several scenarios in case Belgium splits. Last but not least is the issue of the French-speaking capital region of Brussels totally surrounded by the Flemish territory (often with majority French-speaking population) and additionally the city of Brussels (being one of the 19 communes of the capital region of Brussels) being also the capital of Flanders. I do not want to mention the issue of competencies of 6 independent governments, of the European institutions and of the NATO. Did you get lost already? Welcome to Belgium, the bureaucratic nirvana... http://www.vimeo.com/15049808
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