I often go to a Sci-tech Daresbury breakfast meeting, where scientists meet businessmen of all stripes. Of course, the reason we all go there is in the hope of doing business, but whether I make useful business contacts or not, I always enjoy it. That’s because I meet interesting people and/or people who do interesting things. I often find myself talking to people who are involved in things I can’t understand, but it always fascinates me. I find it good to mentally stretch and become aware of new ideas.
We must never stop learning. I remember the words of Bristol University Vice Chancellor Andrew Merrison on my graduation day: “I hope you will never describe today as the day you completed your education. If you do, we will have failed.”
It’s also good to remember how fast the world is changing. The knowledge I once had is now out of date.
When I was in school they made me specialize quite early, so I never really learned much about science. Regardless, I always knew that a lot of what I had learned would probably be superseded by progress. I’m not thinking of the invention of the wheel, by the way, but you get the point.
I continued studying economics. It was a well-worn joke in those days, and certainly worse now, when every year they asked the same exam questions: to keep us alert, they simply changed the answers. I have to say there is some truth to that. It’s obvious that George Osborne learned a different set of responses than I was taught!
However, I thought I was pretty safe with the story. Granted, there have always been plenty of new theories. Having remembered to learn the Old Point of View and the New Point of View on almost everything, so that I could show the examiners that I had really studied the subject. But the facts are the facts. it’s not like that? So I was quite surprised to find out recently that some of the best known facts about ourselves, the British, are being called into question.
I was taught that prehistoric Britain was subject to a series of invasions, coming in waves from the nearby continent. The Old Stone Age people were wiped out, or driven to the ends of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, by the New Stone Age people, who in turn were replaced by the Bronze Age People, also called Iberians, who of course were replaced by the Celts, who ushered in the Iron Age. Then the pattern was broken by the Romans who came, saw, conquered and finally left, leaving us with many roads, buildings, laws and Latin words, without really colonizing Britain. Then we went back to the old pattern, when the Angles and Saxons invaded and wiped out the surviving Celts in the far north and west, like the remnants of their predecessors. Thus, the Angles and the Saxons merged with the English, which explains why there are different languages and cultures on these islands.
I can barely express my shock and horror after reading “The Origins of the British” by Stephen Oppenheimer. It’s heavy in parts, but fascinating. It uses DNA studies as well as linguistics and archaeology. He also reexamines some ancient documents, including the works of Julius Caesar and Bede, and finds things that others seem to have missed. His astonishing but well-argued and well-founded conclusions are, to simplify a bit, the following:
1. After the Ice Age, Great Britain was settled by people from Spain and Portugal along the Atlantic coast, settling on our west coast and Ireland.
2. Later waves arrived by a similar route, including the Celts at the beginning of the Neolithic period.
3. Meanwhile, there were several waves of migrations from the Continent arriving on the East Coast and some along the South Coast. These were Germanic and especially Scandinavian.
4. So the Angles and Saxons only added to an existing Germanic population that had been in what is now England since the Iron Age.
5. There is no reason to believe in a series of genocides or acts of ethnic cleansing.
6. There’s been a lot of gene mixing since then, so most Brits today have a lot of Celtic genes, even if they think they’re all English.
7. And vice versa.
All my supposed certainties are shattered. But it’s good to know that the Welsh are not the survivors of an act of genocide committed by the English.
So you can’t be sure even of the past.
That also reminds me that systems you may have in place that were once fit for purpose, like controlling a risk, may now be out of date because of the way the world keeps changing. Yes. Even the systems I may have suggested in the past! Is it time for you to have a risk review?
