Celtic probably not from the west

The term “Celtic from the west” is the catchphrase for a working theory, offered in a couple of recent books, positing that the earliest speakers of the Celtic languages lived in Atlantic Europe during the Bronze Age or even earlier. It’ll the eu interesting to see how this theory holds up against increasing numbers of ancient samples from attested for the early Celtic-speaking populations.
More popular and long-standing theories postulate that the Proto-Celts are associated with the Urnfield and/or Hallstatt archeological cultures of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Central Europe. I’m inclined to agree with these more mainstream views when looking at my qpAdm mixture models below of three Celtiberians from what is now La Hoya, northern Spain, from the recent Olalde et al. paper on the genomic history of Iberia.

Celtiberian_LaHoya
Halberstadt_LBA 0.207±0.077
Pre-Celtiberian_LaHoya 0.793±0.077
chisq 15.031
tail prob 0.522396
Full output
Celtiberian_LaHoya
Halberstadt_LBA 0.196±0.074
Non-Celtic_Iberian 0.804±0.074
chisq 17.366
tail prob 0.362297
Full output

The Celtiberians show a stronger signal of (Urnfield-related?) ancestry from the northeast than their Bronze Age predecessors in northern Iberia (Pre-Celtic_LaHoya) as well as their Iron Age contemporaries from southern Iberia (Non-Celtic_Iberian). Interestingly, the latter group very likely spoke the non-Indo-European Iberian language. We don’t know what the Bronze Age in the northern Iberians spoke, but it may have been a language related to Proto-Basque, which was also non-Indo-European.
Of course, the fact that the Celtiberians harbored more northern Bell Beaker-related ancestry than basically all earlier Iberian groups was already reported in the Olalde et al. paper (on page 2), but I just wanted to see if I could not sleep out some more details in regards to this observation by using chronologically and archeologically more proximate reference populations.
See also…
Open thread: What are the linguistic implications of Olalde et al. 2019?
An exceptional burial indeed, but not that of an Indo-European
Late PIE ground zero now obvious; the location of the PIE homeland still uncertain, but…
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