Pagan Symbols of the Picts by Stuart McHardy sampler

chapter one
Who were the Picts?
the question of who the Picts were has been the cause of much
controversy over the years. The lack of early written material from
Scotland has meant we have virtually no direct historical evidence
regarding the Picts. This vacuum has served to create a situation
where a whole range of theories have arisen regarding the origin of
the Picts. Short of any evidence pointing to a major population
influx in Scottish pre-history, and to date this has not been
presented, it seems to me that the most sensible approach is to
consider the Picts as the descendants of the original inhabitants of
this part of the world (McHardy 2010).
Given that we now know that stories can pass down provable
facts over millennia (Isaacs 1991), there may in fact be a hint as to
their origin in the far past. The tradition given by Bede, a monk
writing in Jarrow monastery in the 9th century, is that the Picts
came from Scythia. In the 1st Millennium and into the Early Medieval
period, Scythia referred, not to the area north of the Black Sea, but
to the southern area of Scandinavia, modern Denmark and the
adjoining areas. For a considerable period after the close of the last
Ice Age, much of the area that is now the North Sea was dry land
and it seems likely that people travelled east from Denmark and the
Low Countries to Britain as well as coming into what is now
England from the south.
The idea that people only came into Scotland after having come
first into England has no specific evidence to support it. While some
people probably did come by this route, early settlers were just as
likely to have come in across the land bridge from the Continent.
The geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer states that according to genetic
analysis there was an influx of people from northern Norway as
early as 4000bce (2006, p.190) Given that Isaacs (1991, passim)
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