Once you understand the magical, or alchemic thinking that was the way our ancestors thought, then you also need to flip your understanding of the most recent ten thousand years or so to place the sea-ways and the ocean-ways at the center. People who travelled, people who represented contact with the exotic, people who presented themselves as shamans – if only because this was the best protection anyone could devise – would be highly respected, as much an ‘elite’ as existed, and quite multilingual. And their world was dotted with sacred islands, where there was special knowledge, and special objects… and special experiences. Even without language replacement, they would be the people whose syntactical quirks, and whose pronunciation would be copied – not always perfectly – by those they visited regularly.
And so we could see the exceedingly strange predilection for initial consonant mutation travelling along the Atlantic coast, and becoming a defining feature of Insular Celtic – and if this feature were spread by mature travelling shaman-priestesses (in a matriarchal culture) it would leave no aDNA trace…
And think one’s self back to the ending of the Ice Age… when glaciers are retreating at one end of that coastline, and the Sahara Desert is gradually becoming green and verdant at the other end. So that any established Nature-religion along this coast has a responsibility to be there to welcome – and celebrate – this continuously appearing new land… and in Spring-time especially…