Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer maintains that the population of the British Isles are overwhelmingly a single ethnic group: the Basques. This group migrated from the Iberian Peninsular to the British Isles prior to recorded history and were conquered and linguistically colonised by Celtic and Germanic groups in the first millennium BC. These conquests by establishing the main Anglo-Celtic linguistic distinction between the inhabitants of the British Isles and obliterating the linguistic unity of this people have concealed the original ethnic unity of the Britons. Not an insignificant claim in the present context.