The King list , like the above was written centuries after the most of the kings had died . Considering that the Picts had no written records they were unlikely to be accurate , they are false up to just before the the time of writing , that is different from being falsified which suggests some tampering of the “facts “ . The use of gaelic was part of the assimilation of that language and culture into that of the Picts ,it can be seen in material culture where the earliest Pictish stones had no christian iconography by the mid period around the time when Kenneth was crowned , Christianity the religion in the Gaeltachd , informed and was mixed with Pictish symbols , by the end of the tradition the Pictish stones had a only christian symbols ,a clear transition rather than abrupt revolutionary change .
It is also not clear to me why medieval Scottish scholars such as Boece felt the need to cite a pre-Christian foundation... which, so I understand, involved literally inventing 40 kings to fill in the resultant gap in the King list.... if there was no suggestion of discord, no dark folk memory to overcome. I would describe this as falsifying, to be honest. Not a big deal if notables such as Buchanan had not later cited Boece's work when the decision was taken to remove Mary Queen of Scots.
It is stated as a certainty that the genocide of the Picts is a medieval myth. I obviously need to do a lot more reading since this is a very interesting subject. However there was clearly also much construction of 'pro-Scots' myth by medieval (and later) Scottish scholars suggesting - to me, anyway - that there was some skeleton lurking in the cupboard. Perhaps archaeology will one day unearth the physical evidence to throw more light on the Pict question; perhaps the discipline might also uncover the physical remains of the suggested mass Anglo Saxon invasion to conclusively debunk DNA analysis by the likes of Oppenheimer? The archived records, such as they are, would not seem enough to come to any firm conclusion at the current time.
Buchanan using Boece as a source who in turn based his work on earlier works is typical of medieval histories ,there is distinction between quoting works that are wrong but which you accept to be correct and falsifying . There is no way that either would have been aware of the accuracy of the king list anymore than Geoffrey did the building of Stonehenge . There was an incursion of Germanic peoples into England even accepted by sceptics ,see above , their culture and language would have differed to a greater extent from the indigenous population of the time to a much greater extent than that found between the Gaelic and Pictish cultures who shared a the same land mass and had even fought together against common enemies .
There are big problems with Oppenheimer , I posted a pdf (twice ) recently with some of the most obvious genetic ones .I'll post it again if you like but a simple web search on dna forums will provide plenty of info on the problems encountered , in fact it has got to the point where he and Sykes are hardly mentioned these days , think Atkinson in archaeology , we have moved on and a learnt a lot since 2006 . It's worth mentioning that he is primarily a paediatrician and his biggest critics are geneticists .His linguistic ideas are even stranger e.g. the Picts spoke a non Indo European language , English came from Scandanavia and was spoken or something very similar in England before the Roman invasion ,there are no Celtic place names in England etc .
