Go back where you come from! You violate our traditions and are trying to replace us!
I guess that’s a familiar complaint. Britons were complaining about all those immigrants from the European mainland who were waltzing in, smug as you please, after the fall of Rome, and I presume they were taking all the jerbs. Now science demonstrates the takeover.
In the eighth century C.E., an English monk named Bede wrote the history of the island, saying Rome’s decline in about 400 C.E. opened the way to an invasion from the east. Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes from what is today northwestern Germany and southern Denmark “came over into the island, and they began to increase so much, that they became terrible to the natives.”
But in the later 20th century, many archaeologists suspected Bede, writing centuries later, had exaggerated the invasion’s scale. Instead, they envisioned a small migration of a warrior elite, who imposed their imported culture on the existing population. Now, a sweeping genomic study, published this week in Nature, suggests Bede may have been at least partly right. New DNA samples from 494 people who died in England between 400 and 900 C.E. show they derived more than three-quarters of their ancestry from Northern Europe.
It was the Angles and the Saxons!
“You can’t deny there was a big shift in material culture—Roman Britain looks very different from the Anglo-Saxon period 200 years later,” Hills says. In spite of that, “Most archaeologists have been critical of the idea of migration,” rejecting it as an overly simplistic explanation for cultural change.
But the new DNA analysis revives it. Together with previously published DNA, samples from more than 20 cemeteries along England’s eastern coast suggest a rapid, large-scale migration from Northern Europe, beginning by 450 C.E. at the latest. “Some Anglo-Saxon sites look almost 100% continental European,” says co-author Joscha Gretzinger, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “The only explanation is a large amount of people coming in from the North Sea zone.”
Anglo-Saxons go home! Pack up your things and move back to Germany. Or France. Or Poland. And take your foreign ways and your strange foods and your filthy habits with you.<
Except…here comes the kicker.
Traces of western British and Irish ancestry in people buried on the continent suggest a reverse migration, too, with migrants’ descendants moving back after generations in Great Britain. The results undercut the idea of Great Britain as an isolated island, upset only occasionally by invasions. “Actually, the North Sea was a highway, where people were coming and going,” Hills says. “Maybe mobility is a more normal human state than we think.”
So, like, maybe we should just get used to populations changing over time?
Yup, and before that it was beakers…
As I guessed before looking, David Reich is one of the senior authors. He’s famous for his research theme that large migrations and large-scale ethnic wipeouts are the norm of human history (eg, middle eastern hunter gatherers wiping out indigenous europeans, etc, etc.), having written a book and resting part of his scientific reputation on that idea. (He’s famous for other things like methods for ancient DNA analysis, of course). That’s worth keeping that in mind when evaluating the evidence.
Without stating a conclusion on it myself, it’s also worth noting he has been criticized for this writing on race: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bfopinion/race-genetics-david-reich
And finally, as I had guessed, this article has sections relying on evidence from PCA analysis. However, there has been criticism specifically of Reich’s use of PCA, for instance see this recently published paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14395-4
The criticism is that Reich (and others) have been using PCA as evidence of mass migrations, however it seems that users of PCA can easily use it to get the outcome they wanted beforehand.
That is not to say it is all wrong, just that it’s good to be aware of these current debates when evaluating this research.
In August, Science had an issue with DNA from a large number of people in Caucasus, Anatolia, the Pontic steppe and the Balkans and Greece 3000 BC to 1200 BC.
It is complicated, but there was a lot of movement.
BTW the neolithic Brits supplied less DNA to the present population than the bronze-age immigrants who came up from the Pyrenean peninsula (and were mostly descendants from the Pontic steppe/Yamnaya people who displaced the original population in Spain).
The bronze-age Brit immigrants were probably indo-European speakers.
They took over the megalith culture from the locals, which created a confusing continuity amidst all the change.
The big difference between anglo-saxons and the later vikings was not language or even religion, but the ship design. Clinker-built ships was something remarkable for the time and provided rapid transportation and a crucial advantage.
260 years later, french-speaking viking descendants displaced anglo-saxon rulers (who had just ejected a Danish dynasty) and commissioned the Bayeux tapestry.
“Maybe mobility is a more normal human state than we think.”
I love that. And yes. How did humans leave Africa? We walked. Too cold up north? Invent fire and keep walking. How did humans get to America? More walking. In fact IIRC there were multiple waves of migration into the Americas. Want to migrate through Indonesia and Polynesia? Invent boats. Our ancestors were just doing what most species do. We find niches and fill them.
Xenophobia is NOT natural. To quote Charlie Chaplin “We want to live by each other’s happiness, not each other’s misery”.
There are some big anglo-saxon burial mounds on the English East coast for the chieftains Hengist and Horsa.
In current Swedish, hingst means stallion, so there is a close linguistic connection even today.
The Celtic languages lived on in Cornwall and some islands surprisingly long, and remain in Cymru and Alba.
(Wales and Scotland, if you are filthy siche/sassenacs/saxons).
Ted Alexandro, meme / quote on facebook.
Truth. If only.
Tho’ not reality. Sadly.
Guess we’ll have to tell ’em that ourselves.
Under the rock they hide under whenever fascism isn’ t rising.. 2022 and STILL fucking nazis? Really?
Wildflowers – Things of Stone & Wood epic song linked in the hypertext.
Hengst means a particular part of a Horsa, and the horse twins are probably as mythical as the twins that were suckled by a she-wolf.
There is no evidence for a large scale Anglo-Saxon invasion as recounted by Bede, but this study is entirely consistent with the post-Roman establishment of trade routes and trading colonies along the south east coast of England.
People have been traveling across the channel ever since it flooded Doggerland.
The Amesbury Archer was buried at Stonehenge, but born in the Central Rhineland on the Continent. He was buried with five of those famous Beakers, copper arrowheads, and the oldest gold ornaments found in Britain. He was also missing a kneecap and severely disabled due to an injury.
It’s utterly unsurprising that group migration included women and children, not to mention that there are multiple sites where Anglo-Saxon women have weapons as grave goods. Assuming that any warriors are exclusively male is as erroneous as Bede’s casual assumption that the incoming population were heathen barbarians. The helmet above and other grave goods in that mound alone are evidence of some people with boats, highly advanced artisans, and skilled tradespeople.
There is an excellent paper linked within the article PZ has provided above that has many details of the various archeological and genetic evidence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amesbury_Archer
I hope not to derail the thread, but knowing some of us care about language, I have to say I’ll never get used to weigh (in kilograms?), measure (in cubic cm?), or value (in what currency?) A number of people.
@birgerjohansson
The modern Scottish Gaelic language is a later import from Ireland though. The original Celtic language of Scotland was a Brythonic language.
#2: Are you telling me that the TRUTH of OBJECTIVE SCIENCE sometimes contains biases? Say it ain’t so!
I hope some day that the myth that people lived in some kind of isolation from the other people around them dies completely. It is not in anyway a new phenomena we humans really like to move about and go visiting, and searching and questing and pilgrimaging and just moving to a different place. it is one of the things we do and have always done since we got down from one tree and went to another one.
#12 Often the ensuing debates are the fun part! I enjoyed reading Reich’s book despite (because of?) the skepticism.
lasius @11:
That’s the commonly held story, but it’s also possible that people have been crossing between Ulster and Argyll since before the divergence of P-Celtic and Q-Celtic (according to the Insular Celtic hypothesis). In that case, Argyll could have been Gaelic since that divergence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewan_Campbell
To clarify: The Insular Celtic hypothesis isn’t about people crossing the sea; it’s that P-Celtic and Q-Celtic developed from a common ancestor within the British Isles.
The episode of Tides of History (Thanks Marcus for the recommend at stderr) titled “Migration, Ancient DNA, and European Prehistory: Interview with Kristian Kristiansen” has some good points about interpretation of ancient DNA. Specifically, well, some people buried their dead as a common practice. Other people burned their dead. One of those practices leaves DNA, the other doesn’t.
So, the study above suggests that people in Britain -who were buried in a manner and in conditions that were amenable for preserving their DNA- traced their ancestry to Northern Europe. Maybe they cover all this but 400 is quite a transition in material and burial culture in britain (end of the roman period.) So it’s tricky to disentangle migration from other changes.
Apparently ‘migrant replacement’ coming from British historians and archeologists provokes a bit of an eye roll from others outside the country in the community when it comes to describing major changes in society. We are a very weird, racist and fearful little island sometimes.
The Great Replacement Catastrophe of the 19th century was the immigration of Catholic Germans and Irish to the USA. The English White Anglo Saxon Protestants were afraid of being replaced.
There were anti-immigrant riots all through the 19th century that killed dozens at the least.
And…they were right!!!
The WASPs got overrun by Germans and Irish.
The WASPs aren’t even in second place since that is the Irish.
No one even noticed or cared.
It was no big deal.
The leader of the anti-German Irish Catholics was the Native American Party commonly called the No Nothings.
They even ran the famous Millard Fillmore, a former president, as a candidate in 1856.
@ 10 René
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/amount
I suppose one is forced to accept that it is not only populations that change over time, but also language. ;-)
What the Nature paper says quite a lot about, but the Science write-up has ignored, is evidence of substantial genetic contribution after the initial Anglo-Saxon period from the French Iron Age population (which is different from the British Iron Age population, still well represented in the “WBI” – Western British and Irish, ie Wales, Ireland and Scotland).
This is not something easily tied to written histories. The studies of the Early Middle Age cemeteries that are the main subject of this paper may show the start of this in the southernmost sites used (that face France across the Channel), but the area that has ended up in Britain with the most French Iron Age ancestry is East Anglia, across the North Sea from the Netherlands. The Norman Conquest is one suggestion, but there’s no reason to think that had a big effect on East Anglia compared with other regions, and the written and archaeological evidence has always pointed to that as an elite takeover, not a mass migration.
“We estimate that the ancestry of the present-day English ranges between 25% and 47% England EMA CNE-like, 11% and 57% England LIA-like and 14% and 43% France IA-like. ” (Early Middle Ages Continental Northern European, Late Iron Age and Iron Age for the abbreviations).
As to Reich’s influence on the paper: there are very many authors listed (about 80), he’s far down in the list, and I can’t see that he’s been quoted in articles on it. Is he really a “senior” author of it (other than, perhaps, being one of the older ones)?
@astringer – right, bloody beaker folk, coming over here with their beakers. With their drinking vessels! WHAT’S WRONG WITH JUST CUPPING UP THE WATER IN YOUR HANDS, AND LICKING IT UP LIKE A CAT?! My name’s Paul Nuttals of UKIPs and I say we need to ensure the brightest and best beaker folk stay in the Iberian Peninsula, and FILL IT WITH BEAKERS!!
(For those that didn’t get the reference, it’s a Stewart Lee bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cgeXd5kRDg )
@17 mikemcnally
The supporting study linked within the article notes that there only eight individuals who have had their DNA successfully sequenced at time of writing. They use teeth and radioisotopes to establish place of birth. They also note that the DNA of people from South England, Normandy, the Low Countries, and Denmark are indistinguishable, and go into details of lifestyle called “brew and stew” which affects the dating.
They cover it and then there is a very long and complex supporting paper that details exactly how they distinguish between various human remains.
. Huh? France doesn’t exist and Post Roman Britain is not Iron Age. The Franks are just as Germanic as the Angles and the Saxons.
The entire point of the study is that the three lines of written history by Bede aren’t reliable and there is zero evidence of invasion, elite takeover, or mass migration. 494 individuals over a 500 year period is not many people added to the 3.5 million post Roman population.
East Anglia is where Whitby and St Hilde come into the process. Any notions of elite are mostly reflecting bias of modern historians and the sexist Christian church that came later.
There seems to be little known about Britain from the 5th century to the 9th. The population collapsed after the Romans left and things pretty much fell apart.You can find Roman remains all over Britain but dark ages stuff is very scarce.”Invaders” from Europe would have found empty space
The venerable Bede is a fascinating man. He never left his library, researching and writing book after book on math, science, history.. The abbot on the other hand traveled widely, buying crates of books where ever he went and sending them back to the monastery so it had one of the best libraries in Europe..The abbot would also “boroow” books from other libraries and send those back too.
Further to some of the more sceptical posts above, I note that the sample came from cemetries on the east coast – where you would expect the biggest concentration of incomers from the European mainland. I’ve seen other studies indicating that the Anglo-Saxon invasions/migrations contributed about 5% to modern British DNA.
raven@18,
You’ve posted similar rubbish before. No, the Germans and Irish did not arrive in such numbers as to give rise to more descendants than the largely British-descended colonists who were there in 1800, who didn’t stop producing children, either among themselves or with immigrants from elsewhere. What people (I’m tempted to say particularly Americans!) say about their ancestry tells you very little. Surnames, and census returns, confirm that among white non-Hispanic Americans, British descent predominates.
KG you are wrong once again.
The source is the US census bureau, the US government agency in charge of collecting population statistics.
Repeated by a UK source, The Economist.
If you choose to believe what you want to believe rather than what the data says, so what.
That isn’t my problem.
A factor that is not mentioned in any of these papers is climate change, and the fact that the coastal lands of the Angles and Saxons in particular were completely inundated by the sea during the late Roman period and beyond.
The first flood wiped out villages in about 250 AD, there is a good map at the link showing the affected areas all around the North Sea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_transgression
I found this on the internet years ago. Yes, those darn immigrants:
http://theartsinarizona.org/gobacktoyourcountry.jpg
@Tethys [French Iron Age ancestry]
“Huh? France doesn’t exist and Post Roman Britain is not Iron Age. The Franks are just as Germanic as the Angles and the Saxons.”
I’ve no idea what you mean by “France doesn’t exist”. The point is that they’re not comparing the genetics to “Post Roman Britain”, but to Iron Age France – “Iron Age Gaul”, if you want. Before any Franks (who did not replace the existing inhabitants) arrived.
“The entire point of the study is that the three lines of written history by Bede aren’t reliable and there is zero evidence of invasion, elite takeover, or mass migration. 494 individuals over a 500 year period is not many people added to the 3.5 million post Roman population.”
No, that’s not “the entire point of the study”. In fact, that’s a useless misreading. The study supports what Bede said – that many Angles and Saxons came over (not just a warrior elite, and including plenty of women), so “mass migration” is a good term. If you think this means there were 494 individuals compared to 3.5 million, then you don’t understand statistics or samples.
“East Anglia is where Whitby and St Hilde come into the process. Any notions of elite are mostly reflecting bias of modern historians and the sexist Christian church that came later.”
No, Whitby is not in East Anglia (it’s in Yorkshire). I have no idea why you bring up St. Hilda in connection with genetics or migration. She is a complete red herring, however much she interests you.
Ethicsgradient
Gaul is accurate. Any scientist who uses a modern ethnicity or nationality like “French” to describe Iron Age populations should be slapped with a red herring. Gauls and Gaels are related Western European Iron Age ‘Celtic’ populations that are all over Roman histories. They even get a whole book in the Bible known as Epistle to the Galatians.
The population of England at the end of Roman occupation is estimated at 3.5 million. This study is literally 494 individuals that come from Anglo-Saxon graveyards, and span a 500 year period. Before this study there were only 8 samples of aDNA from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ sites.
75% of the new aDNA samples in this study show admixture, so that doesn’t actually support the claim of mass migration. Nice own goal in claiming that I somehow don’t understand how statistics or samples work in populations, despite not noticing that the 494 individuals come from the OP.
I did not claim Whitby was anywhere, but you are truly ignorant on the subject of early medieval history if you can’t figure out why I would mention a well documented (by Bede!) Anglo Saxon Abbess in connection with East Anglia and Frankish rulers.
Did you notice the Sutton Hoo helmet that illustrates this post? It is thought to be the burial mound (which also contained an entire ship) of Rædwald. From wiki:
The Wuffingas are mentioned in Beowulf.
Edwin is Hilde’s uncle, thus she is rather important to understanding how Britain became Anglo Saxon. I could have mentioned St Æbbe, or St Radegund, or Charlemagne’s mother Bertrada. The point is that those Anglo Saxons in Britannia aren’t different from the Franks genetically, and they clearly had far more egalitarian societies with women in positions of power. Sadly, most of the written records left by Goths or Merovingians have not survived. Justinian and Louis the Pious are both recorded as destroying them, though only the Vikings get blamed.
Raedwalds father has a Hunnic name, and you need to go back to Attila, Goths, Visigoths, Lombards, Vendels, and the fall of Rome to have any grasp on the concept of heritable royalty within the various Germanic tribes during the Migration period.
Theodoric the Great had a very interesting family tree, but the crucial link is his wife Audofleda.
Basina was the geniatrix of the Merovingian dynasty, and mother to Clovis and Audofleda. Their capitol was Tornai, which is an ancient city located in Belgium. We have law codes from Merovingian times, but little else in the way of documentation of this era. All evidence of the supposed ‘barbarian’ hordes shows that Rome was horribly barbaric to its client states, and that’s why it got sacked by the Vendels (who owned Carthage at that time) and later the Goths.
Soooo, do go educate yourself on those women before claiming I am ignorant of this era of history. I can read runic, the original AngloSaxon manuscripts of Beowulf, and the Latin of Bede.
There is a lot nonsense in history about the supposed dark ages. Pope Gregory pretending that he introduced Christianity to Brittania (lol nope) and the damn usurper Carolingian genocide of northern European ‘pagan’ populations are the primary historical reasons why that is so.
Charlemagne refused to let his daughters marry. Hmmm, why? Because he knew well that he was not royal, but his mother absolutely was of the same royal matrilineal lineage as Hilde and Audofleda. His married daughters would have outranked him, and he didn’t want to kill them like all the royal little boys his father Pepin murdered to gain power.
@Tethys,
“75% of the new aDNA samples in this study show admixture, so that doesn’t actually support the claim of mass migration.”
No, 75% DOES support the claim of mass migration. That is the basic maths. 75% is a majority.
“The point is that those Anglo Saxons in Britannia aren’t different from the Franks genetically”
No, the study is not about Franks at all; that is your red herring that you’d like to slap someone with. Again, the history of the Franks, Goths, Vandals and all may fascinate you, but it’s irrelevant here. This is about England – how many Angles and Saxons went there, how many Iron Age Britons contributed to the genetic make-up of the English, and whether anyone else did – and we see Iron Age France (Gaul, specially for you) did, most concentrated in East Anglia. Frankish dynastic politics is irrelevant.
“Edwin is Hilde’s uncle, thus she is rather important to understanding how Britain became Anglo Saxon. I could have mentioned St Æbbe, or St Radegund, or Charlemagne’s mother Bertrada.”
No, the character of the major part of Britain has become Anglo Saxon before Hilda was born, so she is not relevant to that. In response to the mention of East Anglia as where much Iron Age France ancestry has been found, you claimed “East Anglia is where Whitby and St Hilde come into the process.”. Why mention Whitby, when it’s not in East Anglia? Why mention St. Hilda, when she was not involved with migration, or, for that matter, the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms? You appear to want a pat on the back for introducing her name, or that of any woman.
Hilda is important to the character of the Christian church in England, but no, bringing in the other women you mention (Bertrada? What the hell do you think she has to do with the genetic ancestry of the English?) is a massive attempt at thread-jacking. You appear obsessed with the royalty of the time, when this is about the general population.
What many previous inhabitants of Great Britain could have said:
4500 BCE – You farmers, go back to where you came from!
2500 BCE – You Bell Beaker people, go back to where you came from!
600 BCE – You Celts, go back to where you came from!
55 BCE – You Romans, go back to where you came from!
450 CE – You Angles and Saxons and Jutes, go back to where you came from!
900 CE – You Vikings and Danes, go back to where you came from!
1066 CE – You Normans, go back to where you came from!
Back in 4500 BCE, they could have said “Those farmers are so rude!!! Claiming that they own land! We have to be careful of where we go because of that.”
Apologies for returning to this thread after so long (I’m just purging the 2000-odd tabs I have open), but having seen raven repeating ridiculous rubbish @26, I can’t leave it there.
raven@26,
As I said before: “What people (I’m tempted to say particularly Americans!) say about their ancestry tells you very little”. There are contemporary records showing how many people immigrated to the USA from where in the 19th century, and the number of Germans and Irish is nowhere near enough to outweigh the (largely British descended) whites already there, even without counting the continuing immigration from Britain. I don’t know why more Americans claim German than British ancestry (many may simply be taking for granted that yes, they have British ancestry like most Americans, but they also have a name, or a family tradition, that indicates German ancestry); but the historical record makes it quite clear that the white non-Hispanic American population is predominantly of British descent.
To clarify a point@33, it’s quite plausible that 46 million (or more) Americans have German ancestry. What is utterly implausible is that no more than 25 million have British ancestry. I’d be astonished if fewer than half of all Americans have British ancestry. Do you, raven, somehow think that having German ancestry and having British ancestry are incompatible?