I wasn't aware of this recently published abstract and subsequent speech at a (virtual) annual conference last year, but it's kind of a bombshell for those interested in your ethnic make-up, if you're British or the descendent of the British, like True Americans, Australians, Kiwis, etc. tend to be. Of course, my ancestry does include some very specific non-English ancestry, including a fair number of Scottish-Americans, and one great-grandfather who was Portuguese. But still; my culture and personality are very typical of the old northern English Borderers. Although the specific ancestry from here is more related to my dad's side; my Mom's side was a more typical Massachussets to the American "Mormon" West type of Yankee. And although I say that my dad's side is the part of my heritage that is my identity, all of the mixed stuff is on my dad's side too. The part of me that is actually the descendent of a Scottish-English borderer is probably relatively small. Then again, Anglo-Scottish northern borderer and East Anglian Puritan are probably too fine scale of a structure to be easily identified.
Anyway, enough rambling. What am I talking about? There's been a lot of debate over decades if not centuries as to the degree to which the modern English are the descendants of Anglo-Saxons vs. integrated Romano-British and Celtic. I've always assumed that the Celtic remnant was a fairly high level of the autosomal DNA of the modern English. A study published in 2016 which analyzed the DNA from ten Anglo-Saxon graves and compared them to the modern English seemed to corroborate that; it suggested that the Anglo-Saxon component of the modern English was about 38%. Quite a bit, to be sure, but the Norman and Viking invasions of England seem to have left even less of an imprint on the modern English DNA, so presumably a good half, and then a bit more were remnant Romano-Celtic. However, various studies gave very swingy results; anywhere from 10% to 95% had been published.
This new abstract, which previews a paper which hasn't been published yet, appears to have done a much more thorough study, with many more samples than previously published ones. The result? About 80% genetic replacement of the Romano-Celts with a North Sea Germanic DNA during the Anglo-Saxon period. (I wonder, though—the Danelaw and Viking settlement is also the Anglo-Saxon period, and the Viking DNA might have been extremely difficult to separate from the Anglo-Saxon, given that their place of origin was almost the same; southern Denmark and the northern Low Countries vs. mostly just Denmark. It's possible that that 80% replacment represents both Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlement, not just Anglo-Saxon.) The pre-Anglo-Saxon genetic profile, on the other hand, closely resembles that of modern day Ireland and Scotland. The Brythonic vs Gaelic shift doesn't appear to have brought with it substantially different DNA, at least. In other words, the English (and their diaspora daughter populations like True Americans) are much more Anglo-Saxon than we thought. Although the abstract makes a point of highlighting the continuity of that last 20%, the elephant in the room is that going from ~60% to 20% presents a very different picture of the continuity of British genetics than what we'd previously been told.
In fact, that is one of the key takeaways for what we've learned from ancient DNA research in the last few years. The dogma of continuity is just that; dogma, and it's been thoroughly shattered by evidence from DNA. When a new population comes in, the extent to which they replace the previous population, from a genetic standpoint anyway, is substantial, and we see that over and over and over and over again. The modern English (and, again, their diaspora cousins, like me) have almost no genetic connection to the people who built, for example, Stonehenge. Nobody does. Those people are gone. A tiny strand of their legacy remains in the DNA of the English today, but it's tiny. Those people were not our ancestors. Our ancestors replaced them. Or rather, they were replaced by a people who were then later substantially replaced again by our ancestors. Although the 20% remnant of the old Bell Beaker ~ Celtic DNA is much more subsantial than that of the old Neolithic megalith building farmer DNA in our current genetic profile, the fact remains that neither of them are really deep enough that you can say that they are the ancestors of the modern English—unless you're using English very sloppily to refer to the Cornish, the Welsh, the Scottish, and the border regions that those populations have with the English.
Although I disagree with him, I think Tolkien can consider himself vindicated in suggesting that the King Arthur cycle of stories had nothing to do with the English. I think that King Arthur has been so closely associated with the English for so many centuries that it should be considered a naturally grafted on story, but if the origin of it was with the Romano-Celtic peoples, and in many ways the propagation of the mythology was due to the Normans picking it up and being enamored of it, Tolkien was right that it has little if anything to do with the Anglo-Saxons, and as we now know, the Ango-Saxons really were the English. The degree to which they picked up DNA from the people that they replaced is much more limited than we thought. The stories of King Arthur really are the stories of another people, and Tolkien really was right in that the Anglo-Saxons didn't have much in the way of stories to call their own.
And I have mixed feelings about that. Do we need them? Does having false stories, or someone else's stories impact us? I think it does, but how much? I grew up hearing the false narratives about the Civil War that the north wrote to recast themselves as the heroes of their own story rather than the unjustified and corrupt aggressors that they were in real life. And even as a little kid, although I hadn't yet learned to question The Establishment like I do now, I had cognitive dissonance about that narrative. Something about it didn't quite add up, although I wasn't sure what. On the other hand, two of the three legs of Western civilization have nothing to do with my people. And yet, I claim the heritage of the Bible and Christianity as my own, even though it was written by and about (and honestly, mostly for) the Hebrews, not the Americans. And I also claim the Classical Antiquity heritage of Greek and Roman history and mythology, even though those aren't my people either. DNA isn't the only thing that makes up a people, and Western Civilization wouldn't be what it is without Christianity and the classical traditions of the Greeks and Romans. Likewise, English tradition wouldn't be what it is without the King Arthur cycle of stories, even if at their root they weren't written by the Enlish, for the English, or about the English, and may even have represented reistance and hostility towards the goals of the earliest proto-English to arrive on Great Britain.
UPDATE: Don't know why, but the link went dead. Here is a better version, I hope.
If it actually takes you to a blank search field, put in the author's name: Jorscha Gretzinger. The title of the paper is The Anglo-Saxon migration and formation of the early English gene pool.
Here's the text of the abstract:
A series of migrations and accompanied cultural changes has formed the peoples of Britain and still represents the foundations of the English national identity. For the most prominent of these, the Anglo-Saxon migration, the traditional view, resting upon historical sources and derived concepts of ethnic and national origins from the 19th century, outlined that the indigenous Romanised British population was forcibly replaced by invading Germanic tribes, starting in the 5th century AD. However, to which extent this historic event coincided with factual immigration that affected the genetic composition of the British population was focus of generations of scientific and social controversy. To better understand this key period, we have so far generated genome-wide sequences from 80 individuals from eight cemeteries in East and South England. We combined this data with previously published genome-wide data to a total dataset of more than 200 ancient British genomes spanning from the Early Bronze Age to the Early Middle Ages, allowing us to investigate shifts and affinities in British fine-scale population structure during this phase of transformation. Here we present two preliminary results: First, we detect a substantial increase in continental Northern European ancestry akin to the extant Danish and Northern German populations during the Early Anglo-Saxon period, replacing approximately 80% of the indigenous British ancestry during that time period. Second, we nevertheless highlight the continuous presence of ancestry identified in Pre-Saxon Iron Age and Roman individuals during the Early and Middle Anglo-Saxon period, originating in the Early British Bronze Age and closely resembling present-day Celtic-speaking populations from Ireland and Scotland. Therefore, our study suggests that the early English population was the outcome of long-term ethnogenetic processes in which the acculturation and assimilation of native Britons into the immigrating Anglo-Saxon society played a key role.
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