Posted on 01/20/2016 7:49:52 AM PST by ek_hornbeck
The present-day English owe about a third of their ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons, according to a new study.
Scientists sequenced genomes from 10 skeletons unearthed in eastern England and dating from the Iron Age through to the Anglo-Saxon period.
Many of the Anglo-Saxon samples appeared closer to modern Dutch and Danish people than the Iron Age Britons did.
The results appear in Nature Communications journal.
According to historical accounts and archaeology, the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain from continental Europe from the 5th Century AD. They brought with them a new culture, social structure and language.
Genetic studies have tackled the question of Anglo-Saxon ancestry before, but sometimes gave conflicting results.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
That would be the way it appears to me, but I am not a geneticists.
The Third Punic War came close to the modern definition of "total war," and was effectively a genocide against the Carthaginians. There are several Biblical examples of total war as well.
[insert punchline containing “British Women” and “how the heck does the DNA ever get transferred anyhow?” here]
Then came the Germanic people, about 80 years after the Romans departed. As warlike as they were, they could not subdue the people where Wales is today. They also had trouble to subdue the Britons where Cornwall is today. Then came the Norsemen. They even had their own small kingdom and at one time a Danish king- he was King Cnut. Finally the Norman conquest 1066 AD. Quite the mix. It is said that about a 1000 persons claim to be descended from the original Normans. Very hard to prove though.
A bit of a ramble by me, but just had to put in a few items from all those years ago in history lessons.
Hey, that is a great and informative link.
Thanks much!
bfl
That is true, however, both Henry I and II did their best populate the Isles. I believe Henry I had about 20 illegitimate kids. (I actually hate that term). I would like to see how Plantagenet DNA was dispersed..
When they dug up the remains of what is now thought to be Richard III, I remember the archaeologists using the DNA of a Canadian carpenter with Plantagent ancestry as a validation. So there must still be a lot of Plantagent blood around!
I M253,
In my last post, “Plantagent” should be “Plantagenet”, don’t know how I made the same typo twice.
The various geographic areas of the UK have markedly different accents, which may be faint echoes of the old dominant languages in those areas -some of which have been exported to the US. Listen to some of the older people from Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, they sound as if they could be tranported back to the English west country and fit right in.
Little English blood in Charles The Dim.
We must remember that, back then, "genocide" did not mean the wholesale slaughter of whole ethnic groups (as practiced by, e.g., Stalin or Pol Pot).
The captive men were perhaps emasculated, enslaved, or otherwise kept from reproducing through drudgery; their womenfolk were made into (perhaps willing) concubines. I would expect that, after three or four generations, there was consequently no longer any substantial genetic difference between the conquerors and the conquered.
Regards,
Somewhere on Youtube there is a program tracing the "rightful" Plantagenet heir to the English throne. He's a farmer in Western Australia who doesn't believe in a Monarchical system of government !
Certain sieges were genocidal (metrocidal?) as well.
And the Biblical examples were also extraordinary and emphasized as such.
But the default assumption in the Ancient World - a world of great scarcity - is that a major motivation of any war would be the accumulation of wealth in the form of slave laborers.
Vikings were also extreme slavers. All those tomb monuments and ring forts were built with slave labor. There was only slave labor until Christianity took root.
The full weight of the propagandists from the British War Office, saw violence against people of German descent living in England. Even those born there. This after the carnage of the war in the trenches. The Royals then quickly adopted the name of The House of Windsor. They are directed descended from Germanic royalty. Prince Phillip, father of Charles is directly descended from Greek and Danish nobility. Name of Battenburg. He even has maternal lineage from the Romanovs who were assassinated by the Bolsheviks in 1917.
Once again a bit of a ramble. FR sure gets the interest going!
“Wales was the primary Celtic holdout in Western Britannia during the ascendance of the Anglo-Saxons. Using computer analysis, the researchers explored how such a pattern could have arisen and concluded that a massive replacement of the native fourth-century male Britons had taken place.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/07/who-killed-the-men-england
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