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Can a (fully) black person be called English?

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Source? Is this from Oppenheimer's study?

Yeah it would be much easier to do the reading if it was actually, you know, readily available for free or of nominal value. Hope you recover from your period or whatever it you seem to be on.

Oppenheimers study amongst other, the genetic history of the Britons is being slowly knitted together.

Genetic studies as well as archeological evidence and genetic studies on ancient Britons remains have shown that Britain has been very insular due to our island status.

Reply 81

NDGAARONDI

Original post by Blue & Red Lights

I was supposed to have bought that book some time ago but I won't have the money until another pay day because getting a job where passports are required suck. They should teach it in schools since all my year did was the Second World War. Might add the value to university research too. :rolleyes:

Reply 82

Tangopopper

English is a nationality, not a race.

Reply 83

Blue & Red Lights

Original post by Tangopopper

English is a nationality, not a race.

It is not a nationality or a race, it is an ethnicity

Reply 84

Lewis :D

I know lots of Indians, Polish etc who class themselves as Welsh, so I can't see why there would be a problem with a black person classing themselves as English.

Reply 85

Lewis :D

Original post by Blue & Red Lights

It is not a nationality or a race, it is an ethnicity

It is a nationality. English people constitute a 'nation'.

Reply 86

Blue & Red Lights

Original post by Lewis :D

It is a nationality. English people constitute a 'nation'.

it is as much an ethnicity as it is nationality. I am Scottish and I wouldneverregard a black person as a Scot, that ridiculous. That would be like an Indian calling himself Japanese.

Reply 87

ANARCHY__

Original post by Steevee

Well, tracing their lineage back 5 or 6 generations, and with no reason to suspect that their ancestors were from far flung reaches. I'm sure you're going to have a hearty laugh and tell me how Britain was invaded so many times etc. But the funny thing is that any island is going to be more homogenus than a mainland anyway, so assuming there is no 'British' or 'English' then there certainly is no Pakistani, French, Korean or Iraqi.

In most cases, you're correct. Britain is, however, the strange exception to this rule. Most islands tend to remain largely homogeneous or largely uninhabited but if we are going to stretch back 5 generations, there was already a lot of mixture. Let's say you're pushing back to about 250 years at a push with that sort of number. That would take us to around 1750/1760. Britain was already invaded by the Romans, French, Saxons, Vikings and was part of an ever expanding Empire that was just beginning to flourish. Already, those sound like pretty far flung reaches to me. In fact, if you look at a lot of landlocked countries, (let's say China for example), there are only really now two or three ethnic groups. We can look at large landmasses such as Russia as well and the same applies. In Indian, there is not really a huge difference in terms of ethnic groups and the only disparity you may see is in the far North or the far South. For the most part, the subcontinent is in the main homogeneous. Spain, France, Portugal, Germany etc etc etc etc. These are all mainland (and in some cases, landlocked countries) which all have very, very similar ethnic backgrounds.

Hope that clears my point up.

Original post by MonkeyMan2009

the point is that the 'english' are not accepted as an ethnic group . . . there was a channel4 programme about 5 patriotic brits and their identity . . . . they all had their dna tested to discover their genetic makeup (one of the was a solicitor/lawyer and ran a campaign to get the english registered/recognised as an ethnic group) . . . interesting and funny stuff (may still be on 4OD)

I'll take a look when I can. English people are not technically much of an ethnic group any more. As I've said in previous posts, the English are far too disparate and dissolved into the general make up of the country for them to really be considered as an ethnic group. If, however, people would like to class themselves as English 'COZ WE R DA FIRST PEOPLE HEER ND HAV DA SMA SKIN COLUR' then we're getting into different territory.

Reply 88

Foghorn Leghorn

Original post by Blue & Red Lights

it is as much an ethnicity as it is nationality. I am Scottish and I wouldneverregard a black person as a Scot, that ridiculous. That would be like an Indian calling himself Japanese.

Funny that because I know plenty of black people that are scottish.

Reply 89

Lewis :D

Original post by Blue & Red Lights

it is as much an ethnicity as it is nationality. I am Scottish and I wouldneverregard a black person as a Scot, that ridiculous. That would be like an Indian calling himself Japanese.

I'm Welsh and I'd regard anyone who had lived in Wales all their lives as Welsh. My Indian friend speaks with a Welsh accent, has lived here all her life and rarely visits India. To me, and to most people we know, she's Welsh.

Reply 90

Blue & Red Lights

Original post by Lewis :D

I do not recognize blacks or asians as Scottish, they are not ethnically Scottish so.

Reply 91

Lewis :D

Original post by Blue & Red Lights

I do not recognize blacks or asians as Scottish, they are not ethnically Scottish so.

It would be very rare to find someone purely one ethnicity in the UK, if not impossible. There's been lots of breeding between Scots, English, Welsh and Irish over the years. What's an ethnic Scot?

Reply 92

Steevee

Original post by ANARCHY__

Well I'm sorry, but I can mention plenty of invasions of China, France, Germany etc. The problem of course is that, these countries are so much larger than Britain, any population influx or demographic change is going to be felt far less than a small island. Still, I'd be interested to know if you can provide a source showing genetic variation within these countries and compare it to Britain. The last large demographic change in Britain can be argued as the Roman invasion, which was near enough 1800 years ago, which is as far as most countries can even trace their roots back. After that, most invasions didn't follow with a huge influx of native invaders, rather a small amount who came to either rule the people, or simply plunder. Just look at the Normans, people call this invasion a dilution mof the British gene, and yet comparitvley very few Normans actually settled in Britain.

Reply 93

User414413

Depends on how you define English. If nationality, then yes. If ethnicity, possibly. Where is the cut-off point? Are those whose ancestral claim to England dates back to 1066 when the Normans invaded England, English? What about those whose ancestral claim to England dates back to the 1700s when the freed slaves formed small communities around England? How are we rationally deciding where we place the cut-off point? A swiss whose ancestors moved to England in the 1700s wouldn't have any trouble convincing people she was English.

(edited 12 years ago)

Reply 94

Blue & Red Lights

Original post by Lewis :D

It would be very rare to find someone purely one ethnicity in the UK, if not impossible. There's been lots of breeding between Scots, English, Welsh and Irish over the years. What's an ethnic Scot?

There is no such thing as a pure ethnicity what are you talking about ? The ethnic Scots are scots whom share a common heritage, ancestry, culture and identity and percieve themselves to be part of a distinct group.

Learn what is ethnicity is please.

Reply 95

ANARCHY__

Original post by Steevee

I agree. There have been invasions, wholesale and small scale, of these countries and for the large part, these invasions do not normally affect the general demographic of the country. I cannot provide a source at present to show what you are asking but I would be interested in researching it myself so I will get back to you if I have found it and I remember. I do wonder why the cut off point you decide for a classification of a person being 'English', however, is 5 or 6 generations back. In my mind, the native people of England or the British Isles (let's say, argument's sake, the Britons) are those first people who have settled the country. Whilst I accept your point that the Romans were the last to invade, my post was implying that it was the number of these sorts of invasions that renders the idea of a 'native' English man or woman as immaterial. I am sure, if we were having this discussion as Romans, come the time of the Saxons, we would say that we were the natives and so on and so forth. It would seem logical to assume the first ever settlers of England and their descendants are the only real natives and that all invaders are simply pretenders to that title. It would be similar to saying the whites of Australia are the natives, rather than the Aborigines, would it not?

Reply 96

Steevee

Original post by ANARCHY__

But then at what point is the cut off? I don;t mean in regards to the generational thing, but to the thousands of years timescale. because by that logic we cannot ever know who was native. How can we know that 'Native Americans' were actually not South Americans that moved up thousands of years ago and ousted an already settled North American population? Certainly no mainland country could then ever claim to have it;s own ethnic backround, because there would absoloutley no way to prove that they are descendants of oringinal settlers of that piece of land. So I think, there does need to be some sort of arbitrary cut off, at say 1000 years, 2000 years etc. Because after living in a land for 2000 years, I think it would be perfectly logical to assume those people's to be 'native'.

Reply 97

Blue & Red Lights

Original post by Steevee

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In his 2006 book The Origins of the British, revised in 2007, Oppenheimer argued that neither Anglo-Saxons nor Celts had much impact on the genetics of the inhabitants of the British Isles, and that British ancestry mainly traces back to the Palaeolithic Iberian people, now represented best by Basques, instead. He also argued that the Scandinavian input has been underestimated. He published an introduction to his book in Prospect magazine[2] and answered some of his critics in a further Prospect magazine article in June 2007[3].

Oppenheimer uses genetic studies to give an insight into the genetic origins of people in the British Isles and speculates on how to match this evidence with documentary, linguistic and archaeological data to give insights into the origins of Britain, the Celts, the Vikings and the English. Oppenheimer uses DNA databases provided by Weale et al., Capelli et al. and Rosser et al. to provide new analyses of the haplotype distributions in both the male and female lines of the populations of Britain and Ireland (as well as Western Europe).

He breaks down the R1b haplogroup into a detailed set of "clans" that are undefined.

He makes the case that the geography and climate have had an influence on the genetics and culture of Britain, because of coastline changes. These genetic and cultural changes stem from two main zones of contact:

1. The Atlantic fringe, mainly from Spain and Portugal, to the western British Isles
2. Northern Europe, originally across Doggerland to eastern England and from Scandinavia to northern Scotland

Oppenheimer derives much archaeological information from Professor Barry Cunliffe's ideas of the trading routes using the Atlantic from Spain, and from the writings of:

* Simon James (The Atlantic Celts - Ancient People or Modern Invention? ISBN 0299166740)
* Francis Pryor (Britain B.C. : life in Britain and Ireland before the Romans ISBN 0007126921)
* John Collis (The Celts : origins, myths & inventions ISBN 0752429132)
* Colin Renfrew, (Archaeology and Language - The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins ISBN 0521354323)

The work of the geneticist Peter Forster has strongly influenced Oppenheimer's linguistic theories. From Forster's evidence that the Germanic genetic contribution to eastern England originated before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, Oppenheimer argues for the possibility that some inhabitants of the isle of Britain spoke English well before the so-called "Dark Ages".

Oppenheimer's main research include:

1. The importance of Cunliffe's Atlantic routes to the settling of Britain.
2. Since much British genetic material dates to the re-settlement of Britain following the ice ages, all subsequent invasions/migrations/immigrations occurred on a relatively small scale and did not replace Britain's population.
3. The origins of Celtic culture lie in southwestern Europe. The Central European ([La Tène culture]) theory for Celtic origins has no basis. Celtic culture arrived in the British Isles before the Iron Age and only involved limited movement of people, mainly into the east of England.
4. There are some differences between the male and female origins of the British population, but these are small.
5. Some genetic evidence is in support of Renfrew's theory that Indo-European origins comes with farming.
6. Genetic evidence suggests that the division between the West and the East of England does not begin with the Anglo-Saxon invasion but originates with two main routes of genetic flow — one up the Atlantic coast, the other from neighbouring areas of Continental Europe. This happened just after the Last Glacial Maximum. There is a cline between east and west, rather than a sharp division.
7. Scandinavian influences, stronger than suspected, may outweigh West Germanic influence.
8. A genetic difference exists between the Saxon areas of England and the Anglian areas. (Oppenheimer suggests that the so-called Anglo-Saxon invasion actually mostly consisted of an Anglian incursion.)
9. English being native to east Britain might explain the lack of Celtic influence on early English and the genetic split between East and West.
10. Classical sources differentiate between Gallic/Celtic and Belgae. Sources state that some of the (northern) Belgae have a German origin. Various archaeological and linguistic evidence make for a weaker case for Celtic presence in Belgium and Eastern England than in Gallic/Celtic or western Britain.

In Origins of the British (2006), Stephen Oppenheimer states (pages 375 and 378):

"By far the majority of male gene types in the British Isles derive from Iberia (Spain and Portugal), ranging from a low of 59% in Fakenham, Norfolk to highs of 96% in Llangefni, north Wales and 93% Castlerea, Ireland. On average only 30% of gene types in England derive from north-west Europe. Even without dating the earlier waves of north-west European immigration, this invalidates the Anglo-Saxon wipeout theory..."

"...75-95% of British Isles (genetic) matches derive from Iberia... Ireland, coastal Wales, and central and west-coast Scotland are almost entirely made up from Iberian founders, while the rest of the non-English parts of the British Isles have similarly high rates. England has rather lower rates of Iberian types with marked heterogeneity, but no English sample has less than 58% of Iberian samples..."In page 367 Oppenheimer states in relation to Zoë H Rosser's pan-European genetic distance map:

"In Rosser's work, the closest population to the Basques is in Cornwall, followed closely by Wales, Ireland, Scotland, England, Spain, Belgium, Portugal and then northern France."

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3514756.stm

Teeth unravel Anglo-Saxon legacy
By Paul Rincon
BBC News Online science staff

Sutton Hoo helmet, PA
History books say Anglo-Saxons replaced the Britons in England
New scientific research adds to growing evidence that the Anglo-Saxons did not replace the native population in England as history books suggest.

The data indicates at least some areas of eastern England absorbed very few Anglo-Saxon invaders, contrary to the view in many historical accounts.

Chemical analysis of human teeth from a Medieval cemetery in Yorkshire found few individuals of continental origin.

Details of the work are described in the scholarly journal Antiquity.

There are practices that are being adopted from continental Europe. To what extent is that a movement of people (into Britain)? Probably not that much
Dr Paul Budd, University of Durham
Researchers from the University of Durham and the British Geological Survey looked at different types of the elements strontium and oxygen in the teeth of 24 skeletons from an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery at West Heslerton, North Yorkshire that spans the fifth to the seventh centuries AD.

These types, or isotopes, of oxygen in local drinking water vary across Europe and locally within the British Isles.

The differences are influenced by latitude, altitude, distance from the sea and, to a lesser extent, mean annual temperature.

Invasion of ideas

This characteristic isotope composition gets set in people's teeth before they are 12 years of age, and can therefore be used by scientists to pinpoint a person's geographical origin.

Of the 24 individuals sampled, a possible four had oxygen isotope values outside the range for the British Isles. Following improvements in calibration, the group now believes only one individual was from continental Europe.

The results support the view of other researchers that the introduction of Anglo-Saxon culture and language into Britain did not occur through large-scale replacement of native populations by invading tribes.

Jawbone, Budd
The isotopic composition of teeth can pinpoint geographical origin
It seems more likely that there was a small-scale immigration from continental Europe and that the existing British population adopted the customs of these outsiders as their own.

"There are practices that are being adopted from continental Europe. To what extent is that a movement of people (into Britain)? Probably not that much," Dr Paul Budd of the University of Durham told BBC News Online.

But the team did find evidence for migration into the area from other parts of Britain during the period. While the isotopic composition of Bronze Age remains from West Heslerton matched local drinking water isotope compositions, the early Medieval group were more varied.

Of the 20 locals, 13 had oxygen isotope signals consistent with an origin west of the Pennines. Dr Budd puts this down to upheaval amongst the British population after the Romans withdrew their armies and administrators from the country in the fifth century AD.

"At the end of the Roman period there was a huge collapse of a centuries-long organisation, in government and in how the landscape was used. The population moves off elsewhere to exploit the landscape for agriculture."

The Anglo-Saxons supposedly began migrating into Britain en masse from the fifth century. Their culture and language has long formed the basis for English national identity.

Genetic support

The findings broadly agree with a large genetic survey of the British Isles published in 2003. The study, led by Professor David Goldstein of University College London, found that the genetic stamp of the Anglo-Saxons on the British Isles was weaker than expected.

Patterns of oxygen isotopes vary greatly within UK drinking water

Enlarge Image
Professor Goldstein attributes less than half of the paternal input in England to Anglo-Saxon migration.

"I don't think there ever was evidence for a massive population replacement. From the genetics, it's pretty clear there was not complete replacement on the paternal side in England," Professor Goldstein told BBC News Online.

"Studies like this suggest that the number of individuals that came over is small and even in burial sites that are Anglo-Saxon culturally, they're actually natives."

However, Dr Neal Bradman, also of University College London, suggested that, since the teeth of immigrants' descendents would take on the isotopic composition of the local area, it was impossible to know whether the burials were of Britons or not without conducting genetic analysis.

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Y Chromosomes Rewrite British History
Nature ^ | 6-19-2003 | Hannah Hoag

Posted on 24 June 2003 1830 by blam

Y chromosomes rewrite British history

Anglo-Saxons' genetic stamp weaker than historians suspected

19 June 2003
HANNAH HOAG

Some Scottish men's Y's are remarkably similar to those of southern England. © GettyImages

A new survey of Y chromosomes in the British Isles suggests that the Anglo-Saxons failed to leave as much of a genetic stamp on the UK as history books imply1.

Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans invaded Britain repeatedly between 50 BC and AD 1050. Many historians ascribe much of the British ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons because their written legacy overshadows that of the Celts.

But the Y chromosomes of the regions tell a different story. "The Celts weren't pushed to the fringes of Scotland and Wales; a lot of them remained in England and central Ireland," says study team member David Goldstein, of University College London. This is surprising: the Anglo-Saxons reputedly colonized southern England heavily.

The Anglo-Saxons and Danes left their mark in central and eastern England, and mainland Scotland, the survey says, and the biological traces of Norwegian invaders show up in the northern British Isles, including Orkney.

Similar studies, including one by the same team, have looked at differences in mitochondrial DNA, which we inherit from our mothers. They found little regional variation because females tended to move to their husbands.

But the Y chromosome shows sharper differences from one geographic region to the next, says geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza, of Stanford University, California. "The Y chromosome has a lower mutation rate than mitrochondrial DNA."

Goldstein's team collected DNA samples from more than 1,700 men living in towns across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They took a further 400 DNA samples from continental Europeans, including Germans and Basques. Only men whose paternal grandfathers had dwelt within 20 miles of their current home were eligible.

The Y chromosomes of men from Wales and Ireland resemble those of the Basques. Some believe that the Basques, from the border of France and Spain, are the original Europeans.

The new survey is an example of how archaeologists, prehistorians and geneticists are beginning to collaborate, comments Chris Tyler-Smith of the University of Oxford, UK, who tracks human evolution using the Y chromosome. "It would be nice to see the whole world surveyed in this kind of detail, but it's expensive and there are other priorities."

References Capelli, C. et al. A Y chromosome census of the British Isles. Current Biology, 13, 979 - 984, (2003). |Article|

© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

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http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/20...itishancestry/

Myths of British ancestry
Stephen Oppenheimer
21st October 2006 — Issue 127 Free entry
Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands

Read Stephen Oppenheimer’s follow-up to this article here, in the June 2007 edition of Prospect, as he answers some of the many comments and queries readers have sent in response to his analysis. You can also find out more about his work here, at the Bradshaw Foundation website.

The fact that the British and the Irish both live on islands gives them a misleading sense of security about their unique historical identities. But do we really know who we are, where we come from and what defines the nature of our genetic and cultural heritage? Who are and were the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the English? And did the English really crush a glorious Celtic heritage?

Everyone has heard of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. And most of us are familiar with the idea that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who invaded eastern England after the Romans left, while most of the people in the rest of the British Isles derive from indigenous Celtic ancestors with a sprinkling of Viking blood around the fringes.

Yet there is no agreement among historians or archaeologists on the meaning of the words “Celtic” or “Anglo-Saxon.” What is more, new evidence from genetic analysis (see note below) indicates that the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, to the extent that they can be defined genetically, were both small immigrant minorities. Neither group had much more impact on the British Isles gene pool than the Vikings, the Normans or, indeed, immigrants of the past 50 years.

The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.

Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.

Many myths about the Celts

Celtic languages and the people who brought them probably first arrived during the Neolithic period. The regions we now regard as Celtic heartlands actually had less immigration from the continent during this time than England. Ireland, being to the west, has changed least since the hunter-gatherer period and received fewer subsequent migrants (about 12 per cent of the population) than anywhere else. Wales and Cornwall have received about 20 per cent, Scotland and its associated islands 30 per cent, while eastern and southern England, being nearer the continent, has received one third of its population from outside over the past 6,500 years. These estimates, set out in my book The Origins of the British, come from tracing individual male gene lines from continental Europe to the British Isles and dating each one (see box at bottom of page).

If the Celts were not our main aboriginal stock, how do we explain the wide historical distribution and influence of Celtic languages? There are many examples of language change without significant population replacement; even so, some people must have brought Celtic languages to our isles. So where did they come from, and when?

The orthodox view of the origins of the Celts turns out to be an archaeological myth left over from the 19th century. Over the past 200 years, a myth has grown up of the Celts as a vast, culturally sophisticated but warlike people from central Europe, north of the Alps and the Danube, who invaded most of Europe, including the British Isles, during the iron age, around 300 BC.

Central Europe during the last millennium BC certainly was the time and place of the exotic and fierce Hallstatt culture and, later, the La Tène culture, with their prestigious, iron-age metal jewellery wrought with intricately woven swirls. Hoards of such jewellery and weapons, some fashioned in gold, have been dug up in Ireland, seeming to confirm central Europe as the source of migration. The swirling style of decoration is immortalised in such cultural icons as the Book of Kells, the illuminated Irish manuscript (Trinity College, Dublin), and the bronze Battersea shield (British Museum), evoking the western British Isles as a surviving remnant of past Celtic glory. But unfortunately for this orthodoxy, these artistic styles spread generally in Europe as cultural fashions, often made locally. There is no evidence they came to Britain and Ireland as part of an invasion.

Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic culture in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after Roman times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that identifies the Hallstatt or La Tène regions or cultures as Celtic homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the “Keltoi,” he placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the region of Iberia.

The late 19th-century French historian Marie Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville decided that Herodotus had meant to place the Celtic homeland in southern Germany. His idea has remained in the books ever since, despite a mountain of other evidence that Celts derived from southwestern Europe. For the idea of the south German “Empire of the Celts” to survive as the orthodoxy for so long has required determined misreading of texts by Caesar, Strabo, Livy and others. And the well-recorded Celtic invasions of Italy across the French Alps from the west in the 1st millennium BC have been systematically reinterpreted as coming from Germany, across the Austrian Alps.

De Jubainville’s Celtic myth has been deconstructed in two recent sceptical publications: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention by Simon James (1999), and The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions by John Collis (2003). Nevertheless, the story lingers on in standard texts and notably in The Celts, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in February. “Celt” is now a term that sceptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless.

This is too drastic a view. It is only the central European homeland theory that is false. The connection between modern Celtic languages and those spoken in southwest Europe during Roman times is clear and valid. Caesar wrote that the Gauls living south of the Seine called themselves Celts. That region, in particular Normandy, has the highest density of ancient Celtic place-names and Celtic inscriptions in Europe. They are common in the rest of southern France (excluding the formerly Basque region of Gascony), Spain, Portugal and the British Isles. Conversely, Celtic place-names are hard to find east of the Rhine in central Europe.

Given the distribution of Celtic languages in southwest Europe, it is most likely that they were spread by a wave of agriculturalists who dispersed 7,000 years ago from Anatolia, travelling along the north coast of the Mediterranean to Italy, France, Spain and then up the Atlantic coast to the British Isles. There is a dated archaeological trail for this. My genetic analysis shows exact counterparts for this trail both in the male Y chromosome and the maternally transmitted mitochondrial DNA right up to Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and the English south coast.

Further evidence for the Mediterranean origins of Celtic invaders is preserved in medieval Gaelic literature. According to the orthodox academic view of “iron-age Celtic invasions” from central Europe, Celtic cultural history should start in the British Isles no earlier than 300 BC. Yet Irish legend tells us that all six of the cycles of invasion came from the Mediterranean via Spain, during the late Neolithic to bronze age, and were completed 3,700 years ago.

Anglo-Saxon ethnic cleansing?

The other myth I was taught at school, one which persists to this day, is that the English are almost all descended from 5th-century invaders, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the Danish peninsula, who wiped out the indigenous Celtic population of England.

The story originates with the clerical historians of the early dark ages. Gildas (6th century AD) and Bede (7th century) tell of Saxons and Angles invading over the 5th and 6th centuries. Gildas, in particular, sprinkles his tale with “rivers of blood” descriptions of Saxon massacres. And then there is the well-documented history of Anglian and Saxon kingdoms covering England for 500 years before the Norman invasion.

But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated—culturally, linguistically and genetically—by invading Angles and Saxons derives from the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape. But the presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names doesn’t mean that all ancient Britons were Celts or Celtic-speaking.

The genocidal view was generated, like the Celtic myth, by historians and archaeologists over the last 200 years. With the swing in academic fashion against “migrationism” (seeing the spread of cultural influence as dependent on significant migrations) over the past couple of decades, archaeologists are now downplaying this story, although it remains a strong underlying perspective in history books.

Some geneticists still cling to the genocide story. Research by several genetics teams associated with University College London has concentrated in recent years on proving the wipeout view on the basis of similarities of male Y chromosome gene group frequency between Frisia/north Germany and England. One of the London groups attracted press attention in July by claiming that the close similarities were the result of genocide followed by a social-sexual apartheid that enhanced Anglo-Saxon reproductive success over Celtic.

The problem is that the English resemble in this way all the other countries of northwest Europe as well as the Frisians and Germans. Using the same method (principal components analysis, see note below), I have found greater similarities of this kind between the southern English and Belgians than the supposedly Anglo-Saxon homelands at the base of the Danish peninsula. These different regions could not all have been waiting their turn to commit genocide on the former Celtic population of England. The most likely reason for the genetic similarities between these neighbouring countries and England is that they all had similar prehistoric settlement histories.

When I looked at exact gene type matches between the British Isles and the continent, there were indeed specific matches between the continental Anglo-Saxon homelands and England, but these amounted to only 5 per cent of modern English male lines, rising to 15 per cent in parts of Norfolk where the Angles first settled. There were no such matches with Frisia, which tends to confirm a specific Anglo-Saxon event since Frisia is closer to England, so would be expected to have more matches.

When I examined dates of intrusive male gene lines to look for those coming in from northwest Europe during the past 3,000 years, there was a similarly low rate of immigration, by far the majority arriving in the Neolithic period. The English maternal genetic record (mtDNA) is consistent with this and contradicts the Anglo-Saxon wipeout story. English females almost completely lack the characteristic Saxon mtDNA marker type still found in the homeland of the Angles and Saxons. The conclusion is that there was an Anglo-Saxon invasion, but of a minority elite type, with no evidence of subsequent “sexual apartheid.”

The orthodox view is that the entire population of the British Isles, including England, was Celtic-speaking when Caesar invaded. But if that were the case, a modest Anglo-Saxon invasion is unlikely to have swept away all traces of Celtic language from the pre-existing population of England. Yet there are only half a dozen Celtic words in English, the rest being mainly Germanic, Norman or medieval Latin. One explanation is that England was not mainly Celtic-speaking before the Anglo-Saxons. Consider, for example, the near-total absence of Celtic inscriptions in England (outside Cornwall), although they are abundant in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany.

Who was here when the Romans came?

So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar’s time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul “the language differs but little.”

The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.

Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the genetic evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia.

A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

So, based on the overall genetic perspective of the British, it seems that Celts, Belgians, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all immigrant minorities compared with the Basque pioneers, who first ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.

Note: How does genetic tracking work?

The greatest advances in genetic tracing and measuring migrations over the past two decades have used samples from living populations to reconstruct the past. Such research goes back to the discovery of blood groups, but our Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA are the most fruitful markers to study since they do not get mixed up at each generation. Study of mitochondrial DNA in the British goes back over a decade, and from 2000 to 2003 London-based researchers established a database of the geographically informative Y-chromosomes by systematic sampling throughout the British Isles. Most of these samples were collected from people living in small, long-established towns, whose grandparents had also lived there.

Two alternative methods of analysis are used. In the British Y-chromosome studies, the traditional approach of principal components analysis was used to compare similarities between whole sample populations. This method reduces complexity of genetic analysis by averaging the variation in frequencies of numerous genetic markers into a smaller number of parcels—the principal components—of decreasing statistical importance. The newer approach that I use, the phylogeographic method, follows individual genes rather than whole populations. The geographical distribution of individual gene lines is analysed with respect to their position on a gene tree, to reconstruct their origins, dates and routes of movement.

Of course they can.

Original post by Steevee

It then begs the question as to why this important. If the notion of ethnic background is a complete artifice and not backed by any sort of objective, observational study, then we are simply using our own subjective whims to decide who is and who isn't a native. Starting off at the point where we say that the first people who settle the land are natives may have its own ambiguities but in the same sense, we are simply applying the same rules to peoples who settled the land some time after. Whether it is logical to class those living in a land for 2000 years is questionable but it's certainly not implausible. If we take that train of thought, however, what about the people who have lived there for 3, 4 or 5000 years? It starts getting into a discussion of 'who is more native'. I think the more objective, the better but in all honesty, I do not believe that ethnic background is entirely relevant, at least in Britain.