h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A new study proposes that the Anglo-Saxons set up a kind of apartheid society after their invasion of Britain in the 5th century.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5192634.stm

This study has concluded that there is “a very high number of Germanic male-line ancestors in England’s current population.” and that “Genetic research has revealed the country's gene pool contains between 50 and 100% Germanic Y-chromosomes.”

This new apartheid theory is another slant on the elite dominance idea. Basically, yet another attempt to explain how a relatively small number of Germanic settlers had such a profound effect on Romano-British society.

Personally, I am sceptical of the team’s apartheid society hypothesis. They make some unsubstantiated assumptions about the cultural homogeneity, general cohesiveness and organisational capabilities of early Anglo-Saxon society.

As we know, early England was made up of three distinct German ethnic groups; Jutes, Saxons and Angles. Although they could probably understand each other’s languages, they were distinct nationalities and were as often at war with each other as with the Britons. Their society was tribal and fragmented for centuries, until the threat of the Vikings forced them to start co-operating with each other.

I cannot see this society, which was incapable of central organisation and prone to constant fighting amongst its own factions, could have maintained anything like a consistent ‘apartheid’ system in relation to the Britons across all its territories and the different Germanic ethnic groups.

Their economic argument for settler dominance has more strength, but not for the reasons they state.

More likely, the Germanic settlers actually enriched themselves on the back of 400 years of Romano-British industry and commerce, and lived off the remains for centuries. No forests to clear, no rivers to bridge, no roads to build, field systems all laid out and ready to use.

Post-Roman Britain would have been, in effect, a massive free-for-all warehouse containing literally millions of ready-to-use high quality manufactured items; from metal implements, weapons, pottery, ceramics to high-grade building materials that were being ‘recycled’ for centuries afterwards. Totally stripped Roman sites, often reduced to trenches, show the newcomers’ enthusiasm for these resources.

The Saxons weren't ‘economically superior’ they were just lucky. A big chunk of highly invested-in Roman real estate fell right into their hands, complete with farms, roads, bridges and buildings. They didn't use these things in the same way, but without this legacy of civilization, and the store of materials it offered, I doubt whether they would have been anything like as successful.

Regular readers on this forum will know very well what I think actually did happen to the Romano-Britons and their culture, so I won’t go down that path again here. But the interesting thing about this study is that it has swung back to a belief of Germanic genetic dominance in England, in contrast to the Blood of the Vikings survey which painted a seemingly different picture.

Any thoughts?

I agree with EVB. I am sceptical about this theory.

The concept seems to be that the Saxons kept the Britons (or at least their males) out of the gene pool - and this seems unlikely.

The Saxon male gene could not have predominated if Briton were allow to breed with Briton. However to prevent this you would have had a system of harems - which might have suited the Saxon males, but no other party.

I would suspect the Saxon male would have needed to test each mouthful of food carefully. The Saxon female, or British concubine would be a real threat - and the Saxons would too b%^&*y tired to do anything about the frustrated mob of British males rioting down at the pub.

I also would question the very fundemental point that Germanic 'males' gene type account for 50-100% of the English population.

The studies I have seen show differently.

In some parts of central/eastern England the ratio of 'invader' genetype is in the majority - up to 70% as I recall - but nowhere is it 100%.

In the south and especially in the south-west it is the other way around.

How then would this theory of apartheid account for such dynamics.

Apartheid in certain areas and not others?? I think not.

I suspect that the truth is a mixture of invader replacement and dispacement of the British in some areas, and assimilation and/or overlordship in others.

The displacement may have occured more frequently in the central and eastern parts of England - but even here not uniformally, and in other areas the invaders took positions of power but only existed as a thin veneer over a continuing British population (in the same way as the Normans).

I have re-read the article, and I erred in my earlier comment concerning the deliberate restriction of the British gene.

The argument is simply that the Germanic people had greater numbers of (surviving) children, and that they did not intermarry to a great extent.

However, I still struggle with the logic.

For a start the records suggest that the Anglo-Saxons were not particularly wealthy as a whole when they arrived in England. It is possible, indeed likely, that they may have occupied the richer, more fertile land - and may have displaced the British.

However, why would they have been that much more productive than the British who (even if displaced from the best spots) would have farmed land only slightly less fertile??

If the Anglo-saxons used the British as slaves this may have been possible for a while, but only whilst the British were in the vast majority. As soon as the balance moved there would be too few British to go around, and the system would have collapsed.

In any event I know of no evidence of this - or at least there is evidence of the anglo-Saxons treating their own people in similar ways to the way they treated the British. Servitude was applied to both peoples.

Ine's laws of the early 7th century indicate that there were various classes of laws (wergild - actually values on each persons life) depending on the individuals 'class'. There were various class distinctions within Saxon people, and others classes for British people.

Generally the Saxon values are higher than those for Britons for equivalent classes - generally about double - but there was substantial overlap. The highest British wergild was many multiples of that of the lowest Saxon.

Therefore the "apartheid" logic seems to apply only partially at best, and certainly I doubt it could explain one population out breeding the other to any substantial effect.

Ine's laws applied to Wessex, and so equivalent laws may not have existed elsewhere (eg Mercia). They also predate the expansion of Wessex influence over Dumnonia.

ExeValleyBoy and Ozzie Exile,

I first came across this news item when listening to the radio yesterday morning. Mark Thomas was being interviewed. One must remember that Thomas was the one member of the Weale et al team (“Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration”) who has persistently tried to apply the Y-Chromosome data from Norfolk and the East Midlands to the whole of England. He seems to have a bee in his bonnet about the English (as a whole) being genetically Germanic, and has grabbed every opportunity of publicity to ram home this view.

The BBC article is a summary of the points gleaned from this interview. As always I try to disregard sensationalist media reports and search out the original research paper before commenting. This is it:-

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_b/papers/RSPB20063627.pdf

Firstly we find that the views of Thomas et al are not based on any new genetic research, but are primarily based on the Weale et al paper. He repeats the extrapolation of the 50-100% Germanic component to the whole of England, when it only applies to an area of Eastern England. He does not explain that the 100% end of the range is theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely even for the region investigated. It is only theoretically possible because about 40% the Germanic source population exhibited the same R1b Y-Haplogroup as was found in about 90% of the Indigenous British source group. The percentage of the Eastern English with R1b (Hg1 in the Weale et al study) was found to be about 65%. It is therefore theoretically possible that 100% of the Eastern English population could be Germanic in origin, but only if a disproportionately high percentage of those members of the Germanic source population who migrated to Britain had the R1b Haplogroup. This is as likely as the existence of a perpetual motion machine.

Thomas goes on to defend the 50% end of the spectrum for the whole of England by citing Capelli et al (“A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles”), who used a more sensible likelihood-based admixture approach (Chikhi et al, 2001), to conclude that median estimates for Germanic migration rates into what is now England ranged from 24.4% to 72.5% depending on the region sampled. These figures quoted by Thomas agree closely with those quoted by Goldstein (of the Capelli team) and also with my own computed figures (25% to 70%), but Thomas then states that the mean value in England is 54.1%. This is in total disagreement with not only my own figure, but also that of Goldstein (both about 40%). Capelli states that the Chikhi technique results in admixture percentages, which are in very close agreement with the graphically presented data in the Principle Component plot (Fig. 3 in Capelli et al). In this plot, all of the English sample sites (apart from York and Norfolk) are clustered closer to the Indigenous node than to the Germanic node. There is no way that one could obtain an overall figure of 54.1% Germanic from this plot.

I have concluded that, from a genetic point of view, there is nothing new here, and that Thomas continues to put his own biased slant on the genetic results, both in his paper and in his media interviews. He obviously has his own strange agenda.

I will not say too much regarding the “apartheid’ theory, as you have both analysed this well. Suffice it to say that Thomas et al have played around with theoretically possible interbreeding rates in order to try to get unproven hypotheses to knit together. As an academic exercise it may be interesting, but does it have any bearing on reality?

Having glanced through the link, I am in agreement with Plymouth Exile. Concentratring on the Eastern Counties would produce a higher percentage of "Germanic" DNA. This is England's and indeed the whole island of Great Britain's front door with the rest of Europe. The population of this area is going to reflect the waves of immigration that have come in and the diversity thereof, just as Toronto is Canada's and NY is America's.

Furthemore the population of England is 48 million or there abouts, the vast majority living south and east of the highland line (Weymouth to the Humber, this is roughly the division between the more rugged upland upland zone of moorland etc and the flatter usually more fertile lowlands) If the DNA shows a characteristic of "majority" in the lowland area it can be assumed to be a majority across England, but that is only a statistical asumption. There are other sources which show the DNA step that runs up the centre of England from the Solent and then out to sea across North Yorkshire, Co Durham.

Regarding the apartheid society, the Norman's did implement one. That wealh meant slave in Anglo Saxon signifies only that the majority of slaves were of Brythonic origin, the brand and brand name becoming sinonymous. Where I have a problem with this hypothesis is that the Anglo Saxons were not hermoginous. They came from the whole swaithe of coast from Flanders (B) to Jutland (Dk, if anything they would have been almost as hostile to each other as to the native Wealh. Infact the alleged genocide of the Jutes on the Isle of Wight by the West Saxons could be taken as illustrative of this point.

The article and it's opinions I feel are an interesting addition to any debate on the relation between the people's of England 1000 years ago but only part. After all lies, damned lies and statistics.

This article, for me, shows the debate about the origins of England and the English is still going on and on, with no-one any closer to a conclusive explanation.

With the genetic studies, they often seem contradictory. I know little about this field but would it not be better if researchers concentrated on one specific area; say a single county or region, and analysed it intensively, to show up possible (and possibly very interesting) local variations.

It would take much longer to build up a picture of England, or even of a part of England, but surely the results would be more informative.

I still have seen nothing, for example, that describes findings specifically for Devon. I would imagine Devon to be a very interesting place for such research, as for centuries it was the border country between the English and the Celts.

If anyone has done such localised research already, particularly with Devon, I would very much like to know more about it.

ExeValleyBoy,

The genetic studies only appear to be contradictory when viewed second hand, via press and media reports. The population genetics research papers themselves are entirely consistent in their conclusions.

There have been two studies, which have included Devon, to my knowledge, but I have only had access to press reports. These were:-

“How Celtic are the Cornish? A Study of Biological Affinities.” By R. Harvey et al. Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 21/2, 1986.

“Cornish Genes and Celtic Culture.” By M. Smith. Unpublished paper presented at Polytechnic South West, 1991.

Apparently, both these studies showed no significant genetic differences between the Cornish and other inhabitants of the South West. In a commentary on these studies, the Western Morning News stated: “The Cornish might not like it, but they are no different from the Devonians on the other side of the Tamar.” (Western Morning News, 29 August 1992).

Incidentally, the genetic studies do not show that Devon was the border country between the English and the Celts. It may have been the border territory between core Wessex and the land conquered by Wessex (Devon and Cornwall), but the whole of the South Coast region of England (from Cornwall to Kent) is inhabited by people who are predominantly Indigenous British (Celtic) in origin.