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

Hello everyone,

It's a long while since I last posted, and I'm happy to see the Celtic Devon discussion is still going on.

One problem with the traditional idea of the Anglo-Saxon invasion is the assumption that Germanic migrations from the continent only occurred in the 5th and 6th centuries.

Such migrations may have occurred in Roman times owing to the settlement of mercenaries (Federates) employed in Britain by the Roman Army.

I have recently read about a historian who thinks that the "Saxon Shore" forts named in Roman texts refer not to defences against the Saxons but to the ethnic identity of proto-English Germanic people living there in late Roman times who had given their name to the coast.

On a recent Time Team programme I saw, it was revealed that after numerous archeological digs of Roman sites in and around Canterbury no evidence at all of burning or destruction of late Roman sites had been found in the area, contradicting the idea of a violent Germanic invasion. It was then suggested that the later fortifications erected around Canterbury were not to repel Saxon invaders but had resulted from a 4th century civil conflict within the Roman Empire in which Britain had been heavily involved.

The Oppenheimer and Sykes data you cite suggest Germanic migrations from the continent may have been occurring long before even the Romans came.

I will try to dig out more concrete examples with references, but I am beginning to think that Celtic and Germanic people may have lived side-by-side on these islands long before the 5th and 6th centuries and that this cohabitation may even precede the Roman period.

Plymouth Exile,

Thankyou for your reply (and sorry for the lateness of mine!). Interesting stuff.

So I take it that 95% or more of the population of Devon and Cornwall is (according to the data) probably of pre-Saxon stock on the male line. This sort of makes more sense with the conclusions I had come to from historical and other evidence, than does the figure of 80 percent (Blood of the Vikings, I think).

I'd been thinking for some time that perhaps a majority of the North-Germanic DNA in Britain could be pre-Saxon, maybe even pre-dating the arrival of Celtic and Germanic languages in Western Europe.

And just another question, does the 4.2% from Norway appear to pre-date the Germanic arrivals as well?

Einion,

Sykes does not indicate what proportion of the Norwegian element in the Y-Chromosome record of Devon and Cornwall is from the Viking invasion/settlement period, but Oppenheimer (using exact gene match techniques) has estimated that only about one in six of the Norwegian clusters in Britain date to the last 2,000 years, i.e. the Viking period. If this applies to the Devon/Cornwall result, it would imply a mere 0.7% Viking period intrusion, the rest being earlier.

Thanks again for the info, Plymouth Exile.

A national study into Britain's genetic history is expected to show that Devonians are closely linked to Ancient Britons.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/content/articles/2009/02/13/devon_ancient_britons_feature.shtml

This latest part of the Bodmer survey extends the data to the Plymouth area.

PlymouthExile,

It will be interesting to see what that study shows.

I wonder if the survey will be carried out in larger blocks (e.g. Cornwall, Devon, etc..) or whether it will look at the data in a more granular fashion (e.g West Devon, East Cornwall etc..)

I believe that previous surveys have not found any significant difference on either side of the Tamar, but we shall have to wait and see..

Ozzie Exile,

It is not made clear what the size of the ‘blocks’ will be, but judging by the results already obtained by Bodmer, it would seem that the genetic profiles obtained in Devon and Cornwall are fairly uniform, with no significant differences found on either side of the Tamar, as each county was surveyed separately.

This correlates well with the Y-chromosome signatures obtained by Sykes for the South West, i.e. Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset (historical Dumnonia). However the Sykes Y-chromosome data set seems to show a marked difference between the South West and the rest of Southern England where the North West European component is much higher. In this respect, the South West correlates much more closely with North Wales, Tayside & Fife, and the Borders than with any other English region.

It is interesting that Bodmer has included Plymouth in his latest sample set, as he has avoided large conurbations in the past, as these often had more migration into the area over the centuries.