Celts and Anglo-Saxons, part n + 2

Posted by on July 23, 2006; This entry is filed under Uncategorized.
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Today’s UK Sunday Times has an interesting article following up this week’s news story about the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. It includes comments by some of those involved in the research.

11 Comments

  1. bioIgnoramus July 23rd, 2006 at 2:02 am

    It all seems to be based on the premise that no Anglo-Saxon DNA arrived much before late Roman times. There’s no obvious reason to believe it.

  2. David B July 23rd, 2006 at 5:13 am

    Bioignoramus: apart from mercenary soldiers, there is no historical or archeological evidence of migration from Germanic-speaking lands (outside the Roman Empire) into Britain before the 5th century.

  3. bioIgnoramus July 23rd, 2006 at 6:59 am

    The trouble is that arguments from lack-of-evidence are not terribly convincing. Example: in the middle ages, the SW of Scotland (Galloway) was Gaelic-speaking. In Roman times it had been British-speaking. There is, I gather, no historical or archaological record of what presumably had been an Irish invasion. There are records, of sorts, for other Irish Dark Ages invasions of western Britain, most obviously in Argyll, but none for Galloway. Yet no-one doubts it happened. Some German settlement into E England before the Romans arrived would necessarily not be recorded historically. If they assimilated, no-one might remember the events in historical times. Heavens, didn’t Tacitus remark that the Caledonians resembled Rhinelanders: the idea of migration before Roman times didn’t seem outlandish to him, I take it.

  4. John Emerson July 23rd, 2006 at 7:21 am

    The article reminded me of something I’ve been vaguely aware of for awhile. Roman rule civilianized the local populations. That’s why the Britons and the Gallo-Romans were so easily conquered by the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks — when Roman soldiers left, there were no indigenous soldiers.  
     
    I think that this is also a factor in the Mongol conquests in the Middle East. Once Genghis Khan defeated the professional military men (who were often mercenaries, or an imposed foreign ruling group), the local people had no defenses at all. Disarming the populace makes controll easier, but it hardms defense. 
     
    This is NOT a second-amendment plug. Just history.

  5. HIlde July 23rd, 2006 at 10:44 am

    If you use data from polymorphisms in all the chromosomes, and not only the uniparental markers you will see that the germans or danish are closer to galicians, and the galicians are not anglo-saxons nor vikings, but a population of southwestern europe. So I think the similarity between english and continental german-danish haplotypes maybe comes from the neolithics or post-neolithic events. 
    In other words, the culturally celtic britons could be genetically closer to the germanic populations, and the culturally celtic welsh closer to irish. 
     
    The data from autosomal SNP are in : 
     
    http://bioinformatics.cesga.es/snpforid/ 
     
    If you make a excel correlation analysis you will find it.

  6. razib July 23rd, 2006 at 11:20 am

    It all seems to be based on the premise that no Anglo-Saxon DNA arrived much before late Roman times. There’s no obvious reason to believe it. 
     
    as i said, there are probably signatures via tajima’s D you can look at it. genetically a massive infusion and population explosion over 2-3 centuries differs from gradual genetic exchange. so i suspect that Y diversity does not suggest gradual introgression, but quick radiation from a small founding population. someone would have to look at the older papers to check this, but it isn’t like this is an unanswerable question from a genetical angle. 
     
    finally, there is the fact that has been observed that anglo-saxon Y lineages tend to drop off in a discontinuous fashion, not a graduated one. that is, populations which have been celtic to the modern day don’t carry them at all, their historically english speaking neighbors do. this does not suggest that there was village-to-village movement of lineages, as is the case with mtDNA (which makes sense in light of dominant patrilocality).

  7. David B July 24th, 2006 at 1:57 am

    “Some German settlement into E England before the Romans arrived would necessarily not be recorded historically” 
     
    - I assumed you were talking about migration *during* the Roman empire period (1st to 4th centuries AD). If you go back *before* the Roman period I agree that negative evidence is less valuable (no written records, etc), but the distinction between ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ becomes increasingly murky.

  8. dearieme July 24th, 2006 at 8:29 am

    David, I was really just wondering whether it makes any sense to picture some sort of homogeneously “celtic” population until late Roman times, followed by an incursion of pure-bred “Anglo-Saxons” in just a couple of centuries. I presume that the Spring Easterlies have blown for a few thousand years and I therefore find it quite plausible that for a long time people in E England might have been kin to people in NW continental Europe, people in the Northern Isles kin to Scandowegians, people in the west of Britain kin to Irish and Iberian peoples and people in the South kin to people over the Channel. I don’t see why that picture (rather like Tacitus’s) is incompatible with substantial uniformity of culture and language when the Romans pitched up. But then Razib, and lots of others, know much much more about genetics than I do. On the other hand, nor do I see why the Anglo-Saxons must be treated as necessarily innocent of the large-scale slaughter of Britons. There again, what about a plague too? I’m just fascinated at how all this stuff advances, albeit erratically. But the base model, that at some time there were clearly distinct populations, does seem to me to require evidence in its support. The lack-of-evidence argument is less than compelling.

  9. David B July 24th, 2006 at 1:17 pm

    “I was really just wondering whether it makes any sense to picture some sort of homogeneously “celtic” population until late Roman times, followed by an incursion of pure-bred “Anglo-Saxons” in just a couple of centuries” 
     
    - I’m sure it would be wrong to picture any of these populations as being ‘homogeneous’ or ‘pure-bred’. ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ are mainly linguistic terms, but we don’t really know when these two language groups became recognisable as such. We do know that populations identified as ‘Celtic’ on the basis of decorative styles once occupied much of what is now German-speaking territory.

  10. pconroy July 24th, 2006 at 3:07 pm

    DavidB, 
     
    I agree that “Celtic” and “Germanic” are best viewed as linguistic terms – particularly when applied to the Britain and Irleand. Just as there may have been as few as 5 to 20% Anglo-Saxon male invaders, there probably were similarly only about that many Continental Celtic invaders before that. 
     
    Native Britons in Britain and Gaels in Ireland are far more related to the common Atlantic fringe populations than Central Europeans. 
     
    Even to call English a Western Germanic language is a bit of a stretch, as although the basic structure is Germanic, the vocabularly largely is not. Its a bit like finding an African American whose Y-DNA shows him to be of Irish descent, yet his autosomal DNA, as expressed by phenotype clearly is not.

  11. razib July 24th, 2006 at 7:07 pm

    but we don’t really know when these two language groups became recognisable as such 
     
    you can apply the coalescent to languages. germanic is an outgroup to celtic & latinate. with a few assumptions….

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