neil hilton wrote:I saw a program on tv about an archaeological campaign that questioned the entire notion of an Anglo-Saxon 'settlement' of the British Isles. They compared the DNA of skeletons of known Romano-British and those from the so-called period of the Anglo-Saxon invasion/settlement and found essentially no difference, there was no Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain.
While there are other studies that indicate just the opposite.
One of the websites that has info on this apparently is locking up my browser so I'll add the references one at a time until I figure out which one it is:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2006/ ... hancestry/
This site suggest that the Celts and Germanic tribes were very close DNA wise and both had minimal impact on the British gene pool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxo ... c_evidence
Mentions both theories but notes that Central England seems to have been 50-100% Germanic at one point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_I1_(Y-DNA)
Goes into more detail and states that the estimated migrations were anywhere from 10,000 to 200,000 in the period under discussion.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... itain.html
ups the upper number to 500,000 and states 100,000 is supported by archological and historical evidence but goes on to say the imigration may have taken longer and started earlier than some propose.
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000648.html
Seems to be pretty even handed and as such doesn't come to any firm conclusions although the evidence sited doesn't seem to agree with your posting.
as does this one:
http://heritage-key.com/britain/genetic ... ke-uks-dna
Several hundred warriors hired by local rulers to keep out other barbarians would make no difference to the gene pool of a whole country.
In any case it's pretty clear that there were more than a "several hundred warriors". Indeed estimates range from a 10,000 up to 500,000 German imagrants during the period in question.
So the entire notion of an 'English' nation (bastardisation of the name Angle) is wrong! It should in reality have another name.
Yes and no. It's pretty clear that the Angles were in the minority and indeed the Celts refered to the German invaders as "Saxons" for the most part from what I've read. To the point that the word became an insult whose use was not confined soly to those whom it logically applied.
Again, my mistake. I should have said the English, Scots/Picts, Welsh and Irish have hated each other since Roman times and before that the various Celtic tribes hated each other (Celts didn't have nations as we would call such). And I do think the Celts hated each other going off what they did to each other when they fought and captured opposing warriors and non-warriors, the only thing they hated more was non-celts.
Either you are using a very different defintion of the word "hate" than I am or you simply don't understand the Celts. I suspect it's the latter by the way. Just because they fought each other doesn't mean that they necessarily hated each other. Indeed it's fairly clear that that wasn't the case in general although when you are talking about "Saxons" things may be different. Note the above is still not correct as there were no English until well after Roman times and it wasn't until latter that the Irish and the Scotts were considered different people and even later yet that the Scotts absorbed the Picts.