An interesting article: Genes show Welsh are the true Britons. The historians have gone back and forth on this, but it now appears that the Angles and Saxons did ethnically cleanse the native Britons.
thoughts in and out of season
An interesting article: Genes show Welsh are the true Britons. The historians have gone back and forth on this, but it now appears that the Angles and Saxons did ethnically cleanse the native Britons.
Just a year or so ago, there
Just a year or so ago, there was another study saying that the current gene pool of Britain is largely identical to that of the neolithic inhabitants of the Island—meaning that the numbers of Celts who came to Britain around 500-300 B.C. and the number of Anglo-Saxons who came in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. were quite limited. This was pretty hard to digest, since the accepted view of Britain is based on the idea of its being formed by the successive conquests by Celts and Anglo-Saxons. But now the revised view is being thrown out and we’re returning to the previous conventional view (at least as far as the Anglo-Saxons are concerned) that the Anglo-Saxons wiped out the Celts or expelled them to the Western fringe of the island. I’m glad I didn’t take the revised view too seriously.
You’re right, it’s puzzling.
You’re right, it’s puzzling. A few years ago there was a study comparing the DNA of some inhabitants of an English village with the DNA of some 8,000 year old human remains found nearby that turned up some close matches. Eventually I suppose they’ll put the pieces together.
It was all about
It was all about assimilation, how could a few boat loads of teutons and scandanavians have taken control of an island of Romano British, without adaptation and assimillation. The predominance of the place name ‘Walton’ which roughly translated means Welsh (i.e British) town in the East of Great Britain suggests a large (if not majority) minority of native inhabitants.