Anglo Saxon DNA Study.

[JohnHowellsTyrfro]

Interesting, particularly in view of the "gladiator" thread and the "anomolies".

https://medium.com/@stschiff/how-rar...87a#.k4qu7jvk6

[Bas]

Yeah, this one kind of sneaked in behind the Roman Britain paper.

This is the paper: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/16...omms10408.html

In the supplementary information (http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/16...ms10408-s1.pdf) supplementary table 4 shows the lowest estimate of Anglo-Saxon ancestry as on average 24-27% even in Cornwall

[JohnHowellsTyrfro]

Yeah, this one kind of sneaked in behind the Roman Britain paper.

This is the paper: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/16...omms10408.html

In the supplementary information (http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/16...ms10408-s1.pdf) supplementary table 4 shows the lowest estimate of Anglo-Saxon ancestry as on average 24-27% even in Cornwall

But is it really "Anglo Saxon" ?

[zamyatin13]

But is it really "Anglo Saxon" ?

There has to be a fair amount of Norse and Flemish in there too. Even a little from the Roman era maybe, as the U106 samples in the parallel study suggest.

The PCA sample shows the Anglo-Saxons clustering close to Orcadians. That can only really be explained if the Viking and Anglo-Saxon signatures are very similar. How then do you separate them?

I can feel my inner pedant rising when they say 38% in England. It's Eastern England only. As Bas mentions, the Cornish score is nearer 25%, so somewhere in the middle of the two is probably nearer the truth. The POBI study suggested 25% as a British average. 25-30% is probably the kind of range we're talking about then.

If I had to put money on it, I would say the split of that was maybe 15% Anglo-saxon, 10% Norse, 5% other including Flemish & Norman as an average across Britain.

[avalon]

But is it really "Anglo Saxon" ?

I do think that the "Anglo-Saxon" estimates used by the authors are a bit misleading. 45% for Orkney? The Anglo-Saxons never got anywhere near Orkney!

In the case of Cornwall, again I think "Anglo-Saxon" is misleading, perhaps the term "English" would be better. I am no expert on Cornish history but there is this from wikipedia.

The chronology of English expansion into Cornwall is unclear, but it had been absorbed into England by the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042–1066), when it apparently formed part of Godwin's and later Harold's earldom of Wessex.[34] The records of Domesday Book show that by this time the native Cornish landowning class had been almost completely dispossessed and replaced by English landowners, the largest of whom was Harold Godwinson himself

So I think Cornwall has seen over many centuries a gradual expansion of English speakers (people with Anglo-Saxon ancestry) into the region, such that the Cornish language went extinct by 1800 and so we now have a fairly high estimate for average "English" ancestry.

[JohnHowellsTyrfro]

There seems to be a lot of emphasis on the "Anglo Saxon" contribution to the DNA of the English rather than on the fact that around two thirds of their DNA isn't, if I'm understanding things correctly. There also must be some uncertainty in relation to whether some of the DNA attributed as A/S could have Norse, Norman, Roman or even of earlier origins and possibly not exclusive to England? Not saying of course that there isn't a significant A/S contribution in England.

[avalon]

I do agree that the Celtic ancestry of the English is often overlooked but the Anglo Saxons/English are such a key part of British history I can see why there is so much focus.

What's interesting now is that we now have two recent papers that have sampled Anglo-Saxons (firstly the Hinxton/Oakington Saxons from this paper but also the Anglo-Saxon from Yorkshire in the Romano-Britons paper).

Both papers judging by PCAs seem to have shown that the Anglo-Saxons plot more to the north and east geographically, closer to modern Dutch, Orcadians and Norwegians, whereas the Iron Age samples have more of a southern lean towards France. In this paper we have Iron Age samples from Linton and Hinxton and they plot closer to modern English and modern French than do the so called "pure" Anglo-Saxons from Oakington. We also have the Iron Age woman from Yorkshire in the other paper who plots more towards France whereas than the Anglo-Saxon is more Norwegian-like.

So it seems to me based on samples so far that Iron Age Britons are more French-like whereas Anglo-Saxons are more Danish-Dutch-like, which isn't really surprising I suppose.

[JohnHowellsTyrfro]

I was watching a repeat of a TV programme about the Saxons which may be a bit behind current knowledge, but one comment was after the Roman period the population of Britain was estimated at about 2 million but the A/S migrants numbered in tens of thousands, the theory being that they out-bred the locals over generations ( not everywhere of course). One comment interested me and I'm not sure if still relevant, but it was there is little or no evidence of destruction of the "locals" ( battles, burning etc.) .

[Piquerobi]

^ This 2006 study addressed it in similar terms:

The motivation for this study was to reconcile the
discrepancy between, on the one hand, archaeological and
historical ideas about the scale of the Anglo-Saxon
immigration (Hills 2003), and on the other, estimates of
the genetic contribution of the Anglo-Saxon immigrants
to the modern English gene pool (Weale et al. 2002;
Capelli et al. 2003). We have shown that this discrepancy
can be resolved by the assumption of an apartheid-like
social structure within a range of plausible values for
interethnic marriage and socially driven reproductive
advantage following immigration (Woolf 2004). Perhaps
most strikingly, our model indicates that, by using
plausible parameter values, the genetic contribution of
an immigrant population can rise from less than 10% to
more than 50% in as little as five generations, and certainly
less than fifteen generations. Similar processes are likely to
have shaped patterns of genetic variation in other
‘conquest societies’ of the period, and perhaps more
recently (Carvajal-Carmona et al. 2000). The social
structures described here may have been of wider
significance in processes of language replacement and
the interactions of hunter-gatherers and early farmers.

"Evidence for an apartheid like social structure in England"
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.o.../273/1601/2651

[authun]

The point of interest about the Oakington burials is that it is an early cemetary and 2 of the 4 females are apparantly 'continental'. In the Hinxton cemetary, which dates to the middle saxon period, 3 out of 3 females are 'continental'. This total of 5 out of 7 tells us nothing about the country as a whole but does suggest that in this part of East Anglia at least, the elite male dominated model does not hold and that quite a high proportion of females migrated with males. If anglo saxon males without anglo saxon females took british wives, this helps the arithmetic explained in the afore mentioned 'Evidence for an apartheid like social structure in England'.