Originally Posted by
Creoda
Great to finally have the paper as a reference, although basically just confirming what we'd seen in the previews. The question of Norse/Danish influence vs Anglo-Saxon still remains vague, and I still can't get my head around the France IA influence, when and where exactly most of it came to England. From how evenly it's spread over the bulk of England, parallel with Anglo-Saxon ancestry, you would think it came early-ish, mostly alongside Anglo-Saxons as part of the Frankish influence the paper mentions, but then it's not seen in the early medieval sites outside Southern England below the Thames. However that is possibly just a sampling issue, since Frankish objects are found in good numbers in the Midlands, East Anglia, and East Yorkshire. I personally don't believe the majority of France IA ancestry in English came after 1066 with Normans, although no doubt a significant percentage of it did. 40+% French in East Anglia coming with Normans is just not credible IMO, there is no historical or other evidence that it was a hotspot of Norman/French migration in the later Middle Ages, let alone having such a drastic population replacement.