https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...04.10.716983v1
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Excellent, been waiting for a study on this for years, ever since the Gretzinger Anglo-Saxon paper left us with the mystery of how so much Gaulish ancestry ended up in Medieval England.Quote:
Originally Posted by AngloEd
It's one cemetery in Surrey but more evidence that the Norman conquest had a modest genetic impact. I increasingly believe that the long-term Anglo-Saxon invasions were largely Germanic people who were already heavily Celtic mixed, and Frankish influence is understated.
There's definitely a lot of question marks over the Gretzinger paper.Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Ketch
Though the Gretzinger paper did mention that that the French IA admixture coming into England continued after the early middle ages. The result of the Norman invasion is that it made England affairs shift to France. Thus, the genetic influence from this invasion is not necessarily from the initial invasion from the Normans, but from migrants that came to England during the middle ages.
What's your view on the provenance of most of the French IA ancestry? I'm still torn for a number of reasons.Quote:
Originally Posted by AngloEd
Because the Frankish ancestry being divided between 5 sovereign states (Netherlands, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Germany) clearly wasn't enough, there has to be a sixth one for a better banter. The French will start riots and declare a national emergency if studies confirm that the English have more Frankish ancestry than them.Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Ketch
Nop,because modern French are mostly Gaulish, not Frankish.Quote:
Originally Posted by Orion Arm
Next.
If it was due to post early middle ages migration then I feel like the French IA percentage would vary more between regions, and show stronger in other places we know there was migration. i.e why does Pembrokeshire have no/little French IA, or southern Scotland (mostly from flemish migrants). The amount seems to roughly marry up with the amount of CNE in England.Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Ketch
Attachment 148006
The study does mention the second ancestry component similar to modern day west Germany, Belgium and France. So, it could simply be that a good proportion of those who migrated during the early middle age to England, where from these regions who were mixed heavily with 'Celts' along the coast. So not all just from Southern Denmark, northern Germany, and Netherlands, but further west, and south.
Interestingly from this study on Germany. Attachment 148007 You can see that the regional differences in Britain seem to marry up between the map, indicating that the ancestry components came at the same time.
So, includes Germanic people who carried significant dna that correlates with German EIA (probably from the Halsatt culture that spread into Northern France and Belgium).
Therefore, yes I think alot of this French IA ancestry came during the early medieval period from Germanic people who were mixed with Celts.
Thanks, that was my logic as well, that the CWE seems uniformally proportionate to the CNE all over the British Isles, pointing to it arriving earlier rather than later. I can only guess that the Saxon Shore must have been teeming with Franks who came over with the Saxons, were bunched together and forgotten about in the records. And England being closer to Francia than Saxony the continued migration came mostly from there for centuries perhaps.Quote:
Originally Posted by AngloEd
There's also the fact that nearly all 'French' origin surnames in England are Norman, if there was a large scale French migration in the late middle ages you would expect more names from across France.
Still a bit puzzling why Early Medieval cemeteries in East Anglia and the North are lacking in CWE but those areas have loads of it today, and in the case of East Anglia more than anywhere else.
I think that French_IA ancestry was already in Britain before the Anglo-Saxons came. Probably since Celtic times. Later Anglo-Saxons mixed with French_IA somewhere in Southern England, and eventually this ancestry spread across all of England (also in Northern, Western and Eastern England) due to population movements and intermarriages within the Anglo-Saxon world.
Remember that most of England forms one genetic cluster, which means that it homogenized over time.
That was my keen belief too before the Gretzinger paper came out, but the authors seemed to rule that out as a major factor, so :dunno:Quote:
Originally Posted by Peterski
Despite that I couldn't help notice that the large amount of French IA ancestry on the south coast of Early Medieval England coincides exactly with Caesar's distinction between the Britons of the South Coast and those of the interior, and the areas of the apparent Belgic settlement in Southern England.
https://i.postimg.cc/CMC7YBLm/Screen...-22-151548.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...es.Ptolemy.jpgQuote:
The inland portions of Britain are inhabited by those who themselves say that according to tradition they are natives of the soil; the coast regions are peopled by those who crossed from Belgium for the purpose of making war. Almost all of these are called by the names of those states from which they are descended and from which they came hither. After they had waged war they remained there and began to cultivate the soil. The island has a large population, with many buildings constructed after the fashion of the Gauls, and abounds in flocks. For money they use either gold coins or bars of iron of a certain weight. Tin is found in the inland regions, iron on the seacoast; but the latter is not plentiful. They use imported bronze. All kinds of wood are found here, as in Gaul, except the beech and fir trees. They consider it contrary to divine law to eat the hare, the chicken, or the goose. They raise these, however, for their own amusement and pleasure. The climate is more temperate than in Gaul, since there are fewer periods of cold. . . .
By far the most civilized are those who dwell in Kent. Their entire country borders on the sea, and they do not differ much from the Gauls in customs. Very many who dwell farther inland do not sow grain but live on milk and flesh, clothing themselves in skins.
Central Southern English Counties had higher Northern French like IA from Late Bronze. It could have still spread from within England later.Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Ketch
https://i.ibb.co/7dk6x8py/image.png
https://media.springernature.com/ful...9_Fig5_ESM.jpg
I haven't seen those maps before. What are they from?Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
The Atrebates were a Belgic tribe in Southern England, who had a namesake across the channel they obviously came from.
Article
Open access
Published: 15 January 2025
Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08409-6
Aha, finally some genetic evidence of the Belgae settlement of Southern England.Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
Quote:
An increase in continental ancestry components has been described for Iron Age genomes from the south of Britain (England and Wales)17 and has been interpreted as the result of large-scale movements into the island during and before the Late Bronze Age (around 1000 to 875 bc). This is detectable as a rise in Early European Farmer (EEF) ancestry (Supplementary Note 6.2). When we incorporate our data, we find a previously undetectable significant (Welch’s t-test, two-tailed, P = 0.0005) increase in EEF ancestry between the Early and Late Iron Age (from 39.7% ± 0.2% to 41.8% ± 0.5%), driven by genomes from southern regions along the central and eastern English Channel coast, including those from the Durotrigian territory (Fig. 3d and Supplementary Table 25). These regions emerged archaeologically as a core of unprecedented continental influence during the Middle Bronze Age, with cross-channel communities exhibiting parallel developments in disposal of the dead, settlement architecture and material culture over centuries, suggestive of high levels of population mobility3. Close cross-channel relations persisted throughout the Iron Age, when much of Britain seems to have developed a more regional and distinctively insular cultural footprint.
I have a feeling this local increase of Gaulish ancestry was missed in previous ancestral estimates, which might need revising.Quote:
The impact of continental gene flow specific to the channel core zone is visible in principal-components analysis (PCA) of modern and ancient western Europeans (Extended Data Fig. 2), as well as patterns of haplotype copying from continental populations, characterized using ChromoPainter36 (Fig. 3b). We used SOURCEFIND37 to decompose the ancestry of Iron Age genomes into contributions from Early Bronze Age British and continental groups and further validated our results using an alternative approach of non-negative least squares38 (NNLS) with a different panel of surrogates (Methods and Supplementary Note 6.3). Overall, we estimate an average contribution of 73% (estimated by SOURCEFIND; NNLS estimate: 75%) from the British Early Bronze Age (2500 to 1500 cal bc) to the English and Welsh Iron Age population (800 bc to ad 50). Although this value is larger than the estimate of a previous study17, which inferred a 50% long-term replacement rate for the gene pool, it is in agreement with the reported dilution of British- and Irish-specific R1b-L21 haplogroup Y chromosomes by one quarter17.
A sharp dip in Bronze Age continuity is seen along the channel coast (Fig. 3b and Extended Data Fig. 8). This is centred on Hampshire (SOURCEFIND estimate of 60%), a region traditionally associated with Belgic tribes that Caesar mentioned as having migrated from Gaul3. Both Hampshire and the neighbouring Durotrigian zone show independent and significant increases in EEF ancestry between the Early and Late Iron Age (Extended Data Fig. 7). Notably, the Durotrigian territory was home to a major port at Hengistbury Head, one of the focal points of intensifying cross-channel networks as Roman influence spread across Gaul39. With fewer samples for analysis, haplotypic data provide less resolution on fine-grained temporal trends but identify numerous genetic outliers in the Middle to Late Iron Age, all from the channel core region, which are not discernible when EEF ancestry alone is considered (Extended Data Fig. 3; see Supplementary Note 6.3 for further discussion of genetic outliers). These outliers include one of the most elaborate warrior burials known for Iron Age England (North Bersted on the channel coast; around 50 cal bc), which has been proposed, on the basis of isotopic signature and burial rite, to belong to a stream of cross-channel migrants, fuelled by Caesar’s conquest of Gaul40.
I remember reading about a Belgic tribe coming to settle to Britain after Caesar's invasion. In the Middle Ages, both Henry I and Henry II brought Flemish settlers to Britain. Maybe there were a few times when people from Benelux came to settle, but in the grand scheme of things, I believe their role in increasing continental Celtic genes in Britain rather small. The biggest event that transformed the British Isles genetics, language and culture was Anglo-Saxon invasion. Normans and Vikings had their impact too but much smaller compared to Anglo-Saxons.Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Ketch
It may also have come from Anglo Saxon invasions into France after the initial invasion in which they took French wives back with them. The study mentions this as well, which suggests French like admixture was female-mediated to a considerable extent.Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Ketch
Yes, the Flemish/Walloon influence is undoubtedly very small on England overall, but I have wondered if it had an appreciable influence on East Anglia, given that it strangely has more French IA/CWE ancestry than any other region today and is genetically the closest to continentals (you would expect that to be SE England).Quote:
Originally Posted by Opie
Was that the Gretzinger paper? I may have forgotten that, but important if true.Quote:
Originally Posted by Birchy
I believe it was a seperate UCL study actually, will have to find it.Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Ketch