Southeast England was 80% replaced by Anglo-Saxons in the Early Middle Ages

[J. Ketch]

Posted today on Anthrogenica by JonikW:

The first of the aDNA presentations now: “The Anglo-Saxon migration and formation of the early English gene pool”, Stefan Schiffels and Joscha Gretzinger.

Gretzinger (speaking very quickly throughout) started by saying about 80 people have been working on this since 2018 (including Schiffels as a PhD student). Gretzinger started off by looking at earlier studies including POBI. Then he turned to their own work. This is a map of sites the study looked at to find out the true picture:




England forms a cline between Wales and Scotlands and the Netherlands and Germany on a PCA. In the Bronze and Iron Age, England clusters with other Brits. But the 285 new samples sit with the northern Germans and Danes. The Early Medieval English are genetically closest related to northern Germans, Danes and Dutch. Most sites in England have majority ancestry from the Continent at this time.

Y chromosomes: haplogroup I1 is the big development. Around 76 percent of the paternal ancestry in the study comes from the continent. They also arrive at a level of 76 percent using the autosomal data alone.



Mitochondrial dna. Women were also involved in the migration.

Where did the continental incomers come from?: Nearly exclusively Northern Germany and Denmark. There is a “nice cline from the northern Netherlands to southern Sweden”, but mainly concentrated northern Germany and Denmark.

Impact of the migrations on the modern population: It’s not possible to model English as a simple two way mixture between the iron age population and northern Europeans. We think a better model for modern England involves a mixture between the IA Brits, early English and some French ancestry.

A three-way admixture model for the present day population has to include French. French ancestry 43 per cent in east Anglia and also strong in Kent.

Conclusions in bullet points:

We detect 76 percent ancestry replacement during the Early Middle Ages in England
We find no evidence for sex bias in the admixture process
We identify Lower Saxony and Denmark as the most plausible geographic homeland of those immigrants.
Admixture was heterogenous across England and follows an East to West cline
Continental ancestry was later diluted by southwestern European ancestry.

They now want to understand how this later French ancestry entered England (he mentioned David Reich is working with them).

Points from the questions and answers at the end: they have 30 early Medieval and 10 Iron Age samples from the Netherlands (I’m not sure whether those all belong specifically to the study because he mentioned they don’t have English IA samples of their own). Norway was not sampled specifically for the study but it looks different from the key areas discussed here including Denmark. Samples were mostly taken by archaeologists. Next they need to sample the west of England more and be careful to avoid bias of sites. They admit that “one of the major issues” is that they have is that they don’t have Roman samples from Britain. But this large-scale change that we see in the Early Medieval Period in England is NOT Roman Period”. They know this from studies that they have access to but that are not published yet.

A lot of what I've been saying for a while. A decent amount of Norman French mediated influence is needed to explain England's current position in PCAs, not just Briton + Germanic, although 43% in parts of the Southeast That sounds like a bit much based on my modelling, but I speculated up to 20%. I assume some of that must be Flemish, who've had a decent amount of influence in England since the middle ages, or perhaps earlier undetected ancestry from Belgae or Romans in SE Britain that is different from the other Iron Age British references.

Huge news though, proves the decades of mainstream non-migrationist revisionism to be full of crap. And proves again that 'Brits' are not all the same despite what some people seem to think, English and Insular Celts have quite different ancestry.

[J. Ketch]

[J. Ketch]

How did this French ancestry enter England? Gauls or Normans?

I noticed some south-eastern English can be very southern shifted like user Norb for example, who looks very Germanic (and he probably has lot of Germanic ancestry being from east).
Such people can't be modeled as Iron Age English + Anglo Saxon indeed.

Norb plots like a Fleming, which in light of this study makes sense, as SE England like Flanders/South Dutch looks more Germanic + Gaulish than Germanic + Brittonic.

But much of that Gaulish blood has to be pre Anglo-Saxon IMO, even though there's not much evidence of it yet. I believe the Belgae replaced the earlier Celtic Southern Britons to some extent.

[Token]

Admixture proportions for modern-day British. The "Anglo-Saxon" detected among Irish and northern Scots must be largely Viking. Anglo-Saxon ancestry is as low as 25% in Cornwall and as high 50% in eastern England. By the way, let's all laugh at the vast majority of archaeologists who thought that the Anglo-Saxons were just a minority in England compared to native Britons.

[Token]

Oh, didn't see that you had posted it already

[J. Ketch]

I missed this quote earlier from JonikW:

Conclusion bullet points:
Significant numbers of graves with CNE (Anglo-Saxon) ancestry;
No sex bias to ancestry;
But post-mortem treatment seems to emphasise female artifacts and brooches;
There are significant regional and local patterns;
A significant factor in this migration is the family, providing a vehicle for integration or separation.

Question and answers: Question: are the “French IA” signals actually from the Franks? Response: the only category that really matters is the WBI (British) women. They are the lower status with a “slightly lesser place” in society. But the individuals are not thinking of themselves as AS. However, the IA French ancestry “exists alongside the CNE and WBI” and you’re just as likely to have it in a WBI sample. But “probably, yes” the IA French signal is from the Franks.

Not sure what to make of calling them Franks, but the French IA types existing alongside Anglo-Saxons and Celtic Britons? That's a surprise, and perplexing.

Or if it exists equally in WBI (Celtic Briton) and CNE (Anglo-Saxon) then it's just a part of sub-Roman British ancestry?

[Rædwald]

This thread has been interested to read, given my own ancestry.

[J. Ketch]

Spread of CNE ancestry (Anglo-Saxon like) in Europe during and after the Roman Empire, courtesy of JonikW again.


Thoughts?

[Token]

Spread of CNE ancestry (Anglo-Saxon like) in Europe during and after the Roman Empire, courtesy of JonikW again.


Thoughts?

CNE seems to peak in the Jastorf-Kultur area in the Iron Age, which was probably Proto-Germanic. The arrow from the continent to southern Sweden is intriguing, I'd tend to think it was the other way around based on the evidence of "Proto-Danes" coming from Sweden to fill the empty space left by the Anglo-Saxons after the great migration. Northern Italy with more Germanic ancestry than northern France also looks weird.

[Grace O'Malley]

Admixture proportions for modern-day British. The "Anglo-Saxon" detected among Irish and northern Scots must be largely Viking. Anglo-Saxon ancestry is as low as 25% in Cornwall and as high 50% in eastern England. By the way, let's all laugh at the vast majority of archaeologists who thought that the Anglo-Saxons were just a minority in England compared to native Britons.

That's what the Viking paper concluded but I don't know how much sense that makes as there was obviously English in both Ireland and Scotland. It would have been interesting if they sampled Dublin.

Here's the quote from the Viking paper.

From this, we can see the spread of ancestry during and around the Viking era:
● UK populations have all received high ‘Denmark’ ancestry. Although Anglo-Saxon and Danish Viking ancestry are hard to distinguish, Viking-era Danes have too much “Sweden” ancestry to have contributed more than around 6% ancestry into England, whereas they could plausibly have contributed all (up to 16%) of the Scottish and Irish signal. Anglo-Saxon samples are needed to explore this further.
● The ‘Norway’ ancestry signal in the UK cannot be explained via the Danish or Anglo-Saxon contribution. These fractions (4% in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 3% in Wales) likely correspond to the Norwegian Viking legacy in Britain

The French component is really interesting as well. It looks like southeast England has had a high amount of immigration from the Continent even after the Anglo-Saxons arrival. Really looking forward to this paper coming out in a few weeks' time.