Around three hundred years after the Romans left, scholars like Bede wrote about the Angles and the Saxons and their migrations to the British Isles. Scholars of many disciplines, including archaeology, history, linguists and genetics, have debated what his words might have described, and what the scale, the nature and the impact of human migration were at that time.
New genetic results now show that around 75 percent of the population in Eastern and Southern England was made up of migrant families whose ancestors must have originated from continental regions bordering the North Sea, including the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. What is more, these families interbred with the existing population of Britain, but importantly this integration varied from region to region and community to community.
"With 278 ancient genomes from England and hundreds more from Europe, we now gained really fascinating insights into population-scale and individual histories during post-Roman times", says Joscha Gretzinger, a lead author of the study. "Not only do we now have an idea of the scale of migration, but also how it played out in communities and families." Using published genetic data from more than 4,000 ancient and 10,000 present-day Europeans, Gretzinger and colleagues identified subtle genetic differences between the closely related groups inhabiting the ancient North Sea region.
[...] With the new data, the team could also consider the impact of this historic migration today. Notably the present-day English derive only 40 percent of their DNA from these historic continental ancestors, whereas 20 to 40 percent of their genetic profile likely came from France or Belgium. This genetic component can be seen in the archaeological individuals and in the graves with Frankish objects found in early Medieval graves, particularly in Kent.
"It remains unclear whether this additional ancestry related to Iron Age France is connected to a few punctuated migration events, such as the Norman conquest, or whether it was the result of centuries-long mobility across the English Channel", says Stephan Schiffels, lead senior author of the study. "Future work, specifically targeting the medieval period and later will reveal the nature of this additional genetic signal.
Journal Reference:
Gretzinger, J., Sayer, D., Justeau, P. et al. The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05247-2
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2022, @12:54PM (2 children)
if everyone had sex with everyone else
just think about it
no more wars
just sex
and lots of brown people after the white and black and yellow and red all even out in the gene pool
humanity would be free
the earth would saved
right?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 30 2022, @04:44AM
We would all be brown... and since all the other genetic traits would also average, our collective IQ would be around 85.
The wheel gets invented around IQ92.
.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Friday September 30 2022, @05:11PM
Pretty much exactly what John Lennon in 1971 in his song "imagine.
The touble is, humans being humans, we'd just invent other ways to discriminate. Like, how light/dark brown are you? How rich are you? what are your politics?, how many kids do you have? What age did you get married? etc etc