Apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England

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Tuesday, 18 July 2006, 23:09 GMT 00:09 UK

Britain 'had apartheid society'

An apartheid society existed in early Anglo-Saxon Britain, research suggests.

Scientists believe a small population of migrants from Germany, Holland and Denmark established a segregated society when they arrived in England.

The researchers think the incomers changed the local gene pool by using their economic advantage to out-breed the native population.

The team tells a Royal Society journal that this may explain the abundance of Germanic genes in England today.

There are a very high number of Germanic male-line ancestors in England's current population. Genetic research has revealed the country's gene pool contains between 50 and 100% Germanic Y-chromosomes.
But this Anglo-Saxon genetic dominance has puzzled experts because some archaeological and historical evidence points to only a relatively small number of Anglo-Saxon migrants.

Estimates range between 10,000 and 200,000 Anglo-Saxons migrating into England between 5th and 7th Century AD, compared with a native population of about two million.

Ethnic divide

To understand what might have happened all of those years ago, UK scientists used computer simulations to model the gene pool changes that would have occurred with the arrival of such small numbers of migrants.

The team used historical evidence that suggested native Britons were at a substantial economic and social disadvantage compared to the Anglo-Saxon settlers.

The researchers believe this may have led to a reproductive imbalance giving rise to an ethnic divide.

Ancient texts, such as the laws of Ine, reveal that the life of an Anglo-Saxon was valued more than that of a native.

Dr Mark Thomas, an author on the research and an evolutionary biologist from University College London (UCL), said: "By testing a number of different combinations of ethnic intermarriage rates and the reproductive advantage of being Anglo-Saxon, we found that under a very wide range of different combinations of these factors we would get the genetic and linguistic patterns we see today.

"The native Britons were genetically and culturally absorbed by the Anglo-Saxons over a period of as little as a few hundred years," Dr Thomas added.

"An initially small invading Anglo-Saxon elite could have quickly established themselves by having more children who survived to adulthood, thanks to their military power and economic advantage.

"We believe that they also prevented the native British genes getting into the Anglo-Saxon population by restricting intermarriage in a system of apartheid that left the country culturally and genetically Germanised.

"This is exactly what we see today - a population of largely Germanic genetic origin, speaking a principally German language."

The research is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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Free available report at The Royal Society: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Summary of above:

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The role of migration in the Anglo-Saxon transition in England remains controversial. Archaeological and historical evidence is inconclusive, but current estimates of the contribution of migrants to the English population range from less than 10 000 to as many as 200 000. In contrast, recent studies based on Y-chromosome variation posit a considerably higher contribution to the modern English gene pool
(50-100%). Historical evidence suggests that following the Anglo-Saxon transition, people of indigenous ethnicity were at an economic and legal disadvantage compared to those having Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. It is
likely that such a disadvantage would lead to differential reproductive success. We examine the effect of differential reproductive success, coupled with limited intermarriage between distinct ethnic groups, on the
spread of genetic variants. Computer simulations indicate that a social structure limiting intermarriage between indigenous Britons and an initially small Anglo-Saxon immigrant population provide a plausible
explanation of the high degree of Continental male-line ancestry in England.

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We really are trying to understand so-called invasions and migrations. I attended a lecture at Harvard earlier this year, presented by an American archaeologist trained in Britain who now digs and teaches in her adopted country. For some time, a proposal was put forth that Anglo-Saxons and their little understood friends, the Jutes, were a small group of elites who imposed their will upon the masses.

Its been decided that some of the scholars who felt that way were from the north and west of England where the AS made little impact.

I love the whole notion of using genetics to support historical claims and aid in the interpretation of archaeological sites. This is fascinating!

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It just occurred to me that the Black Death might have made greater inroads on the Celtic underlay than on the AS "royal" or "ducal" population.

What, if anything, does this study have to say about Normans and their lineages?

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plainoldme wrote:

What, if anything, does this study have to say about Normans and their lineages?

Nothing or little: it wasn't a topic.

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Nein, Valter, Ich do not beleef zis theory vun leetle bit.

Englanders are really Cherman?

It ist all strudle!

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It is interesting to not that this study focuses on the Y-chromosome, so the male lineage. Nothing is said about the input from the female side. So it is quite possible that the Celtic females have left a major genetic fingerprint on the population of Britain, especially considering that invading armies tend to be made up of males.

Incidentally, methinks this research will give fuel to racists who see their fears of the majority being genetically wiped out by a fast-reproducing minority confirmed.

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Paasky's point about females is well taken. The documentary evidence for the behavior of marauding warriors is that they kill the men and the children, and rape the women. This is a concerted policy to wipe out the "blood lines" of the defeated enemy, and to impose the genetic heritage of the conquerors on the populace, even if they did not know a genetic heritage from their horses' asses.

I'm not surprised by this, i'm only surprised that anyone else would be surprised.

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NB: the 'B' in Proceedings of the Royal Society B means Biology.

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There have been a couple of television documentaries about testing the travels of humans across the globe using the Y-chromosone. Look for an American scientist called Spenser (or Spencer?) Wells who is now the National Geographic Society's Explorer in Residence.

Women's lineages are revealed through mitochondrial DNA.

There is a story about the conquest of Brittany in which the male conquerors do kill the resident men, then cut out the tongues of the women in an effort to obliterate their language and to guarantee that the father's language and genes are passed on.
-------------------

I took notes on the lecture
(referenced above) I attended: I will look for them.

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plainoldme wrote:

There is a story about the conquest of Brittany in which the male conquerors do kill the resident men, then cut out the tongues of the women in an effort to obliterate their language and to guarantee that the father's language and genes are passed on.

You mean Brittany, conquered by the Vikings in 914?
Sounds a bit ... well, might be.

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Frankly, Walter, while I remember the legend, the identity of the conquerors has escaped me.

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Afterwards, it were only the French, English and Germans. :wink:

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Walter -- I'm not entirely uncertain that the conquerors weren't the Romans.

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Or, for that matter, those expelled from what is now Wales in order to avoid the Romans or the ANglo-Saxons.

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I think the tongue-cutting of entire populations must be taken with a grain of salt (with the standards of hygiene and medicine of the times, cutting out people's tongues carried a high fatality rate, one can imagine).

An interesting tidbit with regards to merging populations was the discovery that the population of Iceland is genetically mainly of Irish/Gaelic make up instead of Norse. It appears the Vikings had more children with their Irish slave girls than with their own wives, and furthermore that slaves survived the eternal feuding that wiped out many of their their masters. A third contributing factor could be that when Iceland hit hard times, after the Viking Age ended, the economically strong elite could afford to move away, while the poor former slaves had no option but to stay.

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Paaskynen -- Applying something from another species to humans: According to a recent chapter of Jean-Michel Cousteau's Ocean Adventure, killer whales will go after the tongues of infant grey whales because death comes quickly when the tongue is cut out. I take all such stories with grains . . . truth is always stranger than.

That is interesting about the Icelandic peoples. The use of Norse names among the Irish and Irish names among the Norse (or the French, the cousins of the Irish to some extent), points to a great deal of admixing. At least some of the sagas have slave girls with clearly Irish names. They might have been bartered brides, however. Or, bartered concubines, to be more exact. Also, when the Norse first arrived in Iceland, they found Irishmen -- identified as priests seeking white martyrdom -- already there, but, according to the sagas, they disappeared. Who is to say they weren't colonists?

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The tongue is not only a vulnerable organ with many blood vessels, it is also a tender cut of meat, very tasty if you ever tried cow, pig (or reindeer!) tongue.

If I remember correctly, the landnámabók mentions Gaelic monks living as hermits on islands off the coast of Iceland. Whether they had lived on the mainland before and were chased away to the fringes when the vikings arrived is unknown. Whichever way, the vikings treated Iceland as virgin territory that they did not have to fight over (if they had, they would surely have boasted of it! Very Happy

Stories about the Shetlands do mention, for instance how arriving Vikings drove the remnants of the gaelic or pictic natives to extinction (or "underground" as the vikings believed; they became latter day pixies and trows).

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Apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England

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