Submitted by MagicRaptor t3_xwxaqx in history
downnoutsavant t1_ira5wsj wrote
Reply to comment by AethelweardSaxon in Where did the English language REALLY come from? by MagicRaptor
Thanks for sharing that. Small bone of contention - the word 'replaced'. It is not clear from this article that this was indeed an invasion replacing the location population. Rather, we could imagine large populations creating trade posts on the east coast, settling, and co-mingling with a smaller local population. Hence, 3/4ths European, 1/4th Celtic-Roman.
I'd be interested to see more specifics as to where they obtained their genetic samples as well. They provide no detail in this article beyond 'east coast' and it doesn't explain the widespread adoption of Old English.
Just thinking - I personally believe there probably was an invasion, especially since we see these Germanic speaking people ascend to positions of power so quickly in the annals, etc, but evidence evidence evidence.
AethelweardSaxon t1_irafboi wrote
But for all modern English people to have from 50-100% Anglo Saxon DNA (generalisation), it suggests that much of the local Celts were either displaced or straight up killed. Unless there were 4x more invaders than locals which seems very unlikely.
We're forgetting that the DNA is just one part of the larger evidence for a replacement. All the contemporary sources and those written relatively soon after talk about invasion as opposed to colonists intermingling. We all know how unreliable those dark age sources are but for them all to agree is something.
The linguistic argument posed by many modern academics who favour the small elite theory has always fallen flat with me. You would expect pretty heavy, or even just any, Celtic influence and that the change would take place over a longer period too in my mind.
We also have a near perfect case study with England with the Norman conquest which was a small elite takeover, and of course we don't speak Normano-French now nor did we ever, day to day words used in conversation are still 70-80% Germanic derived.
MagicRaptor OP t1_iram4l9 wrote
If all those local Celts were displaced or killed, surely that would pop up in the archaeological record, right? One would expect there to be abandoned settlements and mass graves in England, while new settlements and communities start appearing in Wales and Scotland at around the same time. But we just don't see any of that. Something must be missing. No matter which version of the story you go with, it just doesn't add up.
AethelweardSaxon t1_iraw8k5 wrote
I wasn't suggesting genocide as the primary factor, but people don't just give up their land without a fight, there were certainly many battles fought and the chronicles attest to this.
In terms of settlements, there is perfect evidence for this. There are almost no place names in England with a Celtic etymology. A vast vast majority are from Anglo-Saxon derivation, the only other influence is a handful of Norse derivations in certain parts of the country.
Thanatikos t1_irb7r5g wrote
Oh, aren’t there even good examples of Latin place names? Londonum…
AethelweardSaxon t1_irb8jtt wrote
There a few cities sure, anything with -cester on the end of them especially i.e. Chichester, Leicester, Worcester, Gloucester. But even these are the exception to the rule and notable because of it.
Of course there are thousands more villages and towns than cities, and these are the ones with with nearly all Anglo Saxon derivations.
Thanatikos t1_irb9qta wrote
No, I was actually trying to bolster your point. If Celtic names (and genes) are largely missing even while Latin ones managed to make it through, it doesn’t bode well for the idea that the Celts were integrated in the area. I don’t think genocide or “replacement” are great leaps in logic to come to. I think genetic and archaeological evidence are showing more and more that older populations all over the planet were replaced by successive waves of migration and technology. The genes of the oldest human remains almost never suggest a common lineage with present day populations.
AethelweardSaxon t1_irawxjk wrote
Let me put it this way.
After the 'supposed' Anglo-Saxon invasion, Celtic DNA, material culture, language, Christian religion, and settlements basically completely vanish.
Within a relatively short amount of time it was like they were never there at all. This suggests they were largely displaced by the incoming germanics
buteo51 t1_irbk51b wrote
"Women weren't buried with weapons."
"How do you know?"
"Because all the people buried with weapons were men."
"How do you know they were men?"
"Because they were buried with weapons!"
This same pattern plays out to an extent with material culture. We don't actually know that someone who was buried with a Quoit brooch, for example, spoke primarily Old English or saw themselves as ethnically Germanic. It is just traditional to assume that, and so the assumption becomes its own evidence.
AethelweardSaxon t1_irblvgb wrote
You so realise you can tell the difference between male and female skeletons?
buteo51 t1_irbp53s wrote
Skilled forensic anthropologists usually can, but the issue is that most of the graves we're talking about here have never been studied this way, and never will be, because the bones do not exist anymore. In some, the bones disintegrated naturally before the grave was even excavated. There were no surviving bones found in the Sutton Hoo grave, for example. For many though, the bones were simply discarded because the artifacts were all that people paid attention to. This was pretty common practice up until pretty recently, and definitely was during the Victorian antiquarian boom. They dug up the grave, found a sword, wrote the skeleton down as male and Germanic, and then threw the bones in the trash. We are still operating off of that data today.
But it wouldn't even help you to have the bones in this case. A skeleton can't tell you what language someone spoke, or what terms they would use to describe their own background. Not even their DNA can tell you that. Identity is not biological.
As an aside, just because someone had a skeleton we might describe as biologically male does not mean that that person or their society saw them as a man.
MagicRaptor OP t1_irb4ovl wrote
Maybe you're right. I just don't understand how that level of replacement could take place at that time period. It just doesn't happen elsewhere in history like it appears to in Britain. The Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Mongols, the Turks, the Magyars, the Vikings, the Arabs, the Normans, the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Franks, none of them so completely and totally wiped out every last genetic, cultural, and linguistic remnant of those that came before them. We don't see this level of population replacement until the European settlement of the New World, and that can mostly be attributed to disease wiping out most of the Native Americans. As far as I know, nobody is suggesting a plague wiped out the Britons, paving the way for Anglo Saxon resettlement, so for the DNA to suggest upwards of 75% replacement just feels unfathomable to me. If it was a genocide, it would have been one of the most successful ones ever conducted in history, which would require a level of organization that the Anglo Saxons probably weren't capable of, and there would almost certainly be more evidence of it. If it wasn't a genocide, then how on earth did they achieve that high of a replacement rate? Maybe we'll get a clearer answer in coming years/decades as they do more studies and have more data to analyze.
AethelweardSaxon t1_irb7ywp wrote
It's certainly not unheard of. The beaker people essentially wiped out the Neolithic British down to the last man in an even less advanced time. In about 200 years after the beaker people's arrival the Neolithic British only made up 10% of the population.
There of course also was a degree of intermixing with the Celts that 25% of their DNA was still there. I can only assume that the remnants that once lived in England were forced back or fled to the extremities of the Island.
We know there were Celtic 'nations' and communities in Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and Scotland well into the Anglo Saxon period.
MagicRaptor OP t1_irbc4h8 wrote
There are a number of theories regarding the Neolithic decline and subsequent Beaker replacement, but most of them revolve around a plague and/or famine wiping out the Neolithic peoples (maybe even the predecessor to the black plague), so it wasn't as much a deliberate replacement but more of a "oh look, free real estate" situation.
Here's a couple sources on that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_decline
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07673-7
Population replacements just don't happen without some outside force killing a bunch of people beforehand, or a level of genocide that would make Pol Pot blush. If you have any other examples, I would love to hear them. And I don't mean that to be snarky, I legitimately want to know if there are other historical precedents of a non-disease, non-genocidal population replacement so I can wrap my head around this. Because your earlier point was right. For all intents and purposes, it's as if the Celts never lived in England in the first place. How can that be?
ConsitutionalHistory t1_irbwjnx wrote
AethelweardSaxon t1_irbx94h wrote
That's a very old study. There was a more recent one in 2016 that suggested English people were 35% AS. But this new one has 8x the sample size
ConsitutionalHistory t1_irbvvif wrote
Sorry...but I don't believe your statement regarding displaced or killed peoples is completely correct. I believe it was Charles I or James I that favored his followers and gave them much of northern Ireland. There was significant displacement and deaths as a result. Or perhaps I misunderstood your statement.
MagicRaptor OP t1_irbyh4y wrote
Those were both much later, and in Ireland. I'm specifically talking about England in the early medieval period.
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