(no subject)

[fajrdrako]

Now, this is really interesting. (I got it from Warren Ellis.)

I knew that Anglo-Saxons soon outnumbered the Briton population of England, but I didn't know how it happened. And I'm not sure what the article implies, but it's interesting; not just for the information, but for the use of computer simulation to study historical situations.

Comments

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I love the way that the study -- and therefore the story -- entirely ignores the female contribution to the gene pool.

German genes are overrepresented *on the Y chromosome*. That doesn't mean that Britons aren't walking around with a big whopping heap of Anglo-Saxon genes transmitted through the female line.

"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.

Right. Because conquerors never, ever rape the women of the invaded country. No, if you forbid marriage, you guarantee genetic purity.

*spits*

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Half the picture is actually less than half the picture. Whether or not the Anglo-Saxons interbred with the Britons, and to what extent they did so deliberately - well, we have historical accounts. For example, the ruling family of Northumbria in the mid-seventh century intermarried with the matrilinear Picts and the Britons to the west - we have the names and details - and it seems to have been done with all the pride, pomp and ceremony that always currounds royal marriages.

Still, I find it interesting that they are doing this sort of study. It reminds me a little of the 'statistical studies' I've seen in southern France, where all the data they have on a small community is studied - never mind that they have only a small amount of information about a small percentage of the population, and no way of knowing anything about the remainder, or even whether they are studying a tiny minority or a majority.

But information is information, and the more they poke at it, the more we might learn something useful.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I completely agree; data is cool. It's the uses people make of data that sometimes annoy me -- you certainly can't generalize about sexual practices from marriage practices!

I know nothing about British history pre-Wars of the Roses. Everything I know about Picts comes from Pink Floyd.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

What do the Picts have to do with Pink Floyd?

Besides being very cool, of course. And having fascinating spiral art and amazing castle-like fortresses called brochs that are still sitting there in Orkney.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

"Ummagumma" has a cut called "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict".

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

LOL! Wonderful title!

[brashley46.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you'd think if they were serious they'd work out some method of differentiating the ancestry of purely maternal genes too ... oh, wait, there's the mitochondrial genes, haven't they done anything comparable with them? Of course, it's just that they're not important to these schlubs.

Reminds me of a guy who thinks he's a descendant of Chingis Khan on the basis of y-chromosomal links ... http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/science/06genghis.html?ex=1153368000&en=d61fea5f655cb03e&ei=5070

Anyway, I do question whether the British population was that high; we do have indirect evidence of epidemics in the sub-Roman period in the Annales Cambriae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_Cambriae), do we not? (I'm thinking of the Yellow Plague of 547 AD that carried off Maelgwn ap Cadwallon, king of Gwynnedd, and a third of the population with him.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

That's more than I know after studying Archaeology. Even back when I was first studying, decades ago, this was seen as an exploded theory; the current idea is that just as the Britons became Romanised quickly, so the Romano-Brits in the same areas became Anglicised, or Saxonised, however you want to put it. Any apparent "outnumbering" was due to taking up the new fashions when it came to culture; DNA studies (in the South - Danes complicate it in the North) suggest that numerically there were very few new arrivals indeed.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm not much convinced by this, after other studies... Francis Pryor is pretty interesting.
Yes - it's nigh impossible to differentiate Danes from the other incomers via DNA, and also a fair number of people from various places would have been bobbing around in the Roman era. Plus the fact that some of the tribes in pre-Roman times also had links with mainland Europe.

brashley46 is also right about the epidemics.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

the Romano-Brits in the same areas became Anglicised, or Saxonised

So it wasn't that the people changed, but that the culture changed? That makes sense. It happened when the Normans came too, didn't it?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of a guy who thinks he's a descendant of Chingis Khan on the basis of y-chromosomal links ...

SOunds like Douglas Adams... When you go that far back, aren't we all related to everyone? Just about? Do you're my cousin a zillion times removed.

I had thought the population was very low, but I don't know what the estimates are, or how accurate they could be.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Plus the fact that some of the tribes in pre-Roman times also had links with mainland Europe.

The more I think about it, the more confusing it becomes; I'm not sure what can be distinguisted from the DNA but surely there was nothing to differentiate the European Celts from the British Celts except location and culture?

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yup. I don't the genetic variations between western European populations are sufficiently distinct for this kind of thing to hold much water at all. I think this is just being fussed over because it's an iffy theory with an 'Oh Shock!' headline. Sadly, much archæology that hits the news tends to be like that...

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yes. I mean, just think - what would people think if they dug up 21C artefacts here - Starbucks cups and Levis buttons. They'd think we'd been taken over by the Americans. Mind, judging by Blair's Yankee-Poodle act... they might have a point.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

much archæology that hits the news tends to be like that...

Don't start me ranting about the state of journalism today! It's all sensationalism, shock tactics and nonsense. You're lucky if there's an atom of truth, let alone a grain. The fact that they used a politically-loaded modern word like 'apartheid' is a tip-off.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

They'd think we'd been taken over by the Americans.

BIte your tongue, woman! That's every Canadian's unspoken nightmare - not that the Americans might take us over, but that they already have.

judging by Blair's Yankee-Poodle act... they might have a point.

Trade you a Blair for a Harper!

On second thought... maybe not.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Bite your tongue, woman! That's every Canadian's unspoken nightmare - not that the Americans might take us over, but that they already have.

It's ours, too.
In 2004, I wrote an article for the St As alumnus magazine. The article was vetoed. I was asking why we didn't make more of the guys who had served their country in the American War - not just militarily, but also the Secretary to the Peace Commission - as well as one of the Rebels (a crooked lawyer, as a matter of fact!). The article , which was far from being an angry polemic, and outlined the stories of Nisbet Balfour, Rev. James MacLagan (regimental chaplain and noted Gaelic scholar), and Adam Ferguson, was thought to be too controversial, however. This was the reply I had:
"it was the sensitive nature of the content of the article rather than its academic style that gave rise to the Committee's decision. The Committee felt that they had to be cautious about the possible reaction to your article of a potentially significant proportion of our alumni".
Which translates as, it might piss off the rich Americans on whom the university is excessively dependent re: fees and alumnus donations. We are bought and sold for US dollars...

I don't regard myself as having a country. Since 1979 (the dawn of Thatcherism) I have seen the social fabric of the UK torn to shreds. I feel totally alienated from the whole culture which has developed as a result. When we should have been aspiring to European social models, we've become a cut-price offshore territory of the US.
I am a European.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

The role of politics in scholarship - a long and annoying tradition.

When we should have been aspiring to European social models, we've become a cut-price offshore territory of the US.

I would say the same of Canada, except for the 'offshore' bit. The worst thing is that Canadians are constantly facing the example of the U.S., comparing ouselves to them, and getting a skewed vision that fails to take into account the rest of the civilized world.

I am a European.

I wish I was.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

The role of politics in scholarship - a long and annoying tradition.

Yup. In the past I'd queried the fuss St As made over the bicentenary of James Wilson, to be told (by the American postgrad organising things) that essentially because the university relied so much on US student fees, they could dictate which bits of our history we commemorated...

I wish I was.

I wish more people here identified themselves thus. But they're lazy sods who can't be bothered with other languages, so gaze a few thousand miles across the Atlantic instead of across the vastly shorter distance to the mainland. When I was a child, we used to get a lot more subtitled films, and also dubbed imported children's TV serials from mainland Europe. Now it's all American imports, and what gets made here is generally with an eye to US export...

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

bicentenary of James Wilson

Excuse my ignorance... who is he?

Language is part of the problem. The illusory lure of American wealth is another part, and not just their proximity to us, but their ubiquity. It isn't necessarily a bad thing: there are lots of American movies, TV shows, and comics that I love. But it become frustrating when we have access to nothing else.

Saxon Britain and the Southwest

[idiotgrrl.livejournal.com]

The genetic findings mentioned - Germanic language, Germanic Y chromosomes from a small minority of conquistadores - I mean, conquerors - coming in on top of a Celtic population sounds very, very familiar and is almost certainly incomplete. I'm convinced a study of the mitochondrial DNA would show a heavily Celtic lineage, for the same reason that a genetic study of Mexico would show a Spanish language and Spanish Y-chromosomes and a heavily Native American mitochondrial DNA.

This does not imply an apartheid society; merely that the children followed the condition of the mother even though descent was patrilineal. Your heirs were the children of your wife, the daughter or sister of another conquistador. Any Southwesterner could fill in the blanks on that Saxon Britain study down to the latest telenovela plot.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

James Wilson is the St Andrews drop-out who was one of the signers of American UDI and of the US Constitution. He was in the Philadelphia Company (as were some other 'Founding Fathers'), a land-grab, essentially, which was involved in some unpleasant exploitation of poor immigrants (as per the voyage of the Hector to Pictou in Nova Scotia, which the Philadelphia Company was behind). He was under investigation for corruption at the time of his death in 1798.
The university likes to make a great deal of him, and held a seminar on 'Peace' in his honour: never mind the fact he was a member of the Rebel Congress which refused even to talk to the Peace Commissioners in 1778 (the secretary of which was St As graduate Prof. Adam Fergusson). I had written to the event organiser saying the Prof would have been a better person to honour with the theme of 'Peace'.

But it become frustrating when we have access to nothing else.

And what worries me deeply is that we are expected to rewrite our own history to fit their national mythologies, and nod in assent at their projections about us. Too many people here have internalised a cultural cringe towards the US...

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Thanks for explaining about James Wilson. I felt a flash of vague recognition when you mentioned the Hector and Nova Scotia.

what worries me deeply is that we are expected to rewrite our own history to fit their national mythologies

This worries me too. We are at a point in history where we can at last get away from the prejudices of nationalism in every country - and instead we seem to be borrowing (or at least not challenging) the interpretations of another country entirely. Makes no sense. You see this rather strongly in American movies.

Mind you, I'm told that you can tell a Canadian from an American by asking them who won the war of 1812. To any Canadian, it was an invasion of our country that failed. Americans don't see it that way.

Re: Saxon Britain and the Southwest

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Any Southwesterner could fill in the blanks on that Saxon Britain study down to the latest telenovela plot.

I'd like to see that one!

It's an interesting reminder (at least to me) that the reality of inheritance doesn't follow any culturally-based line. The tangle of it all doesn't make for simple analysis even in one tiny segment of time or place.

The Celtic influence genetically, I am sure, was huge - even among the Romans. The Cults were a large, widespread population. Rome was a big empire, but it was also only one city - the genetic mix must have been phenomenal.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

One of the main villains of the Hector episode is Rev. Dr. Witherspoon, who was a minister in Scotland before going to Princeton because he was disgusted with the secular intellectual atmosphere of the Scottish Enlightenment. Sadly, again because he was a UDI signer, he has a plaque in Edinburgh and a huge statue in Paisley.

and instead we seem to be borrowing (or at least not challenging) the interpretations of another country entirely. Makes no sense. You see this rather strongly in American movies.

Mind you, I'm told that you can tell a Canadian from an American by asking them who won the war of 1812. To any Canadian, it was an invasion of our country that failed. Americans don't see it that way.

Exactly. Here, all we get fed is the US pov on the RevWar and 1812. We never hear from a Canadian pov, despite our stronger historical links. We are expected to celebrate people who campaigned against us. It also chimes with a lot of post-imperial guilt-tripping that some people are prone to; they don't seem to realise that they're just acquiescing to someone else's cultural imperialism.

If you try to behave like anything other than a doormat, you're "anti-American". Well, I have plenty of US friends, but I'm not an American, and I don't want to be an American at any price.