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When a strong Germanic signal was discovered in the Y-chromosome of British men, geneticists at University College London suggested that enslavement and apartheid imposed by Saxon invaders was responsible.

It was an idea that, given 20th-century European history, had a particular resonance.

The argument is, that from AD 430 to 730, the Germanic conquerors of Britain formed an elite, with a servant underclass of native Britons. Inter-marriage was restricted, and the invaders and their genes flourished.


“But it is just not necessary to assume an apartheid-like system,” argues John Pattison of the University of South Australia in Adelaide. “The evidence is compatible with the idea of a much more integrated society.”

Lengthy influx

Pattison reviewed existing archaeological and genetic evidence, and conducted a new analysis of British DNA. Then, starting in 2001 and working backwards to pre-Roman times, Pattison calculated for each generation the net population growth and the origins of immigrants.

He concludes that people with Germanic origins came to Britain well before and after the early Anglo-Saxon period, and this long period of immigration can explain a relatively strong Germanic genetic signal today.

He adds that about 60% of the current British population still has some native Briton DNA, arguing against the idea, put forward by Mark Thomas at University College London and colleagues that Saxon invaders ethnically purged the country.

The textual and archaeological evidence collected by Thomas’s team is also controversial, says Pattison.

Brutal times

While the Anglo-Saxon King Ine of Wessex did formulate a code that imposed heavier taxes on native Britons than Saxons, for example, this might have been intended to encourage reluctant Britons to fully adopt the new Germanic culture and language, and to label themselves “Germanic”, rather than to penalise an underclass, Pattison argues.

Overall, he says, the evidence suggests the picture of life in early Anglo-Saxon Britain was not as dismal as that portrayed by Thomas and his team.

“It was still the Dark Ages. People were pretty brutal and there was a lot of fighting going on – but it wasn’t necessarily as grim for the Britons as has been suggested,” he says.

Chris Tyler-Smith, an evolutionary geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK, does not think we have seen the end of the “apartheid” debate. “It emphasises for me how much room there is for interpretation,” he says.

Journal References: Pattison study – Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.0352); Thomas study – Molecular Biology and Evolution (19: 1008)

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