Saturday, June 18, 2011

The English are not really British: People from rural England are more closely related to the northern Germans than they are to people from Wales or Scotland

Biologists at University College in London have studied a segment of the Y chromosome that appears in almost all Danish and northern German men - and is also surprisingly common in Britain, particularly England. This suggests that a veritable flood of people must have once crossed the North Sea. New isotope studies conducted in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries produced similar results. When chemists analyzed the tooth enamel and bones of skeletons, they found that about 20% of the dead were invaders who had come from continental Europe. Archeologist Heinrich Härke of the University of Reading has now come up with a quantitative estimate of the migratory movement. He suspects that up to 200,000 invaders crossed the North Sea. According to Härke, the native Britons lived a miserable existence as servants in the villages of the Anglo-Saxons. The London geneticist Mark Thomas says that the conquerors from the continent maintained social structures similar to apartheid, a view supported by the laws of King Ine of Wessex (around 695 A.D.). They specify six social levels for the native Britons, five of which refer to slaves. As a result of brutal subjugation, the reproduction rates of native Britons were curbed, while the winners had many children. The consequences are still evident in the gene pool of modern England.

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