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DNA Study shows Celts are not a unique genetic group
Interesting report on this study. The study authors state that their results show that there was not one, single, Celtic grouping in Britain, and further that the Anglo-Saxon invasion did not push the various Celts out, but rather the Anglo-Saxons and Celtic groups mingled together.
Nate Hanawalt
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Just saw that this had already been posted in the Boudicca's Last Stand discussion. Apologies.
Nate Hanawalt
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I still have my doubt how they can research 200 people's dna and then reach such detailed conclusions about what happened to large groups of people 1000-3000 years ago.
"Likewise, the Norman conquest of England did not leave any genetic evidence.". Well, maybe the people who moved back into the depopulated nothern counties were of the same stock as the victims?
Someone remarked, based on this research, that apparently the Romans had not intermarried into the British population at all because they left no dna. But what about the probability that the Romans in Britain were mostly from NW Gaul and therefore perhaps less visible?
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I haven't seen the original paper but some of their conclusions seem strange. The closest relatives of the English would appear to be the French (40% identity), ascribed to a folk migration "sometime after the end of the last Ice Age". However, the English relatedness to the Germans (20%-30%) is ascribed to the Anglo-Saxon invasions of c. 450 AD. How did they work out this dating?
Martin
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I get the validity of sampling for Celtic DNA, and seeing where the DNA is and which other DNA it matches. Basically, if the Celts were there previous to the Angles/Saxons/Jutes and Normans, then sampling for Celtic DNA markers could potentially indicate where those populations had eventually settled down after the invasions/migrations/friendly exchanges/insert-own-pet-theory-here. There are of course other reasons that the DNA markers would be present other than in-place perpetuation of the genes (later migrations, recent arrivals from abroad, etc.) but hopefully the sampling would be enough to rule out such outliers. I do share Robert's concern that the sample size is fairly small, but also I imagine that larger DNA samplings would be more costly to run.
I find the information that these genetic groups may have been different so long ago quite fascinating. I know there have been previous genetic studies done, and that none of them are satisfactorily definitive, but it does seem that each study increases our knowledge just a little.
Nate Hanawalt
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There is no reason to think that an Iceni tribesman was genetically identical to a Silurian tribesman in 43 AD. They may have been as genetically dissimilar as a modern Norfolk farmer is from a modern farmer from Glamorgan. Until large-scale work on ancient DNA is undertaken we will have no definitive answers. Projecting modern population genetics back in time is just guesswork tied up with statistics and unreliable mutational 'DNA clocks'.
Martin
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Until large-scale work on ancient DNA is undertaken
I talked to a geneticist about that once, at the time it was about $1500 to sequence a genome from a live subjects swab, but about $50,000 to do an archaeological sample. I don't know if those figures have changed but it seems modern populations are the only viable way forward at the moment. Hopefully that will change.
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However, sequencing a whole genome is not necessary for indications of relatedness. The real problem with ancient DNA is how to avoid getting it contaminated by recent DNA. The number of labs that can do this reliably is relatively small.
Martin
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I now have a PDF of the full paper. In reference to my earlier comments the following quotation from the paper is very telling, "‘Old’ and ‘recent’ here are relative terms—we can infer the order of some events in this way but not their absolute times. Although we refer to migration events, we cannot distinguish between movements of reasonable numbers of people over a short time or ongoing movements of smaller numbers over longer periods." I expect that a lot of the pronouncements in the press are exaggerations of what the authors have actually claimed, sensationalised by rather ignorant press hacks.
Martin
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