No Saxon invasion?

[Chilperic]

Mr Amphlett,

By all means, use the study of DNA regionally to help medical research, but stay out of history.

That opinion came across in your article. If you think genetics should stay out of history, state it and provide your reasons why rather than .

Perhaps if you let me know your own profession you won't mind me telling you how to do your job?

But more seriously, I did not - anywhere in that paper "try to discredit a paper by inflating its claims and then attacking those inflated claims". At no point did I discuss a single paper. If you read my book on Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (http://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Migratio...ewpoints=1), you will see that the only technical paper I actually cited on this subject was indeed the paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology, which - as I said - I discussed at length with people more qualified than myself who did not share your view of the science. So I have not, as you wrongly implied (clearly without taking the trouble to check), just read media coverage, although I have looked at that too. I have read other things and listened to other papers, but my bibliography was already 60 printed pages long, and so I frequently restricted myself to an item indicative of an approach. I have discussed this with other scientists and all I can say is that there are other geneticists who are not convinced by the science here, either, who don't agree with you. I'm in no position to judge, as I (yet again) already said. I am in a position to judge the methodology of sample selection, the sophistication and appropriateness of the historical question being asked and the general approach taken to answering the question.

What I was doing, at some length and in some detail, was indeed to argue why this material needs more sophisticated thought if it is to be used in historical study. If you took the trouble to read the piece with any care, rather than - indeed - making erroneous claims for it (I made it clear on several occasions that my objection was not the the hard scientific analysis of DNA chains, but to the broader scientific methodology and the way it has been abused in/by history) and then rubbishing those erroneous claims, you would see that I said that "DNA analyses could be hugely valuable in the study of furnished inhumation (grave-goods) cemeteries", provided it is used in the right way to answer questions which it can answer and which are framed in more sophisticated terms through the involvement of more sophisticated thinkers than those historians and archaeologists hitherto consulted. The latter are 'parti pris', on this issue and are the ones making the 'inflated claims'.

My conclusion was that:
"...the possibilities of DNA to tell us much about migration – at least until such time as we have so many (hundreds of thousands of) samples from across Europe and the Mediterranean basin for us to be able to make statistically significant statements about the scale of migration and the extent of intermarriage (this would be very important, but let’s remember the cost of the exercise and the likelihood that it might only confirm what sophisticated analyses of written and archaeological data already suggest…) – are meagre."

In other words, DNA evidence can show this but it needs to exist in ancient DNA samples in far greater quantities with a far greater geographical evenness, and to be used in more scientific fashion, but that then it could tell us 'very important' things. In the meantime, the knowledge that people came to Britain from northern Germany and to Spain from the Danube is not news to anyone sane. Even the fact that more people came to Britain from Germany than came to Spain from the Danube can be calculated from other data, if analysed with sophistication. What it doesn't do is explain things - that was my argument (it really is very tiresome to have to repeat oneself in this way; I had hoped I had been clear enough in the discussion piece). It's only descriptive, even if the picture it paints is valid.

The danger is that these analyses are used by historians and archaeologists, who are just as unqualified in the technical analysis of this material as I am, to make inflated claims about mass migration (and if you've ever heard the man speak, Thomas isn't above subscription to these ideas, himself, although he has argued diametrically opposing things from the same data at different times, which is quite interesting in itself), which then lend themselves to extremely dubious political views. Genes become ethnicity and nationality, they then lead to claims of land-ownership (this sort of stuff has been or is being used to claim Greek 'ownership' of Cyprus and Jewish 'ownership' of Palestine). We have to be very careful with this stuff and about how we argue what its conclusions are.

Your example is a fine example of the slip from one discussion to the other - the mistake - commonly made. You talk about DNA and clearly as 'Ingvar' says, you understand the ins and outs of this science more than I do - but then I never claimed to be able to and as I also made clear that was not the target of my critique. But then you slip into discussing 'Jutish' indicators and 'British' indicators. There are no such things. There are indicators of genetic links with a population in mainland Denmark and/or of genetic links with a population in the mainland British isles, but the former may have been possessed by people who didn't stress and perhaps didn't even know they had biological antecedents in those areas and the latter may have possessed by been the people calling themselves Jutes and claiming Jutish ancestry.

I am sorry you do not appear to have understood my piece or to have read it as closely as you are urging people to read the purely analytical pieces in scientific journals. That's a shame. As your response more than amply suggests and as has been my own past experience, there is little more to be gained by my further participation in this discussion. I hope that what I have said might have been of some interest to other readers, whether or not they agree and might have counteracted the unfortunate and ill-informed instruction not to bother to read my work.

Yours
Guy Halsall

Professor of History,
University of York