No Saxon invasion?

[authun]

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

OK, if I have given you that impression your annoyance is understandable and I apologise. This is only about one thing. In your statement, "It has, for example, been suggested that DNA can ‘prove’ that there was mass migration ..."; who is meant to have made the suggestion?

I interpreted that as you asserting that the geneticists were making the claim, which I don't see them doing. However, if you mean that some professional colleagues were citing the study as 'proof', then it is they who are wrong to do so and it is they who should study the paper more carefully. I think I have written enough to demonstrate what I see as the severe limitations of the models, together with the more general problems of timings and direction and fully agree with your views on the quality of the sampling.

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 ...

OK, this makes me think that your criticism is aimed at those colleagues who, unaware of the limitations of the studies, are making these claims and it is not a criticism of the geneticists who, in my opinion, are well aware of them and who state them in the texts.

(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.

I fully agree with the dangers of political involvement and was sceptical about why the Goldstein Labs at UCL [then] were part funded by the State of Israel. I prefer to think that the motivation was for research into the lost tribes. I would like to point out however that Dr Thomas was instrumental in getting the Government to order the UK Border Agency to drop its Human Provenance Project which aimed to test assylum seekers claims to country of origin with genetics and isotopic tests. It was a good example of how a poorly informed Government agency were quite ready to go ahead and apply an incomplete science.

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.

Yes, I obviously didn't make the point clear enough. I used the example to illustrate the contradictory conclusions that one can reach if one associates a chromosomal marker with ethnicity and to demonstrate why anyone who interprets the Y chromosome as an indicator of ethnicity is wrong to do so.

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authun