Ancient genomes from Iceland reveal the making of a human population

Angela said:
From what I recall, monks and hermits did, or were supposed to practice celibacy, but the regular parish priests did not, not until quite late and under increasing pressure from Rome.
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There are lots of Gaelic individuals (mixed/unadmixed) dated of pre-christian era in Iceland.
 
Angela said:
I think that's right, and not surprising. The Anglo Saxons in England and the Lombards in Italy were the same. There was none of the inclusiveness of the Romanization process
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The settlement of Anglo-Saxons in Britain is poorly documented, but it's clear there was a process of Anglicisation in many areas outside of South-East England rather than outright replacement (hence why we don't all look like Danes or Germans), as well as adoption of certain native practices by the newcomers. Only when you get to the late-6th and early-7th century do you have reliable documentation of the politics of the period, and it's clear that the genealogies contain many distinctly British names (Cerdic, Caeawlin, Cenwalh, Cædwalla in Wessex) and that society in general was influenced by Gaelic practices further north (in Northumbria, where I live).

Out of interest, I've noticed you make comments a few times now that were critical of the Lombards. What is it in particular that you dislike about them?
 
Alpenjager said:
There are lots of Gaelic individuals (mixed/unadmixed) dated of pre-christian era in Iceland.
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That's interesting. Could you provide some sources for that? I mean of dates and indicia of "Gaelic" presence in Ireland pre-Norse migrations, and indications that is pre-Christian era as well.
 
Alcuin said:
The settlement of Anglo-Saxons in Britain is poorly documented, but it's clear there was a process of Anglicisation in many areas outside of South-East England rather than outright replacement (hence why we don't all look like Danes or Germans), as well as adoption of certain native practices by the newcomers. Only when you get to the late-6th and early-7th century do you have reliable documentation of the politics of the period, and it's clear that the genealogies contain many distinctly British names (Cerdic, Caeawlin, Cenwalh, Cædwalla in Wessex) and that society in general was influenced by Gaelic practices further north (in Northumbria, where I live).

Out of interest, I've noticed you make comments a few times now that were critical of the Lombards. What is it in particular that you dislike about them?
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In terms of the Anglo-Saxons it's clear that they instituted a system where there was one level of "rights" as it were, economic, political etc., where the "native" inhabitants were of a much lower status. You surely don't doubt that? The documentation is crystal clear and well known. I shouldn't need to provide it if you've been interested in this subject for a while.

The same is true of the Lombards. Are we supposed to totally park our value systems at the door when discussing ancient groups, even ancient groups who probably contributed something to our ancestry?

I'm certainly free with my criticism of the Romans: the conquests, the slavery, the persecutions of Jews and Christians. I can and do acknowledge that this was the way of the ancient world, but that doesn't mean I approve it personally.

Why should the Lombards be exempt?

Indeed, it might be instructive to do a comparison of the two sets of conquerors in my area.

The Romans conquered the Celt-Ligures, my ancestors (and later mixed with them, of course), and Lombards then arrived, although the Lombards were probably fewer in number. The Romans brought increased wealth, a much higher standard of living, baths and clean water, a sophisticated system of laws which are the basis even today for much of European law, literacy, the arts, urban life, long distance trade and all its benefits, and even citizenship on an equal footing with Romans in a very short period of time.

After the Lombards and other invasion era tribes, there was widespread destruction of the roads and therefore of trade and the importation of goods, a vast decrease in average wealth except for the lords, and even for them, a vastly decreased standard of living, no clean water, no public baths, illiteracy, what minor arts there were under the heavy hand of the Church, widespread brigandage on the roads and therefore basically no travel, reduction to serfdom for the vast majority of the people, oh, and yes, trial by combat instead of Roman law! To some degree this was the case all over Europe. Surely you're aware of this?

What, are we supposed to celebrate that, even if they did contribute genetically to some degree? We'd have to be mad. This is not "ethnic" as you seem to think. For one thing, given the dozens of Lombard castles in my area and the names in my family tree I have no doubt I carry some of their ancestry, even if it's a minority. More importantly, no matter the era, no matter the groups involved, I'm always for the civilized "core" against the "barbarians" of the periphery. Of course, the people who were once the barbarians can then become the civilized core, as has indeed happened. Those are the cycles of history, yes?
 
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there is nothing to celebrate when someone conquers another people. i extremely dislike the romans for what i know about them. they were the worlds first imperialists. sure you could say they were quite advanced in certain areas but so were others. and many of the things they achieved would not have been possible without their imperialistic nature. i actually do not care about how civilized someone is as long as he is the agressor and is extremely cruel when conquering. and the romans were certainly like this when they exterminated whole cities and tribes just because they needed to punish someone or needed more loot and slaves. actually i have to say at least the lombards were not as reliant on their slave populations as the romans.

it makes no sense to compare the level of civilization in my opinion. the romans conquered and enslaved others for the same reasons as everyone else. they just liked to call it something like "spreading civilization".
 
Alcuin said:
The settlement of Anglo-Saxons in Britain is poorly documented, but it's clear there was a process of Anglicisation in many areas outside of South-East England rather than outright replacement (hence why we don't all look like Danes or Germans), as well as adoption of certain native practices by the newcomers. Only when you get to the late-6th and early-7th century do you have reliable documentation of the politics of the period, and it's clear that the genealogies contain many distinctly British names (Cerdic, Caeawlin, Cenwalh, Cædwalla in Wessex) and that society in general was influenced by Gaelic practices further north (in Northumbria, where I live).

Out of interest, I've noticed you make comments a few times now that were critical of the Lombards. What is it in particular that you dislike about them?
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Yes, I agree.
The main source are the Brittons, who were their ennemies.
I doubt their view was not biassed.

It doesn't look like the Anglo-Saxons were out to exterminate the Brittons.
They were mainly interested in arable land, which they took from the Brittons.
 
@Angela @Alcuin this was indeed most probably also in England the case, see for example (an older article):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1635457/

I see indeed more integrative aspects in the old Roman society, though I also even more hierarchical aspects (see for example their heir the Roman Catholic church). The free-man along the Germans were pretty equal....I don't know if the Greek and Roman society were less clannish? The clientele-system, especially along the Roman elite, was pretty deeply rooted and isn't quite inclusive.

I guess the Nordic/German/A-S 'discrimination' had something to do with clannish thought, primitive group think, not with that kind of 'pseudo-scientific' racialism of modern times. The Romans on their turn were pretty obsessed with blond hair, there was really a market in blond hair. But was this a kind of beauty ideal or exotica?

Indeed it's in someway remarkable that the Celts, with a quite well developed culture, could not resist the Germans. But may be the German civilization at time was underestimated. They were probably well organized and quite efficient in their military. In the post Roman migration time, early middle ages until the Viking time they spread indeed forceful.

But the Romans had even a bigger track record in operating forceful, in population massacres....
http://mentalfloss.com/article/7278...ind-site-massacre-julius-caesar-boasted-about
 
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The later colonists who may have arrived with the Danish settlers happen to be R1b. The L238+ and the U106+ guy seem to fit in with the early Norse, who I suspect were indigenous Norwegians. We know the R1a1 arrived with CWC/Battle Ax, and I1 seems to have already been in the far north since unique branches exist in Finland. Exactly how R1b fits in, we know some were probably Gaels, but I think additional aDNA from Denmark would be preferred. That seems like the point of entry into Sweden and Norway, the who and when is the question.

Interesting contrast between the SW and the NE of the island. It looks like 2 separate migratory events most definitely.

The rest seems like Nazi propaganda because any visit to Britain or Ireland and you will see the population is quite a bit lighter in skin complexion than the Scandinavians on average. There hair is often darker yes, but it's a contrast to the pale, pinkish skin.
 
Ailchu said:
there is nothing to celebrate when someone conquers another people. i extremely dislike the romans for what i know about them. they were the worlds first imperialists. sure you could say they were quite advanced in certain areas but so were others. and many of the things they achieved would not have been possible without their imperialistic nature. i actually do not care about how civilized someone is as long as he is the agressor and is extremely cruel when conquering. and the romans were certainly like this when they exterminated whole cities and tribes just because they needed to punish someone or needed more loot and slaves.

it makes no sense to compare the level of civilization in my opinion. the romans conquered and enslaved others for the same reasons as everyone else. they just liked to call it civilization.
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That's totally unresponsive to my statements. The Romans never pretended to conquer in order to bring civilization to the "natives". That kind of disgusting hypocrisy is the hallmark of the British and other European countries during their Imperialist periods, the Belgians in the Congo too, if we want to talk about imperialist countries. (Italy and Germany got into the act too, if late.)

You hate Britain as well, and Spain and Portugal? It could be said Spain and Portugal could teach the Romans a thing or too about conquest and the deliberate extermination of native peoples. Of course, the disparity in arms and technology was much, much greater.

Ever investigate the campaigns of deliberate extermination against the Indians of southern South America? Same with slavery. Want to compare slavery in Brazil versus slavery in Rome? Or the treatment of slaves in the Spanish Caribbean? Or even slavery in the southern U.S.? Brandings, hangings, lashing to death, setting dogs after them, young girls and women deliberate impregnated to create more slaves when the well went dry? PLEASE. Perhaps there are subtle differences, but are we going to have a scale of relative evil?

I'm an equal opportunity basher. I don't make my judgments based on absurd ethnic criteria. I make them based on an objective application of a set of standards. Try it some time. Read some history first, though.

What I was talking about, if you can follow the logic, is what was the experience of one area of Europe under two sets of conquerors. As I said, the Romans didn't come and conquer some of my ancestors to bring them prosperity, civilization, and the benefits of the Pax Romana. They came to get access along the coast to other parts of Europe. It's undeniable that the other things came along with them, however, and that almost nothing of value came with the Lombards. In fact, we moved backwards, and it took at least five hundred years to get even part of it back. It's even been said, and by archaeologists, that it took until the 19th century to recover. End of story.

@Bicicleur,

The treatment of the Celts by the Anglo-Saxons is documented through their own documents, histories and compilations of laws. It has nothing to do with how "prejudiced" the Celts were towards them. As with the Icelandic sagas, people are often damned out of their own mouths, because they see nothing wrong with what they're documenting.
 
Ailchu said:
there is nothing to celebrate when someone conquers another people. i extremely dislike the romans for what i know about them. they were the worlds first imperialists. sure you could say they were quite advanced in certain areas but so were others. and many of the things they achieved would not have been possible without their imperialistic nature. i actually do not care about how civilized someone is as long as he is the agressor and is extremely cruel when conquering. and the romans were certainly like this when they exterminated whole cities and tribes just because they needed to punish someone or needed more loot and slaves. actually i have to say at least the lombards were not as reliant on their slave populations as the romans.
it makes no sense to compare the level of civilization in my opinion. the romans conquered and enslaved others for the same reasons as everyone else. they just liked to call it something like "spreading civilization".
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I think you need to read more about the romans and their conquered lands ...for one, they did not enforce Latin onto their subjects , they basically said , ...if you want to talk to us , learn Latin, speak to us in Latin................this system was also used in the Ottoman empire , like the use of dragomans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragoman
these empires did not enforce their language onto their conquered subjects...............modern NATIONS are the ones that enforce their language onto their subjects .........IIRC the arabs and their language where the first to enforce arabic onto the conquered people from circa 600AD
 
Angela said:
You hate Britain as well, and Spain and Portugal? It could be said Spain and Portugal could teach the Romans a thing or too about conquest and the deliberate extermination of native peoples. Of course, the disparity in arms and technology was much, much greater.

Ever investigate the campaigns of deliberate extermination against the Indians of southern South America? Same with slavery. Want to compare slavery in Brazil versus slavery in Rome? Or the treatment of slaves in the Spanish Caribbean? Or even slavery in the southern U.S.? Brandings, hangings, lashing to death, setting dogs after them, young girls and women deliberate impregnated to create more slaves when the well went dry? PLEASE. Perhaps there are subtle differences, but are we going to have a scale of relative evil?

I'm an equal opportunity basher. I don't make my judgments based on absurd ethnic criteria. I make them based on an objective application of a set of standards. Try it some time. Read some history first, though.

What I was talking about, if you can follow the logic, is what was the experience of one area of Europe under two sets of conquerors. As I said, the Romans didn't come and conquer some of my ancestors to bring them prosperity, civilization, and the benefits of the Pax Romana. They came to get access along the coast to other parts of Europe. It's undeniable that the other things came along with them, however, and that almost nothing of value came with the Lombards. In fact, we moved backwards, and it took at least five hundred years to get even part of it back. It's even been said, and by archaeologists, that it took until the 19th century to recover. End of story.
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of course i do not like britain, spain and portugal. why should i? maybe they learned their stuff from the romans?

why are you listing all this stuff? i indeed dislike these but unlike you i never compared them to germanics and tried to get something good out of them. or did i say that the spanish, british and portugese at least brought civilization to america? does this relativate their evil in your eyes? if you dislike people and differentiate between them only because of their technological standards what's the difference when someone dislikes people based on other values?
 
Sile said:
I think you need to read more about the romans and their conquered lands ...for one, they did not enforce Latin onto their subjects , they basically said , ...if you want to talk to us , learn Latin, speak to us in Latin................this system was also used in the Ottoman empire , like the use of dragomans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragoman
these empires did not enforce their language onto their conquered subjects...............modern NATIONS are the ones that enforce their language onto their subjects .........IIRC the arabs and their language where the first to enforce arabic onto the conquered people from circa 600AD
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so, did the germanics force their language on conquered people? or did they actually adopt it? i do not celebrate the lombard conquest or the saxon one or the viking one. i dislike them. but why should i differentiate between these conquerors only based on their thechnological or social standards? roman society was probably not really superior to the ones of the people they conquered anyway.
 
bicicleur said:
Yes, I agree.
The main source are the Brittons, who were their ennemies.
I doubt their view was not biassed.

It doesn't look like the Anglo-Saxons were out to exterminate the Brittons.
They were mainly interested in arable land, which they took from the Brittons.
Click to expand...

Nevertheless:

In all historical cases of conquest societies, the politically and militarily dominant ethnic group is known, or can be assumed, to have had a substantial social and economic advantage, but the quantification of this advantage is difficult. In the Anglo-Saxon case, the best evidence may be found in the rates of wergild in seventh century laws. Wergild is the ‘blood money’ payable to the family of any victim of killing in order to prevent a blood feud; this is graded according to the social and ethnic status of the victim. The late seventh century laws of King Ine of Wessex, which differentiate between natives and Saxons, stipulate wergild for the latter which is between two and five times the money payable for a ‘Welshman’ (native Briton) of comparable status (Whitelock 1979). The early seventh century laws of King Ethelbert of Kent mention a distinct social group, the læti, who have been suggested to be native Britons (Whitelock 1979); their wergild is consistently lower than that payable for a free man, which is between 1.25 and 2.5 times that of the blood money for a læt (Whitelock 1979). Similar wergild differences between immigrants and natives are found elsewhere in early medieval Europe, for example in the Frankish kingdom (Ward-Perkins 2005).
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1635457/
 
Ailchu said:
of course i do not like britain, spain and portugal. why should i? maybe they learned their stuff from the romans?

why are you listing all this stuff? i indeed dislike these but unlike you i never compared them to germanics and tried to get something good out of them. or did i say that the spanish, british and portugese at least brought civilization to america? does this relativate their evil in your eyes? if you dislike people and differentiate between them only because of their technological standards what's the difference when someone dislikes people based on other values?
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I don't debate people who put words in my mouth, i.e. straw man arguments. That's a sure sign the person has no logical counter.

Consider yourself ignored.
 
"More importantly, no matter the era, no matter the groups involved, I'm always for the civilized "core" against the "barbarians" of the periphery. "
would you also be for the "barbarian" core against the "civilized" periphery? note the quote.

the reason why the lombards should not be extempted, is not because of your comparison with rome. if i compared them with rome i could certainly get some good arguments for them too.
btw if you compare lombard to romans to make an example on why lombards should not be extempted and then only mention all the points in which the romans were better, no, the "good" guys according to you, aren't you somehow implying that if the lombards actually were like the romans they should be extempted and thus the romans themselves should be extempted?

you already mentioned the points why you dislike rome but you did not mention any of these points when you compared the romans to the lombards.


"Consider yourself ignored"

and why should i do that?
 
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Angela said:
I'm always for the civilized "core" against the "barbarians" of the periphery. Of course, the people who were once the barbarians can then become the civilized core, as has indeed happened. Those are the cycles of history, yes?
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I'm no black or white thinker in these cases, the Roman civilization has brought us much....and also had shadow sides. But be aware that the whole barbaric thing had a function too namely to create a statue and lift yourself up. First were the Celts the barbaric but conquered and well the Germans became barbaric, described as 'wild' etc.....but may be this was partly exaggerated....because of self lifting function of the 'barbaric' stamp on others, kind of projecting.
 
Ailchu said:
so, did the germanics force their language on conquered people? or did they actually adopt it? i do not celebrate the lombard conquest or the saxon one or the viking one. i dislike them. but why should i differentiate between these conquerors only based on their thechnological or social standards? roman society was probably not really superior to the ones of the people they conquered anyway.
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Germanics did in south-germany and Austria to name one area
 
Northener said:
Nevertheless:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1635457/
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yes, the Anglo-Saxons where the colonisers, and the Britons the subjected natives, that is clear
it was not a conquest and simple subjection, as I told above, they were probably looking for arable lands for their own tribes

We have shown that this discrepancy can be resolved by the assumption of an apartheid-like social structure within a range of plausible values for interethnic marriage and socially driven reproductive advantage following immigration (Woolf 2004). Perhaps most strikingly, our model indicates that, by using plausible parameter values, the genetic contribution of an immigrant population can rise from less than 10% to more than 50% in as little as five generations, and certainly less than fifteen generations. Similar processes are likely to have shaped patterns of genetic variation in other ‘conquest societies’ of the period, and perhaps more recently (Carvajal-Carmona et al. 2000). The social structures described here may have been of wider significance in processes of language replacement and the interactions of hunter-gatherers and early farmers. This is of particular relevance in cases where genetic data indicate a demographic expansion of farmers, such as the Bantu (Passarino et al. 1998; Scozzari et al. 1999; Thomas et al. 2000; Cruciani et al. 2002; Salas et al. 2002; Luis et al. 2004; Beleza et al. 2005) and Austronesian expansions (Melton et al. 1998; Hagelberg et al. 1999; Hurles et al. 2002; Lum et al. 2002).
 
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