A "southward" shift of English genetics between the LBA and the Modern Era???

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Ygorcs

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A "southward" shift of English genetics between the LBA and the Modern Era???

I have been running some tests and analysis using the G25 samples, and I have noticed a very intriguing thing as I plotted English averaged population samples on a North European PCA. See for yourselves in this image:

https://imgur.com/a/oHDSqGo

What I notice is:
1) England_LBA closer to modern Norwegian and Icelandic and in fact to the east of them, on the direction of Swedish instead of Irish;

2) a dramatic "southward" change from England_LBA to England_IA, bringing them much closer to the modern Scottish and English;

3) another more minor "southward" change from England_IA to England_Roman, shifting in the general direction of the modern Welsh and more remotely the Bretons;

4) an even more minor, but noticeable, change from England_Roman to modern English, towards the modern Cornish and further away from Scandinavian (Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic) people, and also further away from the modern Dutch.

That's particularly interesting because that was the period in which the Anglo-Saxon conquests and the Germanicization of England took place, and yet the modern English are less close to modern (and ancient, too) North Germanic people than the pre-Anglo-Saxon English.

That could only make more sense if the actual Bretons that mixed with the incoming Anglo-Saxons were not generally similar to the England_IA and England_Roman samples, but actually similar to the modern Bretons. If that were so, then the Late Antiquity Bretons were very south-shifted compared to the Bronze Age English, which could perhaps be linked to the arrival and spread of Continental P-Celtic language in the island.

So we would have Welsh and Cornish moving "northeastward" closer to Scandinavians and to the Dutch (West Germanic), but less so than the English. Otherwise, the PCA seems to imply an extremely minor genetic impact from the Anglo-Saxon immigration, which is not corroborated by the Y-DNA haplogroup analyses, with English people having ~40-50% of "Germanic-like" lineages.

So is it just a matter of insufficient sampling or sampling in different regions of Britain (implying there was some relevant genetic structure in LBA, IA and Roman Era Britain), or are we really seeing some demographic change and movement there between the LBA and the Roman Era, and between the Roman Era and our modern times?
 
Jovialis said:
It could also be genetic drift. I recall the Iceland paper.

Ebenesersdóttir et al. 2018

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/1028
Click to expand...

But the genetic drift in Iceland involved a higher population growth of those harboring more Scandinavian ancestry than those harboring more Gaelic ancestry, wasn't it? So it pressuposed a previous genetic structure and a differential reproductive success of some genetially distinct groups over others. Random drift, which definitely happens, would probably be much less intense and accelerated for England than for a newly arrived and very tiny populaton like that of medieval Iceland.
 
I thought the paper proposed a 30-40% Anglo-Saxon input, and only in certain areas, the more eastern areas.

As time passed the "missing" Britons of that period would be absorbed.

I'll have to check.
 
Angela said:
I thought the paper proposed a 30-40% Anglo-Saxon input, and only in certain areas, the more eastern areas.

As time passed the "missing" Britons of that period would be absorbed.

I'll have to check.
Click to expand...

Yes, you're remembering it right, and that's partly why I am intrigued. If England_IA, England_LBA or even England_RomanEra-like people were exactly the ones that mixed with the Anglo-Saxons (who probably had a genetic structure ranging from similar to modern Scandinavians to similar to modern Dutch), then the modern English would be expected to plot far to the "north/northeast" of where they are, towards a position closer to Norwegians, Icelandic and others. That's what you can notice in the Orcadians and even partially in the Scots, indeed.

But not in the English. It's almost like the Scots and the Orcadians were more like the Irish, who are surprisingly very close to the Scandinavians in the PCA and closest single genetic distance runs, whereas the people of England & Wales were more like the Bretons (who are indeed at least partly descendants of Britain's Britonnic people) and the North French.

What I find really curious about these observations is that they fit the linguistic evidences: Britonnic languages being clearly closer to Continental P-Celtic, e.g. Gaulish, than Goidelic languages; and the Goidelic vs. Britonnic divide in the British Isles.
 
Ygorcs said:
Yes, you're remembering it right, and that's partly why I am intrigued. If England_IA, England_LBA or even England_RomanEra-like people were exactly the ones that mixed with the Anglo-Saxons (who probably had a genetic structure ranging from similar to modern Scandinavians to similar to modern Dutch), then the modern English would be expected to plot far to the "north/northeast" of where they are, towards a position closer to Norwegians, Icelandic and others. That's what you can notice in the Orcadians and even partially in the Scots, indeed.

But not in the English. It's almost like the Scots and the Orcadians were more like the Irish, who are surprisingly very close to the Scandinavians in the PCA and closest single genetic distance runs, whereas the people of England & Wales were more like the Bretons (who are indeed at least partly descendants of Britain's Britonnic people) and the North French.

What I find really curious about these observations is that they fit the linguistic evidences: Britonnic languages being clearly closer to Continental P-Celtic, e.g. Gaulish, than Goidelic languages; and the Goidelic vs. Britonnic divide in the British Isles.
Click to expand...

However, the Scots and the Irish have "actual" Scandinavian ancestry. Dublin was a "Viking" stronghold, and whole areas of Scotland were settled by Norsemen.

That has to be factored in as well. They may not have been quite so "Norwegian" like prior to that period, yes?

I'm not saying that later migrations speaking a different kind of "Celtic" might not have also brought people with more Neolithic Farmer ancestry, because I've always thought that was probably the case.

Do you see any role being played by "Roman" settlers broadly defined.

How about the U-152 in Britain? Has it been defined enough that we know if there were different sub-groups arriving at different times?
 
My educated guess is that it's due to the 'fact' that all NW Europeans are a kind of 'muted' Bell Beakers.

That's for the Anglo-Saxons and the the Brittonics alike the case.

In the different PCA's and calculator's my family, North Dutch, come very close to the Irish, Scottish etc.

On anthrogenica there is a Irish woman (Jessie) she is in a such a fine tuned tool as G25 close to me and the early Anglo-Saxons.

Only the Celtic vs Germanic PCA, seems to be build around the recent genetic drift we begin to differentiate (in this PCA she is firmly Irish, I am Anglo-Saxon/ North Dutch close to the Scandics).

I know that the departure point of Scottish and North English Bell Beaker was the North Dutch/NW Germanic area, the same areas (NW Germany) that delivered the Anglo-Saxons.....

My father's results of G25 ancient, after some Germanic tribe samples Scotland LBA and MBA are quite in the slipstream!

lm13ss33l2y.05.27.png
 
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Continuing my tests with the aforementioned English aDNA samples, I tried now modelling them on the basis of 4 simple reference samples: ANF (Barcin) + Steppe (Khvalyns-like and Progress-like) + WHG. The southward trend (towards more ANF and less steppe) is still persistently observed, with a big increase between the LBA and the IA, a temporary blip in the Roman Era (the much higher than average WHG makes me suspect it's showing a genetic structure within Roman Britain), a further decrease in the England_Saxon samples, and a resurgence of ANF between the Saxon samples and the average modern English people.

Tables and graphs here: https://imgur.com/a/Afz9VXg
 
Excellent, guys.

The shift in the Iron Age in Britain is definitely more pronounced in Ygorcs' analysis (different samples, both for the sources and each period?), but I think I see it even in the Rui Martiniano admixture analysis.

Perhaps the movement of Continental "Celts" into Britain? We know it happened.

Very interesting the big shift in the last 1000 years which both analyses show. Perhaps the Normans? I doubt the majority of Normans who came over with "The Conqueror" were very "Viking" like, and anyway the invasion ushered in a period where Frenchmen from all over France went to Britain.

I don't know enough about Scandinavian history to venture a hypothesis as to why it happened in Norway. The lack of samples from Central Europe means it's even more difficult to speculate, but I'd go out on a limb and say the same thing might have happened there.

I'd forgotten the graph. It's nice to see one where they use CHG instead of "steppe", although it does, I think, obscure historical processes in places like Italy, where some, if not a lot of the CHG, depending on the area of Italy, comes via a more southeastern route, and mingled with more ANF, not WHG/EHG.
 
Angela said:
Perhaps the movement of Continental "Celts" into Britain? We know it happened.
Click to expand...
It would definitely fit the Iron Age Hallstatt expansion theory which existed for long, but lately there are some scholars that support a different theory "Celtic from the West", like Barry Cunliffe(wrote the amazing "The Ancient Celts") and linguist John T. Koch(which makes the case that Tartessian was Celtic, although I can't properly judge that it still doesn't seem strong).

I can't make justice to theory because I really don't see its validity but it basically postulates that Celtic arose during the middle-late Bronze age in the Western most Atlantic region in Britain,, Ireland Western France and Iberia and only later it spread into Central Europe. So it postulates a quite early proto-Celtic, a initial eastward shift before the Hallstatt-La Tene system was created and emphasizes less political and demographic expansion or movement but focuses on trade.
 
Ygorcs said:
Continuing my tests with the aforementioned English aDNA samples, I tried now modelling them on the basis of 4 simple reference samples: ANF (Barcin) + Steppe (Khvalyns-like and Progress-like) + WHG. The southward trend (towards more ANF and less steppe) is still persistently observed, with a big increase between the LBA and the IA, a temporary blip in the Roman Era (the much higher than average WHG makes me suspect it's showing a genetic structure within Roman Britain), a further decrease in the England_Saxon samples, and a resurgence of ANF between the Saxon samples and the average modern English people.

Tables and graphs here: https://imgur.com/a/Afz9VXg
Click to expand...

That's a sharp picture thanks! I think we must take in account that we have only a limited number of samples so we don't now if it's really representative....
What strikes me is that the differences between the Brittonics and the Anglo-Saxons are in this respect quite small, they both seem like closer to each other than to to modern samples. I think we must take in account the influence from Central-West Europe (Northern France, Belgium, German Rhineland) in England during the middle ages. Take for example the Flemish Textile industry.....

https://www.englandsimmigrants.com/...ry-england-a-place-flemish-rebels-called-home
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zyrymnb/revision/3
 
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