The Genetic History of the United Kingdom

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What does this big recent genetic study tell us about the nations of Britain? The whole island was originally populated by Britons before the arrival of the Romans.

The Anglo-Saxon impact on Britain makes up about 10 to 40 percent of English DNA. The Viking impact on the Orkney Islands was about 25 percent of Orcadian DNA and was much more limited elsewhere. The Romans appear to have had no genetic impact on Britain.

Does that mean the English, Scots and Welsh are mostly Britons of Celtic ancestry? It doesn’t appear that way. It looks like the Celts who migrated from the continent may have had a smaller impact on Britain than the Anglo-Saxons. The vast bulk of our ancestry comes from the Bell Beaker culture that expanded into Britain from Central Europe around 4,500 to 4,000 years ago and exterminated the Neolithic people who previously lived there.

The English and Danes had only diverged about 400 years before the Viking Age which makes it difficult to tell them apart. Similarly, the Britons and Anglo-Saxons had only diverged around 2,000 years before from the same group that populated Northwestern Europe.

Note: In a nutshell, this is why it was so easy for America to assimilate closely related European groups. It takes a liberal to tell you that there is no difference between assimilating and integrating a German and a Somalian.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

9 Comments

  1. The Yamnaya percentage chart is oddly missing some fairly important countries…Germany, Austria, the Low countries, Sweden, Finland, Russia.

  2. When you say Romans, you have to remember that most of the troops in the Claudian invasion and subsequent occupation were Batavian. Or what we might call Dutch today. So that English thing may be connected to the composition of the Roman units.

  3. Who built those megalithic structures in Stonehenge and Avebury, HW? It wasn’t the Celts or the coloreds. There was some kind of super-advanced global civilization which mysteriously disappeared around 12,000 years ago. They had the ability to move and cut giant stone blocks with amazing precision, something we still can’t do today.

  4. America, or perhaps especially Dixie, is the the continuation of the Aryan Expansion, which is soon going off planet after a 50 year hiatus imposed by our Enemy.

    • Dixie in SPAAACE!

      That reminds me of a sci-fi show where Dixie settles outer space first. The forces of globo-homo want to bring the wonders of diversity to their spiral arm, so naturally there is conflict.

  5. When I was in England a few times, it did seem that most people I encountered were not all that much different from the Scots, Welsh, and Irish, culturally and phenotypically. In other words, stereotypically Celtic.

    The Germanic invasions (their genetic imprint, that is), was primarily confined to the upper-classes and aristocracy/nobility as a whole — with perhaps south-western England (East Anglia, Kent, Wessex, Sussex) being an exception, with a more thorough Germanization across all strata of society — from the peasants to the princes, if you will (… and even here, there was intermarriage with the native Celts, especially Celtic women).

    *I think it was the rise of the Romantic Movement in the German States, which was a reaction to the Enlightenment, which lead to this desire to exaggerate English history as being more Teutonic than it realistically was/is. This really took off, and was rather evident after Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, a French philosopher and aristocrat, popularized Nordicism (in fact it’s principal founding father) .. and with Britain being an empire, had to appropriate an identity that was deemed, and openly celebrated, to be supreme. (The British, especially in their imperial days, never acknowledged or accepted a category or metric of human measurement where they were not somehow ‘on top’ – even if it had to be done dishonestly).

      • Absolutely Tx, absolutely.

        I always found it ironically amusing that the English wish to identify as Germanic (“Angel-Sachsen”), yet it was England that was the most childishly infantile in their jingoism against all things German, after the unification of Germany under Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns, and especially in the twentieth century.

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