Monday, July 31, 2006

Reader Luis Aldamiz sends these comments on the Anglo-Saxon apartheid story from a couple of weeks ago:

I read the same story in BBC and left me flippant. The premise is that
Anglo-Saxon male lineages outbred the previous ones but that's not the
truth. In fact Britons, even those of the regions more affected by
Anglo-Saxon and Viking (Danish) invasions (Yorkshire and Norfolk) are
still more "Basque" (Atlantic) than anything else. Only the people of
Orkney and Shetland seem to show about 50% of Norwegian male lineages.

Check this paper carefully and compare with the far-fetched ideas published recently in those articles.

Actually based on that paper and its graphics I found rather that the
rank of male "Basque" (Atlantic) lineages range from c. 100% in some
areas of Ireland and Wales to c. 60% in the regions apparently most
affected by Anglo-Saxon and Danish (Viking) invasions (their genome is
so simmilar, unlike Norwegian, that you can't take them apart). Britons
are still more Atlantic/Western than Nordic, at least via male genetic
lineages.

Curiously female MtDNA lineages seem closer to those of Friesland and
other North European regions (sorry, I don't have any link for that
right now). This was a puzzle for me initially but my conclussion is
that the British Islands were probably populated mostly from the Rhin
region (Belgium and surroundings) and that it is in that region where
there's been a male "outbreeding" in the continent rather than in the
islands. Female lineages are much more homogeneous throught most of
Europe than male ones, what seems to show, in my understanding, a
relative "outbreed" (to continue with the euphemistic term) by
Indo-European male invaders in the Metallic Ages, much less intense west
of the Rhin, as it served as rather stable border between IEs and
Western pre-IEs for c. 1000 years (between c. 2400 and 1300 BCE),
according to what I know of European late pre-History.