We're all Germans! (and we have been for 1,600 years)

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We're all Germans! (and we have been for 1,600 years)
By JULIE WHELDON, Daily Mail

18th July 2006

Spot the difference? England fans and Germany fans party together at the World Cup. Research has shown that the English are "German."




It is a rivalry that has prevailed throughout two World Wars and countless football clashes. But it seems the English and Germans have more in common than one might have thought.

New research has found that the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain from the continent 1,600 years ago was so successful that native characteristics were virtually wiped out.

And as a result experts say this has left England with a population made up largely of Germanic genes and with a language that owes much to our Anglo-Saxon invaders.

The new study explains that the majority of original British genes were wiped out in favour of German ones through a system of apartheid set up by the invaders. This allowed the Anglo-Saxons to out-breed the Brits and our country became 'Germanised.'

It is thought between 10,000 and 200,000 Anglo-Saxons migrated from modern-day Germany, Holland and Denmark into what is now England between the fifth and seventh centuries AD. At this time there were more than two million native Britons living in the country.

But within just 15 generations, the British genes were on the way out, while the Germanic ones were flourishing.

Until now geneticists and archaeologists have been unable to reconcile how a relatively small number of invaders so successfully took over the UK gene pool. Now scientists have used computer analysis to work out how this could have been achieved within just a few hundred years.

They have concluded the Anglo-Saxons probably brought with them an apartheid regime, similar to that seen more recently in South Africa. Under this servant-master system, the Anglo-Saxons would have enjoyed a more prosperous existence and so their offspring would have flourished.

Through restricting intermarriage, they also helped prevent native British genes getting into their own population. This left England culturally and genetically 'Germanised', according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The authors pointed to the fact that ancient texts show a far greater value was put on the head of an Anglo-Saxon than a Briton. If an Anglo-Saxon was killed, the perpetrator's family had to pay 'blood money' two to five times greater than the fine payable for the life of a native person.

Lead researcher Dr Mark Thomas of University College London's department of Biology, said the ethnic distinction of the native British and Anglo-Saxon populations could only have lasted for so many years through some kind of social segregation.

He said: "The native Britons were genetically and culturally absorbed by the Anglo-Saxons over a period of as little as a few hundred years. An initially small invading Anglo-Saxon elite could have quickly established themselves by having more children who survived to adulthood, thanks to their military power and economic advantage.

"We believe they also prevented the native British genes getting into the Anglo-Saxon population by restricting intermarriage in a system of apartheid that left the country culturally and genetically Germanised.

"This is exactly what we see today - a population of largely Germanic genetic origin, speaking a principally German language."

The Anglo-Saxon period came to an end in 1066 when Duke William of Normandy came to England and defeated Harold in the Battle of Hastings. However the legacy of that time can be seen in modern-day place names that end in 'ham' which means settlement (such as Birmingham, Oldham), 'ton' which means farm or village (Bolton, Southampton) and 'den' which means hill (Debden, Essex).

Other words we still use today that can be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon era include daughter from 'dohter' and father from 'faether'.

dailymail.co.uk

 

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We're all German! How herr raising! (But our soul will forever remain British).

We should resist the gravitational pull of Continental hegemony, just as we resisted those invasion forces of old.

Whatever our DNA may say, in character we are no more German than we are French, Chinese or Swahili. We are uniquely, gloriously British.

By ANDREW ROBERTS, Daily Mail

19th July 2006

Thank God we're British and not German or any other nationality.



One can only imagine the look of horror on Basil Fawlty’s face at the news that, under the skin, we are Germans.

For new research has apparently proved that most white males living in Britain today are genetically German, with Y chromosomes identical to people from Friesland, Holstein and Jutland.

According to Dr Mark Thomas and his team of biologists at University College, London, the Anglo-Saxons who invaded Britain from what is now Germany between the fifth and seventh centuries drove out the indigenous population of Celts.

The introduction of a system of ‘medieval apartheid’, with restrictions on inter-marriage, prevented native British genes from getting into the population. Indeed, this form of institutionalised racism was so successful that within just 15 generations, Anglo-Saxon genes accounted for more than half the male DNA in the population of what is now England.

Britain therefore became genetically and culturally Germanised — and no subsequent incursion of Viking or Norman blood could change the underlying DNA of the inhabitants, which was as Teutonic as bratwurst. As a result, Dr Thomas says, today’s British population is ‘of largely Germanic genetic origin’.

Can he really be right? Should the Rottweiler replace the bulldog as the emblem of our national character?

It scarcely bears thinking about. But then Britons have long been in denial about our Teutonic influences.

These days, we prefer to skirt over the fact that our most celebrated symbol of national identity — our Royal Family — was almost completely German from the time of the Hanoverians, and especially after Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840.

They changed their surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor only in 1917, during World War I.

But what if we had recognised far sooner that the rest of us were every bit as German as the royals?

The implications are intriguing. Indeed, if only we’d known earlier, one is tempted to think we might have been able to come to terms with our essential German-ness, with limitless consequences for our culture and world history.

Might we still have had a successful car industry, rather than the disastrous one that collapsed in the Seventies?

Might we have won World Cup penalty shoot-outs in the German manner of Michael Ballack and Jens Lehmann, rather than having lost them time after time?

More seriously — and contentiously — would our loyalties have been called into question during the two world wars that so scarred the 20th century if we had realised they were being fought against our Continental blood-brothers? Fortunately for our sanity, the answer is emphatically ‘No’.

For national identity does not arise from some confluence of DNA and racial or ethnic characteristics contained in chromosomes, but rather from a far more complex mixture of historical, climactic, religious, geographical, economic and social factors, which vary hugely from place to place.

A glance at the events in the spring of 1848 illustrates why Continental Europe — and especially Germany — is so utterly different from Britain.

In Paris that February, King Louis-Philippe abdicated. There were anti-government revolts in Sicily, Naples, Tuscany, Piedmont and Sardinia. In March, the Austrian chancellor Prince von Metternich fled Vienna disguised as a woman. Pope Pius IX was forced to grant democratic reforms in Rome. A republic was proclaimed in Venice.

Right across Germany there were revolutions. In Prussia, King Frederick William IV was even forced to flee Berlin.

In Britain, it was feared that a similar mood of republican unrest might seize the nation. So at 11.30am on Monday, April 10, all eyes turned on Kennington Common in South London, where a petition of 1.2 million names was due to be presented to Parliament by a demonstration numbering perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.

Kennington Common demonstration, 10th April 1848.


The Establishment feared rioting and revolution. The Duke of Wellington insisted on Queen Victoria leaving London for Osborne on the Isle of Wight; 85,000 special constables were sworn in to protect Waterloo station and the Houses of Parliament; the Bank of England was ringed with troops and the British Museum barricaded. Would the Queen of England’s throne totter and fall like so many foreign princelings?

However, all that happened was that it rained, and Kennington Common presented, in the words of a recent historian, ‘a scene of drizzly pathos’. So few people turned up that the petition was merely driven across Westminster Bridge in four taxi-cabs. Many of the names on it, when investigated by parliamentary officials, turned out to be forgeries.

The reason for this stark contrast between the British historical experience and the Continental one was that Britons had already long enjoyed what European liberal revolutionaries were fighting for.

Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the means of constitutional and political change had been available to Britons in a way they were not for Germans until the Weimar Republic of the Twenties.

That, rather than any nonsense to do with blood purity, explains the essential difference in British historical development from that of the Teutonic peoples.

The other great and obvious fact in shaping our unique identity was the 21 miles of salt water between Britain and the Continent.

Without it, Britain would have been overrun by Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler. Geography, not DNA, explains her survival and her national character. In that sense at least, brine is far thicker than blood.

The psychological effect of not having been invaded and subjugated since 1066 is profound. Those 940 years might have made us insular, but that is no bad thing.

Consider the alternative: since 1789, France has had five republics, two empires, two monarchies and three occupations.

Our German blood-brothers have had two republics, one monarchy, one empire, one dictatorship and two occupations. Spain has had three monarchies, two occupations, one dictatorship, two republics and a civil war.

By contrast, we have had one constitutional monarchy (albeit with one regency and one abdication) and one great empire. Otherwise, life in Britain has subtly, if slowly, evolved under precedent, common law and secure borders.

Politically we could not be less Continental. In Germany, the Reichstag was destroyed by fire; there are bullet holes in the ceiling of the Spanish Cortes; the French Assemblée Nationale has been opened and closed by various regimes more often that a dodgy street vendor’s suitcase.

Yet throughout that period, Westminster has been getting on with the routine business of government — symbolised by ceremonial maces carried by men wearing tights.

In March 1944, Winston Churchill said: ‘I confess myself to be a great admirer of tradition. The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.

‘The wider the span, the longer the continuity, the greater is the sense of duty in individual men and women, each contributing their brief life’s work to the preservation and progress of the land in which they live.’

Our gradual development has been radically different from the rest of Europe, not because of our own genius or genetics, but due to certain geographical facts and because we stumbled over the advantages of constitutional monarchy and representative institutions 150 years before the rest of the Continent.

‘I want someone to tell me why we are a great nation,’ said Lady Milner (Lord Salisbury’s daughter-in-law) in 1902. ‘I suppose because we cut off kings’ heads a century or so before anyone else.’

That, and the fact that we’ve not been successfully invaded by a hostile power for nearly a millennium, makes Britain’s experience of the past unique.

To deny or refuse to recognise Britain’s historical exceptionalism is as absurd as to be somehow embarrassed or ashamed of it.

The next time that you hear a politician on Radio Four’s Today programme seeking to justify the introduction of some policy on the grounds that Britain is the only EU country not to conform, remember that there is doubtless an extremely sound historical explanation.

We should resist the gravitational pull of Continental hegemony, just as we resisted those invasion forces of old.

Whatever our DNA may say, in character we are no more German than we are French, Chinese or Swahili. We are uniquely, gloriously British.

dailymail.co.uk

 

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The Sunday Times July 23, 2006


Apartheid in the UK? They're having a genetic joke

Is it really true that the Anglo-Saxons took over by selective breeding? Stuart Wavell investigates

The sneaky German practice of commandeering all the best places around a swimming pool is not as recent as supposed. After the Anglo-Saxon barbarians invaded England 1,600 years ago they used a similar ploy to outwit the ancient Britons, but instead of towels, they laid down a ban on intermarriage that allowed them to dominate the male gene pool.

This policy of segregation, likened last week to a form of apartheid, gave the invaders a range of advantages that enabled them to outbreed the subjugated locals. This apparently explains why most of our DNA is German and why we speak a Germanic language that retains almost nothing of our Celtic past. No British please, we’re Saxon.

Or so claims a new study by researchers at University College London, who maintain that the theory resolves an age-old dispute about the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain that took place after the Roman occupiers withdrew in the 5th century.

It is as well to view this latest development with a little scepticism: in 1997 a different genetic survey purported to show that modern English people were in fact Celts. The study concluded that Germanic settlers came over in only small numbers, leaving the indigenous Britons undisturbed. But now geneticists claim that most of us — at DNA level anyway — are German. What is going on? “That’s very outdated,” Mark Thomas, leader of the latest project, says dismissively of the 1997 study. His recent premise is based on genetic surveys in 2002 and 2003, which found that about 54% of British males have Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtish ancestry.

The new figures throw up a tantalising puzzle. They appear to confirm the once popular idea that there was a mass migration of Anglo-Saxons to Britain, because for the invaders to have achieved genetic dominance in a mere 200 years they must have numbered more than 500,000 in a British population of between 2m and 3m.

“It didn’t square with the archeological data which suggested a much smaller migration of people,” Thomas says. “I was interested in how we could make sense of both conclusions.”

Help was at hand. There was evidence of an “apartheid-like” society in Anglo-Saxon Wessex, where 7th-century law codes conferred disproportionate status and benefits on Saxons over the natives. Wealth combined with an isolated gene pool would give incomers the genetic edge after 15 generations, Thomas reasoned.

“So I wrote a computer model for the apartheid hypothesis and what I found is that you’ve got a large-scale genetic replacement for a relatively small migration of an elite.”

There is an obvious flaw in this hypothesis, according to Martin Biddle, emeritus professor of archeology at Hertford College, Oxford. “The human skeletal evidence suggests that the incoming Anglo-Saxons were principally male and that they intermarried with British women. The royal house of Wessex, for example, had clear British elements in it.”

The experts admit that not much is known about the Celtic inhabitants of Britain soon after the Romans’ withdrawal in AD410. Even Roman chroniclers had little to say about the natives unless they tangled with the empire, like Queen Boadicea, one of our only Celtic icons.

It is thought that Romanised Britons continued to maintain the towns, pursue their villa lifestyle and speak Latin over the dinner table. They also enjoyed a high level of cultural and intellectual life, judging by the Romano-British gallery in the British Museum. But David Mattingly in his book An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire explains that for the Celtic underclass life was grim, as the benefits of Rome were mainly reserved for its representatives.

In much of England the Celts’ mythology and religious structure did not survive Rome’s 400-year occupation, which broke the power of the druids and imposed their own gods. One of the few native deities to endure was Lug, characterised as a young man armed with a spear and a sling.

The Celts’ reverence for trees such as oak and mistletoe survived, but as the Roman empire collapsed, the Anglo-Saxons from northern Europe flooded in looking for their place in the sun. England, with its existing infrastructure, temperate climate and subjugated population was a tempting plum.

There are still sharp divisions over the nature of the migration to Britain in about AD450.

Was it a mass invasion of Anglo-Saxon settlers who killed or displaced the Celts living in southern and eastern Britain? Or a more gradual process, spearheaded by a small elite who managed to sell their culture to a rudderless post-Roman society? Confusingly the first Germanic people came by invitation. Recruited as Roman mercenaries to protect the province, they were settled on the edges of estates and on poor land. “Then, apparently, the British went on doing this when the Romans left,” Biddle says. “The Celts were obviously weak and needed to bring in foreigners for their own defence. That’s probably how it began. There were no D-Day landings.”

Encroaching settlement from the east saw the steady replacement of Celtic place names with Germanic ones. Only great rivers such as the Thames and the Ouse retain their original Celtic names in the east, whereas even rivulets keep their Celtic names in the west today.

However, about 40% of British males have Norman or Celtic ancestry and many family names reflect the latter, particularly those originating from Scotland and Wales, which largely escaped domination by the Romans and Anglo-Saxons.

Many of our leaders are Celts. John Prescott’s surname derives from Prescot, a small English town, derived from “prys”, a coppice, and “cwt”, a cottage. Tony Blair’s surname signifies “a cleared plain”, but also a battlefield. David Cameron and Ming Campbell share the prefix “Cam”, or “crooked” and their names mean “crooked nose” and “crooked mouth” respectively. Such insights can be obtained on websites such as www.last-names.net and www.spatial-literacy.org.

But the Celtic tongue eventually fell silent throughout England, the land of the Angles from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany and the Saxons from Lower Saxony. How did it happen? Alfred Smyth, a professor of medieval studies, believes it was a much bloodier process than the apartheid theory or “invitation” theory suggest.

“The literal meaning of the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Welsh’ is foreigner or slave and that speaks volumes,” Smyth says.

“It was quite normal at the time that when one people conquered another, they enslaved them. That meant the native Celts worked on Anglo-Saxon land as tied labourers in separate communities for no pay other than minimum subsistence.”

He derides the “trendy” theory of a gentlemanly handover of power. “According to the so-called diffusionist theory, people were invited to sit down to supper with the hosts, who invited them to take over their land. This is the most barmy thing every invented. Nobody hands over their land: those people were butchered.”

Many would have resisted in battles involving only hundreds of people, Smyth believes. If they lost, which most did, they either had their throats cut or they fled. “The aristocracy and the land-owning class probably pushed off west and left behind their workforce, who were enslaved,” he says.

“The fact that we’re speaking a Germanic language, not a bastardised form of Latin as the French do, suggests there was a thorough-going conquest of this country. The real world doesn’t work according to apartheid or diffusionism. It’s about people taking power by keeping the conquered at bay.”

thetimesonline.co.uk