We're Basques, not Anglo-Saxons or Celts...probably

[Shevchenko]

I originally posted this on Ukraine.com but it's dead over there, and the England forum is the most fitting:

I know linguistically we speak an Anglo-Saxon language, but so do parrots if they're taught correctly; so should the British & Irish describe themselves as Anglo-Saxons and Celts?

First off to quote Rosalind Harding, a lecturer in population genetics at Oxford University:
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“Geneticists in the early 1970s found that 85% of the diversity between individuals occurred within the same population group, 7.5% between populations within the same continent, and 7.5% between continents..."The idea you've got to get away from," says Harding, 'is that there are distinct groups with lines of demarcation around them".
then:
As it happens, wherever they go, migrants leave a distinct genetic footprint - the Y-chromosomes that are passed down unaltered from father to son across the generations. By matching these between existing populations, scientists have uncovered a small but vital piece of evidence. The modern people closest to the ancient Britons, whose tribal lands also included England, are those of Ireland and Wales. By comparing their Y-chromosomes with others, we can start to make connections. Mark Thomas, of UCL's Centre for Genetic Anthropology, explains: "When we look at the Y-chromosomes in Wales and Ireland, we find a very close match with the Basques.”

Re the Saxons:
...Across all the breadth of middle England, the Y-chromosomes matched those of Friesland. But the Welsh were utterly different. Conclusion: the Saxons advanced from the east across central England but were halted at Offa's Dyke...
...the concentration of "continental" – i.e., Danish or Anglo-Saxon - genetic types is likely to be highest in central England, lessening towards north and south. Despite the bloody upheaval in central counties, this does rather dent the white Englishman’s vision of himself as a perfect amalgam of the continent's finest fighting breeds - Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman - with the vanquished Celts banished to their enclaves in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. A belief in fairies would be no wider of the mark...

Perhaps the most surprising conclusion," they said, "is the limited continental input in southern England, which appears to be predominantly indigenous and, by some analyses, no more influenced by the continental invaders than is mainland Scotland. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of southern England ... can track their earliest male ancestry, to an indigenous Briton.
http://www.monikie.org.uk/race-and-dna.htm
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Add to this "Cheddar man" and his descendants:
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LONDON (Reuter) - British scientists Saturday celebrated their feat in tracing a living descendant of a 9,000-year-old skeleton and establishing the world's oldest known family tree...
...they matched DNA material extracted from the tooth cavity of Britain's oldest complete skeleton with that of a 42-year-old history teacher.
The genetic material showed without doubt that teacher Adrian Targett is a direct descendant through his mother's line of the skeleton known as Cheddar Man -- found in 1903 in caves in Cheddar Gorge in south-west England...

"They would have shared a common ancestor about 10,000 years ago so they are related," Sykes added.

"There has been an idea that most modern European are decsended from farmers that came in from the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, reaching Britain about 6,000 years ago.

"This kind of evidence shows that is probably not true and that modern Britons are in fact descended from the earlier inhabitants like Cheddar Man who existed on hunting and gathering and who were not farmers,"

http://www.chattanooga.net/cita/mtdna.html
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Therefore only about 25-30% of today's English are Anglo-Saxons, the rest are the same as the Gaelic-speaking Scottish, Welsh, Cornish-English & Irish,
whose ancestors are Basques, NOT "Celts".

The Romans and Normans would have left no significant genetic imprint, and while the Celts imposed their language on the indigenous Britons and Irish we can rule them out as being our ancestors - Celts were in no way related to Basques, linguistically or physically, and probably only arrived in enough numbers to mine and trade tin and gold, like the Phoenicians.

SO! People don't move about as much as languages, and historians (esp Victorian and Nazi German historians) have greatly over-estimated the link between language and ethnicity.

Saying that e.g.(1) Turks are related to Chechens because they both speak a Turkic language or e.g.(2)Bulgarians, as Slavs, are related to Poles, because they are also Slavs, is a huge leap of faith, and akin to saying the Irish, the black Jamaicans and the Maoris the same people ie Anglo-Saxons because they speak English as a mother-tongue.

[Ronbo]

Interesting post!

This proves, I suppose, that what makes an Englishman an Englishman is the language...

[Shevchenko]

Very nice of you to say so, Sir.

I thought I may get a stream of vitriol from English, Irish, Welsh or even Scottish nationalists due to the incompatibility of my post with their visions of Celtic or Anglo-Saxon "races".

Still, not that many people have seen the post