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AethelweardSaxon t1_irawxjk wrote

Reply to comment by MagicRaptor in Where did the English language REALLY come from? by MagicRaptor

Let me put it this way.

After the 'supposed' Anglo-Saxon invasion, Celtic DNA, material culture, language, Christian religion, and settlements basically completely vanish.

Within a relatively short amount of time it was like they were never there at all. This suggests they were largely displaced by the incoming germanics

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buteo51 t1_irbk51b wrote

"Women weren't buried with weapons."

"How do you know?"

"Because all the people buried with weapons were men."

"How do you know they were men?"

"Because they were buried with weapons!"

This same pattern plays out to an extent with material culture. We don't actually know that someone who was buried with a Quoit brooch, for example, spoke primarily Old English or saw themselves as ethnically Germanic. It is just traditional to assume that, and so the assumption becomes its own evidence.

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AethelweardSaxon t1_irblvgb wrote

You so realise you can tell the difference between male and female skeletons?

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buteo51 t1_irbp53s wrote

Skilled forensic anthropologists usually can, but the issue is that most of the graves we're talking about here have never been studied this way, and never will be, because the bones do not exist anymore. In some, the bones disintegrated naturally before the grave was even excavated. There were no surviving bones found in the Sutton Hoo grave, for example. For many though, the bones were simply discarded because the artifacts were all that people paid attention to. This was pretty common practice up until pretty recently, and definitely was during the Victorian antiquarian boom. They dug up the grave, found a sword, wrote the skeleton down as male and Germanic, and then threw the bones in the trash. We are still operating off of that data today.

But it wouldn't even help you to have the bones in this case. A skeleton can't tell you what language someone spoke, or what terms they would use to describe their own background. Not even their DNA can tell you that. Identity is not biological.

As an aside, just because someone had a skeleton we might describe as biologically male does not mean that that person or their society saw them as a man.

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MagicRaptor OP t1_irb4ovl wrote

Maybe you're right. I just don't understand how that level of replacement could take place at that time period. It just doesn't happen elsewhere in history like it appears to in Britain. The Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Mongols, the Turks, the Magyars, the Vikings, the Arabs, the Normans, the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Franks, none of them so completely and totally wiped out every last genetic, cultural, and linguistic remnant of those that came before them. We don't see this level of population replacement until the European settlement of the New World, and that can mostly be attributed to disease wiping out most of the Native Americans. As far as I know, nobody is suggesting a plague wiped out the Britons, paving the way for Anglo Saxon resettlement, so for the DNA to suggest upwards of 75% replacement just feels unfathomable to me. If it was a genocide, it would have been one of the most successful ones ever conducted in history, which would require a level of organization that the Anglo Saxons probably weren't capable of, and there would almost certainly be more evidence of it. If it wasn't a genocide, then how on earth did they achieve that high of a replacement rate? Maybe we'll get a clearer answer in coming years/decades as they do more studies and have more data to analyze.

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AethelweardSaxon t1_irb7ywp wrote

It's certainly not unheard of. The beaker people essentially wiped out the Neolithic British down to the last man in an even less advanced time. In about 200 years after the beaker people's arrival the Neolithic British only made up 10% of the population.

There of course also was a degree of intermixing with the Celts that 25% of their DNA was still there. I can only assume that the remnants that once lived in England were forced back or fled to the extremities of the Island.

We know there were Celtic 'nations' and communities in Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and Scotland well into the Anglo Saxon period.

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MagicRaptor OP t1_irbc4h8 wrote

There are a number of theories regarding the Neolithic decline and subsequent Beaker replacement, but most of them revolve around a plague and/or famine wiping out the Neolithic peoples (maybe even the predecessor to the black plague), so it wasn't as much a deliberate replacement but more of a "oh look, free real estate" situation.

Here's a couple sources on that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_decline

https://www.technologynetworks.com/genomics/news/earliest-strain-of-bubonic-plague-bacteria-identified-in-neolithic-site-350328

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07673-7

Population replacements just don't happen without some outside force killing a bunch of people beforehand, or a level of genocide that would make Pol Pot blush. If you have any other examples, I would love to hear them. And I don't mean that to be snarky, I legitimately want to know if there are other historical precedents of a non-disease, non-genocidal population replacement so I can wrap my head around this. Because your earlier point was right. For all intents and purposes, it's as if the Celts never lived in England in the first place. How can that be?

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