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MagicRaptor OP t1_irb4ovl wrote

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

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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