I can hear the windshield wipers squeaking

"Do I disagree with my friends? Or am I just smarter than them? A God among men, if you will. Head and shoulders above the crowd. Just wondering."

If the claim is that mummification wasn’t intended to allow us to take mummies out of their tombs and put them through an MRI machine, I guess that’s true.

I’m far from a professional Egyptologist but they put a lot of importance on staying facially recognizable. It’s why defacing statues and chiseling images off of walls was such an impactful act of desecration.

The technical term for this is spolia if you’re interested in reading about more examples.

Why cut your own stone when there’s a perfectly good Roman mausoleum over there? The Romans aren’t using it anymore.

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.

"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.

>What's strange though is that if it was a trade language, why did it only emerge and gain traction in Britain, and not across the entire North Sea?

This is a really good question, and as far as I know it isn't one that migration-skeptical scholars have a good answer for.

You could also ask it in the other direction though. If Old English came from continental Europe, why didn't any remnant of it survive there? It can't really be that all the people who spoke Old English migrated from the continent to Britain, can it?

Early Medieval Britain is fascinating for the same reason that it can be so incredibly frustrating. There are so many mysteries.

I am not familiar with Pryor's work, and while I know a bit about Oosthuizen's, I haven't read The Emergence of the English (her main book on the subject). The idea that there was no population movement from mainland Europe in late antiquity, or at least that such migration was not the main force behind the creation of Old English, is a small minority view. Calling the scholars who argue for it crackpots or cranks is going too far though.

When pressed on the question in interviews, Oosthuizen usually says something like 'I would be surprised if there was no migration,' so she doesn't even really subscribe to the idea that there was no population movement at all. What these scholars are usually trying to do is point out that there are a lot of flawed assumptions underlying the traditional understanding of Britain in late antiquity. I don't think the alternate theories they propose are likely correct, but they are technically also possible.

Many of the points they emphasize while making their arguments are also very good to keep in mind when studying the past in general.

• DNA is not identity
  • Just because we identify 60% or whatever of a skeleton's DNA as 'Germanic,' does not mean that that person identified with a Germanic ethnicity in life or spoke a Germanic language. Culture is not biological, and the idea that it is has a lot of really nasty implications in European history.
• Artifacts are not people
  • Just because an artifact that we identify as 'Germanic' is found somewhere does not mean that a person who identified with a Germanic ethnicity or spoke a Germanic language left it there. This can really be boiled down to 'trade and cultural exchange exist.' Invasion and migration are not the only explanations for a style of artifact showing up in a new area.
• Historical documents are not necessarily reliable
  • The idea of barbarian invasions remaking post-Roman Britain comes entirely from On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, a text written by a British monk named Gildas in the 5th or 6th century. The problem with this is that Ruin and Conquest was never meant to be a history of post-Roman Britain. Most of it is actually a summary of biblical events. Gildas then draws parallels between this biblical material and claims about his contemporaries to make an argument that British society is sinful and bound to incur God's wrath. Ruin and Conquest is a sermon, not a history. It is written with a polemic agenda and can't be relied on as a source of historical fact. For all we know, Gildas could have been the Alex Jones of his day.

I've typed a stupid amount and still not answered your question: "where did the English language really come from?" The only honest answer is that nobody can say for certain. Anybody who tells you they can is kidding themselves. There is just too little good evidence. It was probably a much lengthier and more complex process than we will ever truly understand.

Now as I understand it, Oosthuizen's theory is that an ancestor to Old English was already spoken along the North Sea coast of Britain before the end of Roman rule. It could have been brought by earlier migrations and/or or introduced to Britain as a trade language by merchants traveling across the North Sea. As Roman influence receded, exchange across the English Channel and ultimately to the Mediterranean became less important to British society. To fill the void, trade across the North Sea became more important, and thus so did this pre-existing Germanic trade language along the North Sea coast. It became the lingua franca of a new economy and society integrated with the North Sea zone instead of the Mediterranean, and so over time whatever variants of Brythonic and Latin remained in what would become England were disfavored and eventually died out. In her view, this theory both explains the spread of Old English language and culture as well as the absence of archaeological evidence for some catastrophic destruction and replacement of Romano-British society.