Submitted by MagicRaptor t3_xwxaqx in history
AethelweardSaxon t1_irb7ywp wrote
Reply to comment by MagicRaptor in Where did the English language REALLY come from? by MagicRaptor
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.
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.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?
ConsitutionalHistory t1_irbwjnx wrote
AethelweardSaxon t1_irbx94h wrote
That's a very old study. There was a more recent one in 2016 that suggested English people were 35% AS. But this new one has 8x the sample size
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