New DNA samples from 494 people who died in England between 400 and 900 C.E. show they derived more than three-quarters of their ancestry from Northern Europe.
In the eighth century C.E., an English monk named Bede wrote the history of the island, saying Rome’s decline in about 400 C.E. opened the way to an invasion from the east. Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes from what is today northwestern Germany and southern Denmark “came over into the island, and they began to increase so much, that they became terrible to the natives.”
When 19th century archaeologists began to dig up Anglo-Saxon houses and burials, their finds seemed to confirm the outlines of Bede’s tale. Around 450 C.E. in western England, Roman-style pottery, tools, and architecture dwindled; jewelry, swords, and houses began to resemble those found along the North Sea coast in what is today Germany and the Netherlands. Some styles evolved into spectacular forms in the new land, such as the helmets and weapons found at Sutton Hoo in eastern England.
A woman buried with jewelry and a whole cow had predominantly local DNA, suggesting immigration and status weren’t linked in the Anglo-Saxon period.The population shift brought huge cultural changes, some of which reverberate today. “There was a relatively dramatic period of language change,” says University of Oxford archaeologist Helena Hamerow. Celtic languages and Latin soon gave way to Old English, a Germanic language that shares vocabulary with German and Dutch.
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