The popular image of migration, invasion and massacre defining which races live where in this country is not borne out by the facts, says Stephen Oppenheimer
The great immigration debate has ancient roots. Our history books tell us that the Celts are the indigenous people of the British Isles, and that they were bloodily massacred and substantially replaced in England by invading Anglo-Saxons 1,500 years ago.
Thus, the story continues, people of Celtic origin dominate in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, while Anglo-Saxon genes monopolise England. On both counts, this is wrong, along with the popular ideas of what it means to be English.
In the past we have relied on ancient chronicles, archaeological finds and the study of language and literature to sketch a picture of how the British population has changed over the ages. But with the development of genetic tracking, we are now able to trace back from the DNA (genetic composition) of our current population and work out, with greater accuracy than ever before, who arrived in Britain and when.
Over the past two years, I have traced and mapped sources and dates of migration of the male and female gene lines, which had arrived in the British Isles before 1950.
The first and most important discovery I made is that three-quarters of British ancestors arrived as hunter gatherers between 7,500 and 15,000 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands.
Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the Ice Age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. Overall, three quarters of our modern gene pool (two thirds in England) derives from this early source.
The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language. There were many later immigrations and invasions, and each left a genetic signal, but no subsequent immigrant event contributed much more than a 10th of our modern genetic mix.
Even "Celts", if they are to be defined by the genes which arrived at the same time as the Celtic language, fall into the class of an immigrant minority. So, who were they?
Archaeological orthodoxy has them hailing from Central Europe, and sweeping into the British Isles during the Iron Age. But there is no genetic or convincing historical evidence for this widespread conviction. However, my view is that Celtic ethnicity, both modern and ancient, is still a valid concept.
We know that today's "Celts" in the British Isles have real cultural and linguistic connections to former Continental Celts in south-west Europe at an early stage – specifically, in France south of the Seine, in Iberia and Italy.
The earliest Celtic inscriptions, in Gaulish, Celtiberian and Lepontic (Celtic languages), have been found in these same regions, dating from well before Caesar and showing a clear linguistic relationship with insular-celtic languages.
Barry Cunliffe, professor of archaeology at Oxford, suggests that Celtic language developed along the Atlantic fringe of western Europe during the first four millennia of maritime trade, and was carried north into Ireland and Wales by metal prospectors from 4,400 years ago.
New linguistic estimates give the age of the Celtic branch at around 6,000 years, consistent with Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew's view of the Neolithic spread of Indo-European languages.
My study found good evidence for Neolithic gene flow from the Mediterranean, around Spain to the British Isles, including at least one sizable genetic colonisation event in Abergele, North Wales, which matches the archaeological evidence of an early copper mining colony there around 3,700 years ago.
This flow provided a third of modern male genes in that part of North Wales, but less than 10 per cent in the rest of Britain, with the highest impact on the English South Coast (10 per cent) and least in Ireland (four per cent). Clearly the dominance of the "Celts" in Britain has been hugely exaggerated.
Contrary to popular belief, we have no cultural evidence to support the view that Celtic was a common language of ancient Britain. Rather the opposite, since an even greater flow of Neolithic-dated genes (10-19 per cent of modern gene lines) and cultural influences were impinging on eastern and south-east Britain from Scandinavia and north-west Germany over the same period as the Iberian (Spanish) influx.
The fact that Britain was one island is of no help in arguing for one language, since the highways of influence were maritime, not land-based. A recent Cambridge study has suggested that the antecedents of English may date earlier in England than the Anglo-Saxon invasion and have links to Norse.
My study also disproves another popular idea – that an aboriginal population was massacred by Anglo-Saxon invasions in the Dark Ages. The key historical source that has led to this conviction is the sixth-century monk Gildas's tract "On the Ruin of Britain".
The gory embellishments of this latter-day Job have led to the entrenched view that Angles and Saxons came over from the Continent, slaughtered the Celts in England and became the "English".
In the aftermath of the invasion, Gildas anticipates Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, speaking of "fragments of human bodies, covered with livid clots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press".
In schoolbooks the invasion is classed as genocide. Genocide means the deliberate extermination of a nation. If that means the death of more than 50 per cent of the people, I am certain, after studying the genetic story, that no such thing took place in Dark Ages England.
There is specific evidence of an invasion from the Anglo-Saxon homeland at the base of the Danish Peninsula, but on my estimation this amounts to only five per cent of male gene types in the British Isles.
This does not give enough genetic evidence for even a 10 per cent cull (that is, a decimation), except in parts of Norfolk and the Fens, which reached about that level of intrusion.
This means there was not just substantial continuity of population, but a survival of around 95 per cent of indigenous gene lines at the time. Even the Vikings achieved a higher estimated overall level of genetic invasion.
This new genetic evidence gives a fresh perspective on fears that immigrants are diluting what it means to be British. When Gildas spoke of the Anglo-Saxon invasion he exhorted the surviving and unrighteous British kings to "seek for the rule of right judgment [on] the proud, murderers, the combined and adulterers, enemies of God, who ought to be utterly destroyed and their names forgotten."
But should we lightly wish such a fate on foreign invaders? After all – Celts, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and others – are all minorities in the modern British gene pool compared with the first unnamed pioneers from the Basque country who, 15,000 years ago ventured into the empty, chilly lands, so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.
- Stephen Oppenheimer, professor at Oxford University, is the author of 'The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story' (Constable), available for £18 plus £1.25 p&p. To order please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112.
