"We are an ancient people "

I have always thought that Britian and hence my "anglo-saxon" blood was mostly germanic via the post Roman invasions....it turns out that is not the case:

From an article by Steve Sailer

As every schoolboy used to know, the episodes of group migration into the British Isles were remarkably few between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the beginning of modern mass immigration after 1945: the French Huguenot refugees, the modest flow of Ashkenazi Jews, and a few others. Nevertheless, in recent years the politically-correct elites on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to promote the improbable contention that Britain has always been a land of immigration.

Ironically, just as this has become an article of faith, genetic evidence has begun to pile up about how profoundly wrong it is. Not only did immigration after 1066 play a vanishingly small role in the makeup of the offshore islanders, but even the famous invasions of previous millennia—Normans, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, and Romans—merely added a fairly minor overlay to the prehistoric gene pool.

Political control and even language varied in the British Isles over time. But the oldest occupants endured, adapted, and flourished. In the words of Oxford University geneticist Bryan Sykes in his new book Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland [published in the United Kingdom under the title Blood of the Isles]:

"We are an ancient people …"

The family trees of the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish are overwhelmingly indigenous to the British Isles since far back into prehistoric times. The title of Sykes' first chapter, "Twelve Thousand Years of Solitude," summarizes this finding. The "average settlement dates" in the Isles for the ancestors of modern British and Irish people, he estimates, were around 8,000 years ago..

.....

For one thing, it offers an important perspective on the current obsession with the supposed educational blessings of racial diversity. Virtually every college president in America publicly denounces the mentally-stultifying effects of a non-diverse student body. (Diversity of opinion, of course, is somehow much less fashionable on campus.)

And yet, William Shakespeare, who likely never left homogenous England in his life, sketched what is perhaps the most diverse array of personalities in world literature. Nor have the British Isles—home to Samuel Johnson and John Lennon, Oscar Wilde and the Duke of Wellington—been grievously lacking in real life individuality. [or gilbert and sullivan, sir richard francis burton, turner, the list goes on and on and on]

This is not to say that the close observation of racial diversity doesn't add interest to our understanding of humanity … or Shakespeare wouldn't have made Othello, the Moor of Venice, the tragic hero of one of his greatest plays.

What it does show, however, is that even in the most superficially uniform racial groups, there is almost endless human richness to be found.


http://www.bloodoftheisles.net/
The Oxford Genetic Atlas Project
The main source of data for Blood of the Isles comes from DNA samples collected from over 10,000 volunteers throughout Britain between 1996 and 2002 under the auspices of the Oxford Genetic Atlas Project. MORE