Apartheid 'ensured Germanic conquest'

LONDON - A form of apartheid was practised in Britain in the 5th century which enabled a small invading force of Anglo-Saxons from northern Europe to achieve numerical and cultural supremacy over the indigenous Celts.

A study has found that a social system that prevented intermarriage between the richer Anglo-Saxons and the poorer Celts could explain why Britain speaks English rather than a Gaelic language.

It could also explain why the vast majority of British men today possess a male sex chromosome that derives from an Anglo-Saxon ancestor rather than from a Celt, said geneticist Mark Thomas at University College London.

The study found how a relatively small immigrant population of Anglo-Saxons from Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia could quickly manage to outnumber the bigger indigenous population of Britons, Thomas said.

"The native Britons were genetically and culturally absorbed by the Anglo-Saxons over a period of as little as a few hundred years.

"An initially small invading Anglo-Saxon elite could have quickly established themselves by having more children who survived to adulthood, thanks to their military power and economic advantage," he said.

"We believe they also prevented the native British genes getting into the Anglo-Saxon population by restricting marriage in a system of apartheid that left the country culturally and genetically Germanised.

"This is exactly what we see today - a population of largely Germanic genetic origin, speaking a principally German language," Thomas said.

Historians believe that a relatively small immigrant influx of between 10,000 and 200,000 Anglo-Saxons came to Britain between the 5th and 7th Centuries AD in aftermath of the fall of the Roman empire.

The population of Britain at the time was probably more than 2 million yet genetic studies show that the Anglo-Saxons made a much bigger contribution to the overall gene pool than their small numbers suggest.

Today more than 50 per cent of white British men carry Y chromosomes of Germanic origin - a far higher proportion than expected from such as small immigrant influx.

Geneticists calculated that it would take an immigrant population of about half a million Anglo-Saxons to account for this prevalence, far higher than historians estimated for the influx.

Thomas and his colleagues show in a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society that a way of explaining this discrepancy is if the well-off Anglo-Saxons limited intermarriage and put their tribes at an advantage.

There is other historical evidence to suggest that the Anglo-Saxons practised a form of apartheid. The laws of Ine in 7th century Wessex clearly distinguished between Saxons and the Welsh - with the price of a Saxon life paid in "blood money" being three or four times higher than that of a Celt.

The scientists said physical segregation could have effected the change, "but this is not what the laws of Ine imply; an apartheid-like structure seems to be the most obvious mechanism".

- INDEPENDENT