No DNA Evidence for the Norman Conquest

[From the Nature paper]

A more general conclusion of our analyses is that while many of the historical migration events leave signals in our data, they have had a smaller effect on the genetic composition of UK populations than has sometimes been argued. In particular, we see no clear genetic evidence of the Danish Viking occupation and control of a large part of England, either in separate UK clusters in that region, or in estimated ancestry profiles, suggesting a relatively limited input of DNA from the Danish Vikings and subsequent mixing with nearby regions, and clear evidence for only a minority Norse contribution (about 25%) to the current Orkney population.

Pretty remarkable. Historical and archaelogical DNA evidence is still very much a work in progress too. You get different results with mitochondrial and Y-chromosone research, and reconstructing the genetics of ancient populations always suffers from the low sample size and somewhat arbitrary way that samples are preserved and become available. I don’t lend aid and comfort to antis, but if I did I would suggest some scientific attacks on the Book of Mormon that are stronger than the DNA ones.

At this point, I think the DNA evidence suggests, though it doesn’t prove, that (1) Book of Mormon populations were probably never extremely extensive, (2) assimilation of locals probably took place relatively quickly even among the Nephites, though there is no record of it, and (3) some of the peoples called the Lamanites may not have had any actual Lamanite descent.

Good stuff. I’m bookmarking it.

Such a tiny (and also non-representative) sample to try and capture such a heterogeneous land mass with such a complex history… conclusions about what they did *not* find are unwarranted.

e.g. the Normans numbered something like 10,000 in a population of about a million – very roughly 1 percent. What chance that a sample of 2000 across England, Scotland and Wales would pick these up? Depends on who was sampled – eg how may people with Norman surnames.

The work by Greg Clarke suggests that the small number of founders will have left behind a disproportionately larger number of descendants; since that is suggested by surname analysis, and also that this nearly always happens in pre-industrial societies – the rulers have the most surviving children. If that pattern is not shown by the genetic analysis, then the genetic analysis is presumably partial or defective. I would not be re-writing the history books yet (especially given the abysmal quality of most genetics researchers).

It is strange that this study was not done ten years ago with ten (or a hundred) times as many people – but then that is political correctness for you; there is elite fear of what may be found in such studies, and what conclusions may be drawn from them.

And there is always the danger that people who say ‘race’ is a social construct may notice that it demonstrably isn’t.

Just to make things muddier, a recent story has a large percentage of Asians are decended from 11 men, including Genghis Khan.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/03/10/millions-of-modern-asian-men-can-trace-their-lineage-to-11-powerful-leaders-including-genghis-khan/

The way they picked their sample was to find people who were living in the same place they were born and whose grandparents where also from there. I’d gather that’d be a very rural and lower class group. I’d expect the descendants of the Normans to be higher class and urban – similar to the recent surname/class analysis from sweden.
Unless there are still Lord Emsworths living in the country – but modern day england doesn’t seem like it would be graced with that caliber of goof.

On the other Hand, A Farewell to Alms says that the homicide rates among the nobility was higher than among the residents of Detroit. So perhaps there aren’t a lot of Norman descendants because they spent far too much time killing each other off?

That was about a thousand years ago. I would not correlate the Normans class and anything today.

I can point out reams and reams of kings, queens, and other nobility (and even Thor and Odin) that are all in my genealogical line. But my family is not high status, most definitely.

But the smallness of the original sample worries me more, though I can see why they did it.

A sample of 2,000 is not small. It may have been collected in some way that makes it not representative, but that problem would still exist with a sample of 200,000.

The sampling as described in the current Nature paper:

“To investigate fine-scale population structure in the UK, and to provide well-characterized controls for disease studies, we assembled a sample, the People of the British Isles (PoBI) collection, as previously described. Our analyses used 2,039 PoBI samples from rural areas within the UK, genotyped as part of the Wellcome Trust Case Consortium 2 (WTCCC2), who had all four grandparents born within 80 km of each other. We thus effectively sample DNA from the grandparents. The grandparents’ average year of birth was 1885 (s.d. 18 years). As the DNA from each PoBI participant is a random sample of their grandparents’ DNA, our approach allows investigation of fine-scale population structure in rural areas of the UK before the major population movements of the twentieth century.

“To provide context for the UK samples, we analysed 6,209 samples from 10 countries in continental Europe genotyped in the WTCCC2 study of multiple sclerosis. To ensure compatibility between the PoBI and continental European samples we restricted attention to autosomal SNPs genotyped in both samples (approximately 500,000 SNPs, see Methods).”

URL for the paper referenced for a previous description of the PoBI collection:
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v20/n2/full/ejhg2011127a.html

@JM – A sample of 2000 is small for what they are asking it to do – it’s more than adequate for an opinion poll between two or three parties; but here they are looking at multiple variables in multiple genetically separate populations.

Agreed with BC that the sample size is pretty small for the multiple distinctions they are wanting to make with it.

JG’s explanation of their method also makes me wonder if they overstate the stability of the genetics. If ‘stay-at-homeness’ is genetic and inheritable, then modern day stay-at-homers might be disproportionately descended from the aboriginal inhabitants, instead of the invaders who would perforce be rovers and might have descendants who would keep picking up and moving around.