The usefulness of the latest genetics studies in looking at the prehistory of Britain, which confirms the methods of Marx

A recent edition of Nature (19^th March 2015) published an article on the results of recent genetic studies under the title; ‘The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population’. We don’t intend to deal with the methodology of these genetic studies themselves and larger scale conclusions drawn from the DNA samples provided by individuals who can be regarded as representatives of regional populations in Britain. To be clear, Britain is being used to describe the whole island often referred to as Great Britain – the land mass composing England, Wales and mainland Scotland. The results of this article also overflow into the Orkneys and Northern Ireland.

The introduction to this genetic study ‘reveals a a rich and detailed pattern of genetic differentiation with remarkable concordance between genetic clusters and geography. The regional genetic differentiation and differing patterns of shared ancestry with 6,209 individuals from across Europe carry clear signals of historical demographic events. We estimate the genetic contribution to southeastern England from Anglo-Saxon migrations to be under half, and identify the regions not carrying genetic material from these migrations. We suggest significant pre-Roman but post-Mesolithic movement into eastern England from continental Europe, and show that in non-Saxon parts of the United Kingdom, there exist genetically differentiated subgroups rather than a general “Celtic” population’.

The genetic study was undertaken (and justified as far as bourgeois society is concerned) in investigating the medical implications of such studies. By tracing genetic change through time, and generations, the profitability for the medicine enterprises funding such studies is the direct motive of such work. It would be surprising if developments in medical fields do not result from such work, but the primary purposes as far as capitalist firms are concerned is profit – the bottom line.

It is the scientific ‘spin off’ of this study which interests us Marxists

‘The genetic composition of human populations varies throughout the world, as a result of the interplay between population movement, admixture, natural selection and genetic drift. Characterizing such geographical population structure provides insights into demographic history…’.

Science under capitalism frequently specialises, which is useful in that it spreads out into different aspects of the subjects, but also fragments the overall picture of the subjects under examination. Specialisms do tend to have a life of their own and need to demonstrate a useful academic role within the overall framework of academic learning. The slotting in, so to speak, of all the different information into an overall picture of events becomes a task which is more suitable for Marxists, as we have no particular specialism to defend, and expand upon. Also Marxism is the only approach which can bring in all the different dimensions of the subject into the overall historical picture.

Before the results of scientific studies, and also the later examinations of people such as genetics became available there was a restricted amount of information about the human population in prehistory. Prehistory is defined as that period before history, and history is regarded as that period for which written records are available. We make the observation that written records arose out of property (both land and merchandise) and so are expressions of class society, and even when previous myths and legends are recorded they are expressed through the prism of the interests of the ruling elites.

Marx used the material then available to examine ancient history, which would later be called prehistory, in his Ethnological Notebooks. Engels used some of this material in his authorative The Origins of the Family, Private property and the State, and one of the primary purposes of this work was to educate the young socialist parties. The message was clear: at an earlier time there was no property or a state, and in the future under socialism there would also be no property and no state.

The bourgeoisie naturally pours scorn upon such a perspective. For them the whole purpose of society and human endeavours is to sustain property and the state, that is their own society. Archaeology was initially a play-thing of the rich – Schliemann did much butchery to the site of Troy (he ‘discovered’ a place which was already known to the local population) just to justify the stories of Homer. Next, ancient Greece was to receive the Schliemann ‘treatment’. After that a more orderly approach was to prevail, shown by the work of Arthur Evans in Crete. Much ruined by earthquakes ‘Minoan’ Crete was reconstructed as best as Evans could do at the time. Then the race was on to strip out the ancient world to fill up the museums for the cities of the growing Imperialist powers. Imperialist powers used (clothed themselves in) these ancient traditions to justify their own ‘civilising’ roles.

Archaeology was becoming a battle-ground for political and ideological struggles, that was everything from academic to personal. It was not for nothing that Sir Mortimer Wheeler declared: archaeology is not a science – it is a vendetta.

Many universities and foundations were then involved in excavating ancient sites and deciphering ancient scripts. The time-scales of ancient civilisations were stretching further back in time. Very quickly the ‘biblical time-scale’ was slotted into the wider history of the Middle East, and more rational explanations provided for the various Hebrew myths and legends.

The emerging picture on the development of civilisations went further back in time. The rise and fall of the various empires showed a series of cycles, demonstrating a steady but irregular advancement of human society, for which there was little comfort for those who still clung on to their religious prejudices. The new dominant viewpoint became the diffusionist model. Civilisation began in the Middle East and was transmitted outwards by the civilised, by trade and conquest, so it was taken out the further reaches of other continents. The furthest outposts of North Western Europe would by all accounts have been a relatively late developments. Monuments such as Stone Henge had to be of a late date, and if not a viewing platform for Egyptian priests, then the only other candidates must be Minoan travellers. The prospect of such works being the product of indigenous peoples was too disturbing to be contemplated. The island of Britain could only have had a backward, undeveloped population, with Ireland being considered a ‘wild island on the fringes of Europe’. This arrogant view-point was soon to be relegated to the rubbish bin, where it belonged.

The revolution in science and its application to history

The nuclear age, from the mid-1940s onwards, led to the latest scientific methods being available to be applied to archaeological items. Carbon 14 dating (even with its margins of error) started to cause concern. The first readings were shrugged off as being unreliable, but as they proved to be consistent they could not be ignored. The diffusionist model which had been applied to the British Isles was soon shattered. Colin Renfrew repeatedly pointed out that a ‘yawning millennium’ was opening up, that the Bronze Age Monuments, amongst others, could not be a simple appendage of the Middle East civilisations. Time-scales were being extended back ‘into the mists of time’. Prehistory, previously the threshold to civilisation, was developing into an expanding discipline, with almost a life of its own.was more

The imprecision of C¹⁴ dating was soon to be supplemented with tree ring dating (dendrochronology), which has now given a remarkable precision back to about ten thousand years ago. In the absence of DNA samples from skeletons, strontium isotope readings amongst others have given indications of the areas where living beings, both humans and animals, have grown up. Patterns of prehistoric developments, and the movements of individuals can be traced. For instance the recent find of the “Amesbury Archer”, and his companion / relative, who were buried near and contemporaneously with the early stage of Stone Henge, both grew up in the area of the Western side of the Alps.

A remarkable window into prehistory was created with the find of a mummified body in 1991 in the Eastern Alps from the period of the changes from the Neolithic to the Copper Age. The mummified body, now called Oetzi, has so far provided only a limited amount of information about prehistoric movements of peoples. Mitochondrial DNA (female line) was the first to be extracted. The female DNA results has located Oetzi’s ancestry to the K-1 subhaplogroup, which has been further sub-divided into K-1a, K-1b and K-1c. The letter K denotes the descendants of a single female, who’s off-spring (or at least some of them) moved into Europe at approximately the same time as the “Neolithic revolution”

The presumption that the original people of K’s descendants were part of the ‘farming revolution’ presupposes that the developments of those earlier times were like the more modern forms of colonisation rather than developments in food production, or collection, which would exist at the same time. Not everyone was converted into a farming way of life.

The nuclear DNA (a combination of the DNA from the father and mother) has proved not to be robust enough to survive over this period of time (more than 5,000 years). Oetzi’s Y chromosome, inherited through the paternal line, falls within a rare European haplogroup and sub-group known as G-L91, and in 2013 several dozen people living today have been identified in the South Tyrol. Prior to these discoveries in Austria, comparisons with other Euopean, North African and Arabian peninsula DNA showed the nearest results to be found amongst modern residents in Corsica and Sardinia.

It should not be forgotten that in the European / Mediterranean context humans were sailors before they were farmers.

A further dimension to this picture has been provided by the recent results of the genetic testing of controlled groups of residents of the United Kingdom, as now published in Nature. As one of the leaders of the research said:

‘Historical records, archaeology, linguistics – all of those records tell us about the elites. It’s said that history is written by the winners… Genetics complements that and is very different. It tells us what is happening to the masses… the ordinary folk’.

The samples used in the genetic study

‘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’. The analysis used 2,039 PoBI samples from rural areas within the UK, who all had all their four grandparents born within 80 km of each other. From these samples access to the DNA of the grandparents were available, with an average birth-date of 1885. The results point to the DNA of the rural areas before the later large-scale population movements of the 20^th century.

Consequently comparisons were made against over 6,000 samples from 10 countries in continental Europe genotyped in the Wellcome Trust’s disease control studies. The limited number of samples in this group needed to use the recently developed fine-scale population structure to ‘look for more subtle effects’. For more details on this the reader should consult the article, and the methods applied.

The first section (Figure 1) shows a map for 17 clusters, along with a ‘tree’ showing how the resulting clusters are related at less fine levels of this hierarchy. The results between the genetic clusters show a ‘striking’ match with geographical areas, being very localised and non-overlapping. There had been no reference to the location of the samples during their processing.. The researchers found nothing surprising and regarded this as confirmation of the methods used.

‘Our approach can separate groups in close proximity, such as in Cornwall and Devon in southwest England, where the genetic clusters closely match the modern county boundaries, or in Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland’.

What is described as the coarsest level of genetic differentiation (the dividing into two clusters) separates the samples in Orkney from all the others.

Next the Welsh samples separate from the other non-Orkney samples. There was a further separation between North and South Wales.

Then there is a separation of the north of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland from the rest of England, and a separation in Cornwall from the rest of England.

There is a large single cluster (about half of the samples) that covers most of central and southern England and runs up the east coast.

[The above results will have an extra relevance when we add in results of our studies on the prehistory of the British Isles, which will follow this work. The population of the Orkneys were regarded as an older population even at the time of the Roman attempted conquest of Scotland. Cornwall appears to have had a separate development, not only geographically from Devon, but also a different economic activity as well.]

Comparing UK clusters in relation to Europe

‘Genetic differences between UK clusters might in part reflect their relative isolation from each other, and in part differing patterns of migration and admixture from populations outside the UK’.

As far as the UK samples are concerned they retain the term cluster (17 in number) – for the samples from mainland Europe the term group is used.(51 in number). ‘For each UK cluster we estimated an “ancestry profile” which characterizes the ancestry of the cluster as a mixture of the ancestry of the 51 European groups’.

‘The bar charts in Fig. 2 show that some European groups feature substantially in the ancestry profiles of all UK clusters’. The bar charts should be consulted to see their influence on UK clusters. These European groups are from Western Germany, Belgium (what is now the Flemish area), North West and Southern France, Denmark, Spain, Norway and Sweden. Only significant influences (at least 2.5% of the contribution to ‘ancestry profiles’) are taken into account in the bar-charts. Mostly these relate to post-Roman Empire invasions and settlements. None of these movements appear to have obliterated previous populations. In general the results have no surprises as they conform to the historical record of movement of peoples.

References are also made to population movements in remote prehistory, when Britain was still attached to the European mainland. From 9600 until 7500BC movements could take place through a land bridge sometimes referred to as Doggerland. From then on movements had to take place by sea.

Ireland was constituted as a separate island by the raising sea-level by 8000 BC. Except from Ulster Ireland has not figured in any way from this research, which is very unfortunate. Ow Ireland would fit in to an overall picture would have been useful.

Returning to the UK clusters comments are made about the differentiation between the results. The genetic differentiation in ‘the UK is not related in a simple way to geographical distance. Examples of fine-scale differentiation include the separation of: islands within Orkney; Devon from Cornwall; and the Welsh/English borders from surrounding areas’. Further: ‘The edges between clusters follow natural geographical boundaries in some instances, for example, between Devon and Cornwall (boundaries the Tamar Estuary and Bodmin Moor), and Orkney is separated by sea from Scotland’.

‘After the Saxon migrations, the language, place names, cereal crops and pottery styles all changed from that of the existing (Romano-British) population to those of the Saxon migrants. There has been ongoing historical and archaeological controversy about the extent to which the Saxons replaced the existing Romano-British populations… We estimate the proportion of Saxon ancestry in Cent./S England as very likely to be under 50%, and most likely in the range of 10-40%’.

This explodes the notion of a ‘celtic genocide’ by the invading Saxons. The post-Roman society was transformed by the Saxon invaders into a new independent society (see our conclusion as the end of this article) overthrowing the old roman rule. The mythical King Arthur, Celtic kingdom, Knights of the Round Table were all fostered by the later Tudor dynasty, who were of Welsh descent, to justify the new ruling bourgeois (mercantile) order.

‘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…’.

This last observation ignores a real attempted bout of genocide carried out by William I in putting down resistance at York. This former Danish area was destroyed in ‘the harrying of the North’ where a two year long campaign of death and destruction, in which starvation was used as a weapon of war. This was an clear message to the Anglo-Saxon population by the new Norman rulers. You are a conquered people, and we will deal with you as we like. Your land has been taken from you, and you are reduced to vassalage. About a century later the Normans also tried to do this also to Ireland. Both of these were carried out with Papal approval.

Our historical analysis, now backed up by evidence in genetics, dismantles two nationalist myths which are widespread both in Britain and in Ireland, which deny our materialist view of history.

1. The chauvinistic idea of an Anglo-Saxon superiority: England has always been, and even more now, a mixture of peoples.
2. The idea of a Celtic nation / race: Celtic peoples are as diverse as are their British counterparts

It has been the changes in the productive force of societies which are the key to human development

Our conclusions: The research we have reviewed chimes in perfectly with what is written in Factors of Race and Nation, the section on the Germans and the barbarian mode of production. For example in this passage:

‘Given the relatively small number of conquerors and their tradition of communist labour, the new organisation of agriculture in these lands left large areas undivided – not just forests and pastures, but also arable land, with German forms of law prevailing over Roman forms, or combining with them. This enabled the formation, among previously nomadic peoples, of a fixed territorial administration; and the birth, over the course of four or five centuries, of Germanic states, whose power extended over the former provinces of the Roman Empire and across Italy itself. The most remarkable of these was that of the Franks, who raised Europe’s bulwark against Moorish invasion and who, while giving way to the pressure of the Normans at the other extremity, allowed populations to continue to live on the territories where they had established themselves, even if this led to complex ethnic mix between Germans, Romans and, in the Frankish kingdom, aboriginal Celts. This recent jumble of ethnic peoples with heterogeneous traditions, languages and institutions meant that these Germanic states could not yet constitute nations; but they were indeed states by virtue of their solid frontiers and unified military forces’.

For England, simply replace ‘Franks’ with ‘Anglo-Saxons’. England had been abandoned by the Romans in 410 AD, by which time the influx of Anglo-Saxons was underway. In the century that followed they introduced the Germanic, i.e. feudal, mode of production, which proved superior to what they found there, slave-estates owned by Romanised Anglo-Celts: ‘The Frankish peasants who had fallen upon this utterly desirable, fertile land and its favourable climate drew more benefit from it than was obtained by gangs of slaves. In this respect, they were part of a powerful rebirth of productive forces that arose from the coming together of all these idle arms and the rich land despised by the wealthy Romans, who had become like the mythical Croesus’. (Factors)

All of this confirms the Marxist approach of understanding history the emergence of nations in terms of social-economic developments rather than the official histories of nation states and the deeds of ‘Great Men’. Let alone romantic views of the superiority of ‘pure’ national cultures.

The DNA research goes some way towards proving empirically what Marxist analysis had already demonstrated theoretically.