(Due to current refugee/immigration hysteria, this seemed like a good time to remind readers that 1) net migration to the UK has been steadily going down and 2) more than 380,000 British people emigrated FROM the UK last year and 3) that immigration is good for the economy and 4) roughly 28% of NHS doctors who have been called heroes for their struggles against the coronavirus were born in a foreign country. Plus, my family immigrated to the UK from the USA in 2016. My precious children are the filth nationalists are griping about, and they have been subject to anti-immigrant bullying at school, so I have no yen to pander to the anti-immigrant asshats who will gripe about the facts in this post.)
Some people (racists) threw a fit when anthropologists revealed that Cheddar Man – the Mesolithic skeleton discovered in Britian in 1903 — probably had ‘dark to black skin’.
Suddenly there were lots of Average Joes (racists) who knew more about human biology and evolution than anthropologists and geneticists. The British, they cried, couldn’t have ‘turned white’ in just a few thousand years. They must have ALWAYS been white, dammit!
Um, no.
First, Britain has had people immigrating into it for thousands of years. When it got almighty cold during the Anglian Stage everybody seems to have migrated OUT of it too, then back in again from Northern Europe. There were even some Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis running around, possibly making babies with the Homo sapiens around them. It was a hella mixed bag of genetics in modern Britain, well before the Anglo Saxons and Normans arrived.
Secondly, Cheddar Man was one of the group of migrants who cruised into the future UK about 10,000 years ago, hunter-gathers from the Middle East and what is now modern-day Turkey.
In 1997, DNA analysis was carried out on a tooth of Cheddar Man, human remains dated to c. 7150 BC found in Gough’s Cave at Cheddar Gorge. His Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) belonged to Haplogroup U5. Within modern European populations, U5 is now concentrated in North-East Europe, among members of the Sami people, Finns, and Estonians. This distribution and the age of the haplogroup, indicate that individuals belonging to U5 were among the first people to resettle Northern Europe, following the retreat of ice sheets from the Last Glacial Maximum, about 10,000 years ago
This migration into Britain was a part of a huge, multi-wave Mesolithic expansion of people from Anatolia, spreading the new technology of agriculture across Europe as they went. There is further bad news for the racists who want to think of Britain as inherently and agelessly ‘white’ … these Mediterranean farmers “almost completely replaced” European hunter-gatherers that were already in Britain, “apart from one group in western Scotland.” In all likelihood it wasn’t violence that supplanted the hunter-gatherers … it was babies. Becoming farmers will lower a populations overall health and life expectancy, but it will cause a massive baby boom compared to the fertility of hunter-gatherers. Soon Britain was full of brown farmers — because they had more children and probably subsumed the earlier population into their descendants.
Since we’re already making the racists sad (which makes me happy), it turns out it was the immigrant Anatolian farmers who did most of the building of that world-famous icon of Britishness – Stonehenge. Yes, Stonehenge was built mostly by brown people.
But wait … weren’t the bluestones quarried in Wales, and weren’t their Welsh-born people buried in the Neolithic chambers there? Yep. But the people living in Wales, even before the next wave of immigrants from Anatolia — proto-Celts – moved in, were also members of that same farming culture.
The Turkish immigrants were probably getting a bit paler during their 5000 years in Albion, though. The lighter your skin, the better chance you have of a successful pregnancy in northern climates with less sunlight. Paler skin in the north means it takes less sunlight to produce the vitamin D you need to make a healthy baby. People with lighter brown skin might have outbred their darker skinned relatives and neighbors, making the population increasingly more ‘olive’ complexioned than dark brown over time.
Not that it matters, because eventually the brown farmers who built Stonehenge were themselves almost entirely replaced (culturally) in about 2500 BC by a new wave of migrants known as the Beaker Culture. Alas for the racists, these new Britons were probably brown/brownish too. The Beaker people were of steppe-related ancestry, and their genetic markers are most prevalent among the decidedly brown modern-day Kets, Mansi, Native Americans, Nganasans and Yukaghirs.
But be of good cheer racists! Blonde ancestors would eventually come to Albion! (Of course, it would be via Eastern Europe migration into Western/Northern Europe, and we all know how welcoming those Britain First idiots are of Eastern European migrants nowadays.) The Beaker culture was gradually supplanted by the fresh immigration and technologies of the Hallstatt culture, who gave rise to the Celts. The Celtic peoples, with most of their genetics from the Steppes Eurasian Russia, almost certainly would have had some blondes. An influx of Scandinavia genes would have further lightened the Celtic people of the British Isles as well. In fact, the Celts, being a culture not adverse to making love as much as war, has such an admixture of DNA from various Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples that there is NO “significant genetic link (beyond being Europeans) between the various ‘Celtic’ peoples in the Atlantic area.” It was a very distinct CULTURE, but not one of any ethnic ‘purity’ or some such bullshit.
By the Atlantic Bronze Age and the Roman invasion of Britain, the population was already incredibly varied because of ancient immigration. Jordanes, a 6th-century Roman historian, wrote in his Origins and Deeds of the Goths that the Silures (the major tribe of southern Wales) had “swarthy features and are usually born with curly black hair” but that “the inhabitants of Caledonia (the people of modern day Yorkshire and Scotland) have reddish hair and large loose-jointed bodies … like the Gauls or the Spaniards.” Moreover, the Romans brought a fresh wave of ethic variety into Britain as well, and the British have been bitching about immigration ever since.
In 1325 King Edward II arrested all foreigners living near the south coast. In 1376 there were calls to force all Italian immigrants to leave the country. Flemish immigrants were targeted and killed during the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. Welsh immigration caused anti-Welsh sentiment to run rife in England during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. In the 1440s, “local juries of English-born men were asked to provide lists of all known aliens living in their communities” because foreign immigrants now made up a whopping 2% of the population and were thus inherently a danger to the ‘real’ English. In 1517 Londoners rioted again against an influx of Flemish workers. In 1528 a letter reached Cardinal Wolsey from Wales bemoaning the fact there were now so many Irish newcomers living in Tenby. In 1593, broadsides were printed complaining about the “beastly brutes the Belgians, faint-hearted Frenchmen and fraudulent Flemings” who were permitted by Queen Elizabeth, it was claimed, “to live here in better case and more freedom than her own people.”
And it didn’t get any better. In the first decade of the 1700s, the arrival of German refugees led to the English printing pamphlets describing them as a “parcel of vagabonds, who might have lived comfortably enough in their native country, had not laziness of their dispositions and report of our well-known generosity drawn them out of it”. (Hmmm … where have I heard that before?) In 1847 the English complained about the “Invasion” of the Irish, saying that “Ireland is pouring into the cities, and even the villages of this land, a disgusting mass of famine, nakedness and dirt and fever.” No mention was made, of course, of the fact England was the reason they were starving to death in their own country.
In the late 19th century, Pogroms in Russia and Prussia forced about 200,000 Jews to Britain, inspiring Sir John Colomb, MP for Bow and Bromley, to wail that “England was being made a human ash pit for the refuse population of the world.” And of course, discourse accusing refugees of “taking jobs or houses, of disorderly, law-breaking behaviour, have been a stock in trade of media coverage of refugees” through the whole of the 20th century.
You’d think we’d learn there is nothing to fear from immigration y historical example, but no. We’ve learned nothing. In the last couple of years, the UK even voted to leave the EU because of fears that Britain would be ‘overrun’ with immigrants otherwise. It is enough to make anyone who reads history scream.