Vikings, maybe not so much after all.

One of the most interesting introductions into the field of history in recent years has been the study of DNA.  The populations of various regions that have more or less static modern populations have been, in some cases, studied, sometimes with surprising results.  Perhaps no place has received more of this attention than Great Britain.

The classic story of Britain has been that it was settled in ancient times by some Celtic population. Following that, it seems a second one invaded at some point.  The Romans conquered it, or at least the southern half, and then in the 400s the Saxons, Angles and Jutes arrived and conquered the southern half of Great Britain, and the Irish Celts the north.  Or so the classic story goes.  Celtic holdouts from these invasions kept on only in Wales.  A couple of hundred years later Vikings from Denmark and Norway arrived, principally as brutal raiders at first, and later somewhat as invaders.  After that, in 1066, the Normans came over from France (the Normans themselves been descendant from Norsemen) and the process ceased, with no further invasions being successful.

Or so the written record held.

Then the study of genetics came in, challenged much of our assumptions, and with the most recent studies it would see that, well. . .the original story was probably more or less correct.

There's been different genetic studies of the British population, and they haven't all been uniform by any means, but the most recent one pretty much overturns the prior one.   The new one concludes that but for a single region of Britain, Scandinavian ancestry is slight.  This reverses the most recent prior conclusions which was that the Vikings came not so much as raiders, but as settlers. Well, they did do some settling, that's been known for a very long time, but it appears that, in fact, they were mostly just raiding.

In contrast, about 40% of the overall British DNA is German, which shows that the prior assumption that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes did in fact invade in strength is correct.  They didn't do under the British Celtic population, however, which was at one time the general assumption, although even Churchill questioned that in his classic multi-volume text on the history of the English speaking peoples.  A conquering people, their culture came to dominate but they obviously mixed with the conquered people, the overall human norm really.

As for the Celts, well it looks like people from Europe had started settling in Great Britain about 10,000 years ago, but we already knew that.  And it appears that the Celts were not one uniform people, but we already knew that too.

So, it seems, the written record was better than it was recently supposed.