Media Release
May 8 2008
UniSA researcher says "no" to Anglo-Saxon apartheid
A
recent theory explaining why 40 per cent of today’s Britons carry
Germanic genes dating from the Dark Ages has been turned on its head by
a University of South Australia academic in a paper published in the
current edition of
The
Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Science).
Senior Lecturer in Physics in UniSA’s School of Electrical and Information Engineering, John Pattison’s research suggests the results of present-day British genetic surveys can be explained by a very long period of low level Germanic migration – and not by a massive invasion of Germanic invaders that crushed native Britons, as is often believed.
“In 2006, scholars at University College London concluded that the genetic surveys were evidence that Germanic invaders in early Anglo-Saxon Britain displaced or enslaved native Britons,” Mr Pattison said.
“While accepting that the invasion was not as large as traditionally thought, to support their claim and to account for the results of the genetic surveys the researchers proposed a kind of apartheid system which prohibited intermarriage between Germanic conquerors and British slaves until about 800 AD.
“The result being that the Germanic component of the population grew at a quicker rate than that of the native Britons.”
However, after extensive modelling of the British population over the past two millennia, Mr Pattison found the presence of Germanic genes could be explained without the “apartheid system” theory.
“My research arrived at the same genetic composition of present-day Britons, without imposing any special type of social systems and assumed free mixing,” Mr Pattison said.
“In other words, the genetic make-up of Britons today is most likely to the result of mixing between the British and Germanic people through all periods of British history.”
John Pattison’s paper is the fifth in his series of studies into
population genetics and inbreeding published in prestigious
international journals.
Contacts for interview
-
John Pattison office (08) 8302 3043
email john.pattison@unisa.edu.au
Media contact
- Vincent Ciccarello office (08) 8302 0578 mobile 0434 603 457 email vincent.ciccarello@unisa.edu.au