The skeleton of a girl from the update cemetery, who turned out to have a West African ancestry
M George et al.
Two unrelated young people buried in cemeteries in England at the beginning of the Middle Ages probably had grandparents from West Africa. How and when their loved ones arrived in Great Britain are unknown, but the discovery implies that migrants in Anglo-Saxon times came much further than we thought.
After the Romans finally withdrew from Great Britain in 410 AD, Great Britain was invaded and installed by Germanic angles, Saxons and Jutes. To determine if people also arrived, Duncan Sayer at the University of the Central Lancashire, in the United Kingdom, and his colleagues analyzed the ancient DNA of the bones of people buried in the cemeteries of the 7th century on the southern coast of England.
One of them is in Middown in Kent, where many objects exchanged around the world have been found, including pots, buckles and spits of Frankish Gaul, and grenats in jewelry that can come from India. The residents of the cemetery were often buried with items such as kitchen utensils, cutlery or comb.
The other cemetery is worth Matravers, Dorset, further west. The people are buried there in a romantic-British way, with few serious goods.
The majority of those of the cemeteries had, as expected, either the ancestry of northern Europe or the British and Irish west, but a daughter of Updown and a young man of matravers had a recent ancestor, probably a grandparent, from West Africa.
In both cases, mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted from the mother, was from northern Europe, but autosomal DNA, which comes from both parents, had 20 to 40% of ancestry similar to that of West Africa, Mende, Mandinka and Esan.
This means that West African DNA probably comes from a grandfather-and it is the first proof of genetic links between Great Britain and Africa at the beginning of the Middle Ages.
The two young people were buried as members typical of the community. DNA analysis has also shown that two parents of “Updown Girl”, which was about 11 to 13 years old at his death, are in the same cemetery: a grandmother and an aunt.
Looking at the ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in a sample of bone value of the value of matravers, which was aged 17 to 25 at his death, showed what he had eaten when the bones were formed.
“From his food, it seems that he was born and grew up in England,” said Ceiridwen Edwards, a member of the team at the University of Huddersfield, in the United Kingdom.
There is evidence of African DNA in York in Roman times, explains Edwards. However, Sayer thinks that the proportion of West African DNA among young people in cemeteries would be much lower if they were descendants of people from the time of Roman domination. “It is a grandparent, it is therefore certainly not a question of surviving the military or Roman administrators, who were several hundred years in the past,” he said.
There is also no evidence suggesting that these people were slaves, says Sayer: “These people are buried as full members of their community.”
Instead, he suggests that this concerns trading and movement of goods and people. At one point, people from West Africa had come to Great Britain, perhaps on a commercial ship, and had remained.
Sayer thinks that their arrival may have been linked to the reconquest of North Africa by the Byzantine Empire, also known as the Roman Empire Oriental, in the 6th century. This military action was taken to have access to gold from sub -Saharan Africa. “The reopening of this canal takes place at a time that would correspond a lot to the grandparents of these two people,” he said.
“This work illustrates how post-[Western] The early Roman and medieval periods were in Great Britain, “said Marina Soares Da Silva at the Francis Crick Institute in London.” The authors offer commercial roads facilitated by the rule of the Byzantine Empire in North Africa, and I think it is a valid possibility. »»
The seventh century England was certainly not a “black age” collection of small rural and isolated communities, explains Sayer. “These are dynamic communities with exchanged artifacts, and the flow of genes takes place, from West Africa and beyond.”
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