The land of my ancestors

I've sometimes used that phrase to refer to Britain because both of my parents were immigrants from England, and we traveled back there several times when I was a child.  Despite being born in the US, I grew up in a somewhat culturally-mixed household -- tea instead of coffee, more British TV than American, and suchlike -- I even still have a trace of the accent.  So I have a stronger sense of connection than is probably the case for most Americans whose ancestors came from another country several generations ago.

There's another reason, though -- a consciousness of the tremendous depth of time during which my ancestors lived there.

According to the long-accepted traditional version of British history, during the fifth century (after the withdrawal of Roman rule), the part of the island of Britain which is now called "England" was invaded by Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who pushed out or killed off the Celtic population which had been living there during Roman times and before.  These invaders were the ancestors of the modern English people.  According to this version of things, the English have been living on the territory of England for about 1,500 years -- a length of tenure far greater than what most of today's US population can claim.  An American who can trace his ancestry to the Pilgrim settlers of 400 years ago is felt to have primordial roots in this country; but almost any Englishman could say that most of his family has lived in England for nearly four times that long.

It turns out there's more to it than that, though.  That traditional version of British history is wrong.

Recently a research team from Oxford University carried out a genetic survey of the British Isles, taking DNA samples from 10,000 volunteers across England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.  For the latter three countries, the results were as expected -- their modern populations are mostly descended from the original people who migrated there around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.  But in the case of England, the results didn't fit the accepted story of Germanic invaders displacing the natives during the post-Roman chaos.  The DNA of England looks pretty much like the DNA of the rest of the British Isles.  Genetic markers typical of northern Germany (and of Scandinavia) are found in some areas of the eastern half of England, but their limited distribution suggests that even in those areas, the Germanic invaders contributed no more than 10% to 20% of the gene pool of the present population.

The invasion certainly happened, accompanied by considerable brutality, as chroniclers of the time attest.  But there weren't enough Germanic invaders to displace the existing population.  They settled among that population as a ruling minority, and over time their language displaced the existing Celtic languages.  This would explain some of the differences between English grammar and the grammar of most other Germanic languages, differences which in some cases actually reflect the influence of Celtic grammatical features -- a mostly-illiterate population absorbing a new language from similarly-illiterate conquerors tends to learn it imperfectly, and to carry over features of their original language into the way they speak the new one.

DNA doesn't lie.  The English people of today are mostly descended from the population which has been living on that land for twelve thousand years, just as the people of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland are.

(In 1903 a 9,000-year-old skeleton was found in a cave in Somerset county in southern England.  Recently, DNA extracted from the skeleton was compared with that of modern residents of a village less than a mile away, identifying one person -- a schoolteacher -- as almost certainly a direct descendant of the ancient man whose skeleton it had been.)

This imparts a terrible irony to the vicious and sometimes murderous racism which the English have displayed toward the Welsh, Scots, and Irish during some periods of history, with nineteenth-century pedants even declaring those Celtic peoples to be inferior races who ought not to be allowed to intermarry with the English.  They were from the same ancestral stock all along.

But to return to my original point, most of my own ancestors have been living in what is now England for 12,000 years, probably largely in the same localities that my parents' families live in.  That's about as long as the ancestors of American Indians have been living in the Americas.

For anyone interested in the subject, the Oxford genetic survey and its results are described in detail in the book Saxons, Vikings, and Celts by Bryan Sykes.  On the peculiarities of the English language and the Celtic origin of some of those features, read Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter.