First Britons were black

Why does it matter if Cheddar man was black, white green or yellow?
It does matter if you are interested in human evolution.

And, if you were trying to explain her origins to Jean!

Callistemon I think "Jean" might be selectively deaf.

None so deaf as those who do not want to hear.

I can answer one question. Yes, there was a land bridge between what is now Siberia and Alaska. Anthropologists reckon people arrived on the American continent from Asia.

Oh, yes of course.
They would have travelled that way.

According to Adam Rutherford in his book "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes" all Europeans are descended from everyone who was alive round about the year 900AD who has living descendants today. And all humans are descended from everyone who was alive round about the year 3000BC who has living descendants today.
I confess I can't get my head round this idea completely but bow to Adam's better knowledge of the subject. By his logic, if one of us is descended from Cheddar man than we all are.

In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that all Europeans are descended from exactly the same people

All Europeans are said to have Charlemagne in their ancestral tree.

We could all post that on the other thread asking if we have any famous relatives!

I've been on a video call and have lost the links I found. (sorry)

This one is quite interesting, including information about the Piltdown Man fraud:

www.gesundheitsindustrie-bw.de/en/article/news/a-heidelberg-man-of-african-origin

It also gives a flavour about how anthropologists, geneticists and social scientists have clashed on the whole issue of the origin of homo sapiens.

Callistemon

^In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that all Europeans are descended from exactly the same people^

All Europeans are said to have Charlemagne in their ancestral tree.

I wouldn't mind betting Charlemagne had a few offspring he didn't acknowledge too.

One of my distant relatives claims that one of our family lines goes back to the Northumbrian royal family, but I haven't a clue whether it's true and I'm highly sceptical.

It's true. It has to be. But it's quite another thing to prove the link and being able to follow it back.

When Danny Dyer was found to be descended from Edward III on "Who do you think you are?" it wasn't the fact of the descent that was interesting, it was the way it had been shown to be so. He found out who his ancestors were right back to the royal line. While all of us are similarly descended from royalty we can't all show how it came about.

We all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents etc. By the time you get back to about the year 1500 you have about a million ancestors in the same generation. The population of Scotland in 1500 was about a million people. So I like to think I'm related to everyone in Scotland

I know it doesn't work like that but its a nice thought.

We're a' Jock Tamson's bairns.

growstuff

foxie No, it shouldn't matter, although if you've read some of the comments on another thread, it obviously does to some people who phone radio programmes.

I think it's interesting from an academic point of view. I also think that anybody who claims any legitimacy for ethnic Englishness needs to have a rethink.

"Following on from the thread about David Lammy and the racist phone call he dealt with, I found this. "
This is the first line of the opening thread and yes, I've read that too. I honestly don't believe that being drawn into a discussion about skin colour is helpful with people like Jean, It can be seen as to some extent "validating" skin colour as a "measure of something" and clearly it's not. As ethnicity is self ascribed we can all call ourselves what we want, so her protestations about what makes someone English is totally irrelevant. It's the context of this thread that I find uncomfortable not the History of mankind.

foxie I understand where you're coming from on this issue and think there's a serious discussion to be had, although I don't think "Chat" is the place to do it.

Briefly, I'd like to think it would be better to ignore people like "Jean", but unfortunately I don't believe she's that unusual. I've seen too many incidences of a belief that somehow the "original" English (British) were white and that "others" are coming in and challenging the traditional ways of life (whatever they are). I seriously think that beliefs such as those should be challenged because they're based on myths and can very easily become mainstream. They use pseudoscience to justify and support their views, which is why real science must be used to debunk the myths.

Alegrias1

We all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents etc. By the time you get back to about the year 1500 you have about a million ancestors in the same generation. The population of Scotland in 1500 was about a million people. So I like to think I'm related to everyone in Scotland

I know it doesn't work like that but its a nice thought.

We're a' Jock Tamson's bairns.

It doesn't quite work like that because somewhere along the way there were:

a) incomers
b) "kissing cousins"

I suspect Jean is one of those people who thinks she is superior in all sorts of ways though, the fact she kept going on about being ENGLISH made my teeth itch

The original English were mainly Anglo-Saxons, migrants and invaders from several Germanic tribes - did anyone tell Jean that?

Gagajo, I remember at the time Cheddar Gorge Man’s direct local descendant was discovered, he joked that his wife had always said he was a bit of a cave man.?

What was interesting that the researchers asked local people whose grandparents had also lived in the area, to take DNA tests, since moving away from where you were brought up used to be much less common that it is now.

Since I had GGparents in near-coastal areas of Devon and Suffolk, I’ve often wondered whether there’s a bit of washed-up Armada sailor there somewhere, since a dd has quite an olive-y skin, quite unlike anyone else in the family.

Callistemon

The original English were mainly Anglo-Saxons, migrants and invaders from several Germanic tribes - did anyone tell Jean that?

England as a name only exists because medieval writers referred to the land of the Angles. The land which is geographically England was inhabited for thousands of years by people other than English.

I don't think it matters too much what anybody says to the "Jeans" of this world because she's too arrogant to admit she's wrong. I still think it's important that others don't fall down some rabbit hole after her.

Witzend You have hundreds of thousands of ancestors who were alive at the time of the Armada. It's possible (in fact quite probable) that just one of them was from outside the area, maybe from another country.

It was Bede who first articulated the idea of the English people. In 732, he wrote his 'History of the English Church and People', in which he treated the inhabitants of lowland Britain, whether Saxons, Jutes or Angles, as one English nation.

He traces the name back to a tale from the 590s. The story goes that Pope Gregory the Great saw some fair-haired and fair-skinned slaves in a slave market in Italy, and was told that they were Angles. 'Not Angles but angels,' he replied.

It was a lovely pun, and somehow created an idea, which one senses in Bede, that the English were a chosen race.

Since then, the English have always been the English because Bede said so.

Michael Wood
(Tall, blond and blue-eyed)

No one has mentioned Vikings yet, much of Scotland, Northern and Eastern England was Viking controlled before the Norman Conquest. The Normans were also Viking ancestry so a large part of our genome is Scandinavian in origin, Western England and Wales predominantly Celtic of French origin.

The Royal Family has a very dodgy ancestry, related to pretty much every despot, including Ghengis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Kaiser Wilhelm not to mention all our homebred nasties.

Alegrias1

We all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents etc. By the time you get back to about the year 1500 you have about a million ancestors in the same generation. The population of Scotland in 1500 was about a million people. So I like to think I'm related to everyone in Scotland

I know it doesn't work like that but its a nice thought.

We're a' Jock Tamson's bairns.

But it does work like that. )f the million people in Scotland in 1500 some would not have living descendants today. So the chances of you being related to everyone in Scotland are extremely high. You'd have to go back few hundred years to be sure, to around 900AD.

No, growstuff is right, it really doesn't work like that...

There have been many waves of immigration into Scotland since 1500, even more since 900. So there are Scots today who aren't descended from those million Scots in 1500. So I'm not related to all of them.

I was only making a light hearted comment but I'm starting to be sorry I did.

According to our ancestral DNA tests, both my and dh’s direct paternal ancestor (going back about 25,000 years) was also ‘father’ to about 45% of native Europeans. So he was evidently a very busy chap.
Our maternal dittos were quite different though. Mine was supposed to have been present in northern Greece 45,000 years ago, his in SW France a mere 20,000 or so.

These tests were done around 20 years ago now, and I’m sure the science will have moved on a lot since then so I’m not saying these results still stand. At the time there were solid academic credentials for the org. providing the tests, though.

Obviously numbers of humans would have been tiny compared to anything many thousands of years later.