People of early medieval England had mostly north-western European heritage

Grave goods - Grave goods from Issendorf cemetery, Germany. (©Landesmuseum Hannover) - A genetic and archaeological study involving a UCL researcher has revealed the great extent of migration from continental Europe into the East of England during the early Middle Ages. In the largest early medieval ancient DNA study to date, an interdisciplinary team consisting of geneticists and archaeologists, led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, analysed over 400 individuals from ancient Britain, Ireland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. The results, published in Nature , show in detail one of the largest population transformations in the post-Roman world. Around 300 years after the Romans left Britain, the Venerable Bede wrote about the Angles and the Saxons and their migrations to the British Isles. Scholars of many disciplines, including archaeology, history, linguistics and genetics, have debated what his words might have described, and what the scale, the nature and the impact of human migration was at that time. For the last 30 years many archaeologists have favoured a view that whilst the cultural impacts of this migration were huge - profoundly changing the language and forms of objects used - the genetic impact would have been minor.