Clues to ancient invasion in DNA

[gilmore]

What I find interesting about this discussion is how fragile and easily displaced cultures and languages are.

It was Norman French culture, language, and technology that heavily impacted and transformed Anglo-Saxon culture, moreso than numbers of living invaders physically occupying the countryside. Similarly, Anglo-Saxon languages, dialects and culture pushed Celtic culture to the Fringe. Before that, Celtic culture and language much wiped out the Pictish way of life in Scotland and whatever preceded it in the rest of Britain, so much so that we know comparatively little about them.

And the prior cultures were displaced so throughly that their descendants often thought---and still think--- of the carriers of the "invading" culture as their biological ancestors, while consigning their own genetic ancestry to a kind of pre-civilized Otherness that they don't identify with.

We now know from genetics that largely the same group of people and their descendants have inhabited the British Isles since the end of the last Ice Age, when we humans went north from the refugium on the Iberian peninsula. We may have changed our languages and our technologies, but we can't change our DNA.

How quickly and thoroughly these changes can occur is shown in this news story http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/wo...2&pagewanted=1 about the generational divide in Cambodia between those who lived through the Khmer Rouge genocide and younger people who know little about it, and generally don't want to know. With some 70% of Cambodians under the age of 30, it seems that this part of Cambodian history is being lost to the collective memory.