This is from the epilogue of his book "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer 2006. I don't share all the opinions that he try to explain in his work but I must to say that the books is interesting to read. Anyway I am interested to know some opinions about his topic:
Was there an Anglo-Saxon genocide?
The key historical source that ha led to the conviction that the English originated as recently as the Dark Ages is Gildas tract 'On the Ruin of Britain’. The gory embellishments of this latter-day Job have led to the entrenched view that Angles and Saxons came over from the Continent, slaughtered the Celts in England and became the ‘English’. Few of his core claims hold water.
Even Gildas’Saxon Advent is contradicted by Bede, who claims it was Anglian. There is little evidence for genocide, but it remains in schoolbooks. Genocide means the deliberate extermination of a nation. Now, if that means the death of over 50% of the people, I am certain, after studying the genetic history, that there was no genocide in Dark Ages England.
There is specific evidence of an invasion from the region of Schleswig-Holstein at the base of the Danish Peninsula, but on my estimation this amounts to only 4% of male gene types in the British Isles. This does not give enough genetic evidence for even a 10% cull (literally, a decimation), except in parts of Norfolk and the Fens, which reached about that level of intrusion.
This means was not just substantial continuity of population, but a survival of around 95% of the indigenous lines. Even the Vikings achieved a higher estimated overall level of genetic invasion. Increasingly, this lack of ‘wipeout’ is what many archaeologists are interfering from their detailed cultural and burial evidence. In Francis Pryor’s works, ‘massive war graves’, settlement dislocation and ‘knock-on’ impacts… have not been found’. Rather, there is evidence of continuity in spite of cultural change: ‘if Anglo-Saxon people and culture displaced ‘native’ practices, one would expect the latter to have vanished completely. They did not.
On of the fascinating results of this matching of source gene types from the base of the Cimbrian (Danish) Peninsula to England is the target distribution. As would be expected from Bede and all the Anglian cultural matches, including runes and cruciform brooches,
the higher rates of intrusion (9-17%) fell in Anglian regions of England. These were in Norfolk, the Fen and, to a lesser extent, north-eastern parts of Mercia and Lincoln. By contrast, Saxon England in the South could only muster the background English rate of 5% invasion; and, unlike further north, the south has no evidence for any specific genetic founding event dated to this period.
So, why did Gildas, but not Bede, tell us that Saxons committed the slaughter? As may be clear by now, I think he had his own nation’s agenda.
I would go much further that doubting Gildas on the genetic and cultural evidence. The so-called Anglo-Saxons were not even the first English nation. They did not all arrive at the same time. The Saxons, in particular, were already in residence during Roman times. The Angles were not genetically, culturally or linguistically close to the Saxons, not for that matter to Frisians. The Angles and Jutes were more Scandinavian culturally or linguistically, with clear genetic and archaeological matches to the Danish Peninsula and Sweden. They were not even our first Scandinavian visitors, nor the last.
For more and different opinions you can have a look at this:
Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration -- Weale et al. 19 (7): 1008 -- Molecular Biology and Evolution
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media...PB20063627.pdf
Thanks for your opinon in advance.