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DNA shows Anglo Saxon girl had West African grandparent in 650 [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-08-13
DNA tests on 7th-century remains at an "upper crust" Anglo-Saxon cemetary in Kent, England, reveal some of those buried there had far-flung genetic origins. One girl's paternal grandfather was "100% West African," writes Stephan Schiffels, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and co-author of the research, published in Antiquity.
In a parallel paper, also published in Antiquity, a team including some of the same authors revealed that another Anglo-Saxon individual—a young man buried around the same time in a rural cemetery in nearby Dorset called Worth Matravers—carried West African ancestry, likely inherited from a paternal grandfather. The finds suggest Great Britain in that era was more globally interconnected and diverse than many previously suspected.
Helena Hamerow, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford quoted by Science: "People were moving much more than we assumed … and from places we wouldn't have expected."
Modern British DNA is like a supreme pizza, bearing evidence of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and other origins (if not so much Viking or Norman, notwithstanding Daniel Defoe's famous poem on the matter). Some ancestries, though, would have been clearer to contemporaries than others: "It seems unlikely nobody knew about their ancestry, but these individuals weren't treated differently in death than anyone else," Hamerow says.
The bottom line is people moved around. They had boats and things to trade; everyone was everywhere. They lived in the wake of an empire that had stretched from Babylon to Britain and whose coins were found as far afield as Okinawa and Iceland (though probably not North America).
It's not the first evidence of far-flung medieval migration into Britain.
Those skeptical of the presence of dark-skinned people in medieval and early modern Britain may be interested in the opinions of those averse to it at the time. Including Queen Elizabeth I, displeased at the sight of so many "Blackamoors" in London.
11 July 1596 An open letter to the lord mayor of London and the aldermen and his brethren, and to all other mayors, sheriffs, etc. Her majesty, understanding that there are of late divers blackmoors brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are already here too many, considering how God hath blessed this land with great increase of people of our own nation as any country in the world, whereof many for want of service and means to set them on work fall to idleness and to great extremity. Her majesty's pleasure therefore is that those kind of people should be sent forth of the land, and for that purpose there is direction given to this bearer Edward Banes to take of those blackmoors that in this last voyage under Sir Thomas Baskerville were brought into this realm the number of ten, to be transported by him out of the realm. Wherein we require you to be aiding and assisting unto him as he shall have occasion, and thereof not to fail.
West African ancestry in seventh-century England: two individuals from Kent and Dorset [Antiquity]
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