DNA analysis reveals West African ancestry in early medieval England

Two unrelated young people buried in cemeteries in England in the Early Middle Ages probably had grandparents from West Africa. How and when their relatives arrived in Britain is unknown, but the discovery implies that migrants in Anglo-Saxon times were coming from much further afield than previously thought.

After the Romans finally withdrew from Britain in AD 410, Britain was invaded and settled by Germanic Angles, Saxons and Jutes. To investigate whether people also arrived from elsewhere, Duncan Sayer at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and his colleagues have analysed ancient DNA from the bones of people buried in two 7th-century cemeteries on England’s southern coast.

One of them is in Updown in Kent, where many traded objects from around the world have been found, including pots, buckles and brooches from Frankish Gaul, and garnets in jewellery that may have come from India. The people in the cemetery were often buried with items like cookware, cutlery or combs.

The other cemetery is in Worth Matravers, Dorset, further west. The people there are buried in a Romano-British manner, with few grave goods.

The majority of those in the cemeteries had, as expected, either northern European or western British and Irish ancestry, but a girl at Updown and a young man at Worth Matravers had a recent ancestor, likely a grandparent, from West Africa.

In both cases, the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from the mother, was northern European, but the autosomal DNA, which comes from both parents equally, had 20 to 40 per cent ancestry akin to that of the present-day Yoruba, Mende, Mandinka and Esan groups from sub-Saharan West Africa.

This means the West African DNA probably comes from a grandfather – and it is the first evidence for genetic connections between Britain and Africa during the Early Middle Ages.

Both young people were buried as typical members of the community. The DNA analysis also showed that two relatives of “Updown Girl”, who was about 11 to 13 years old when she died, are in the same cemetery: a grandmother and an aunt.

Looking at the ratios of isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in a bone sample from the Worth Matravers youth, who was aged between 17 and 25 when he died, showed what he had eaten when the bones were forming.

“From his diet, it looks like he was born and raised in England,” says team member Ceiridwen Edwards at the University of Huddersfield, UK.

There is evidence for African DNA in York in the Roman period, says Edwards. However, Sayer thinks the proportion of West African DNA in the youngsters in the cemeteries would be far lower if they were descendants of people from the days of Roman rule. “This is a grandparent, so it’s definitely not about surviving Roman military or administrators, which were several hundred years in the past,” he says.

There is also no evidence to suggest that these people were slaves, says Sayer: “These individuals are being buried as fully fledged members of their community.”

Instead, he suggests, this is to do with trading and the movement of goods and people. At some point, people from West Africa had come to Britain, perhaps on a trading ship, and stayed.

Sayer thinks their arrival may have been linked to the reconquest of North Africa by the Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, in the 6th century. That military action was taken to get access to gold from sub-Saharan Africa. “The reopening of this channel is taking place at a time that would correspond very much with the grandparents of these two people,” he says.

“This work exemplifies how dynamic the post-[Western] Roman and early medieval periods were in Britain,” says Marina Soares Da Silva at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “The authors propose trading routes facilitated by the Byzantine Empire rule in North Africa, and I think that’s a valid possibility.”

Seventh-century England was certainly no “dark age” collection of small, rural, isolated communities, says Sayer. “These are dynamic communities with artefacts being traded, and gene flow taking place, all the way from West Africa and beyond.”

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