It is from my knowledge that the British people are descendants of Anglo-Saxon (German, Dutch) and the Nordics (Swedish, Norwegian) who travelled across the seas and settled in Britain between 600 A.D. and 1000 A.D.
But my question is that if the Brits' ancestors were basically settlers from those parts of mainland Europe, then what about the people who actually lived in the British Isles before the migrants arrived? Did these people exist, or do they still exist today? What is their cultural identity?
A group known to archeologists as the beaker people lived in England, Scotland and Wales, and on the continent mainly in Normandy, before 2300 BC. These people built Stonehenge and a number of similar but smaller installations. They were totally wiped out by invaders from the continent in the 990s BC, to the point where we don't even know what language they spoke. The invaders are ancestral to today's Welsh. The ancestral Scots are actually derived from settlers from Ireland. As you note, Germanic peoples invaded from the late 500s AD through 1066. So the Welsh (a word from German which simply means foreign) and Irish represent earlier settlers, but not the earliest. In fact, the Irish have legends of a people they conquered to take over Ireland. These legends have some remote connection to historical fact, probably.
Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America (Mixed media product)
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"From historical writings, ship manifests, wills, land grants, DNA testing, genealogies, and settler lists, and the widespread presence of Jews and Muslims in prominent positions in all of the original colonies, this work looks freshly at the early Ame...
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