By Nick Griffin
“Black Anglo-Saxons” are the latest multi-cult fantasy being promoted by legacy media outlets in Britain. This politically correct propaganda lie is based on a claim by woke archeologists that two people buried in early medieval England had African ancestry.
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Even the supposedly right-wing Daily Mail ran the story under the headline “The Medieval Brits With West African Ancestry: Bodies Buried in 7th-Century England Show Britain Was More Diverse in the Middle Ages Than We Thought.” The report, published Aug. 13, hailed it as “the discovery that rewrites British history.”
“Archeologists made the discovery after analyzing DNA from a girl who had been buried in Kent and a young man laid to rest in Dorset, both in southern England.
“Both had recent ancestors, likely grandparents, from West Africa, the experts said.
“And, in both cases, the individuals had been laid to rest as typical members of the local community—suggesting they were valued by the societies in which they lived.”
The widely repeated claims were first made in Antiquity journal, which analyzed DNA from burials dating to around A.D. 650. The study alleged that each individual had approximately 25-33% sub-Saharan African ancestry, likely inherited from a paternal grandparent from modern southern Nigeria or similar West African groups.
This was used to bolster the widely promoted but baseless claim that “Britain has always been multi-cultural and mixed race.”
This, however, was rapidly debunked by historians, geneticists, and commentators, who note that the findings are overstated for ideological reasons and do not alter the view of Anglo-Saxon England as overwhelmingly northern European in descent.
Critics note that the sample size is tiny—two outliers among hundreds of sequenced remains and thousands more from the era showing overwhelmingly northern European ancestry—making them rare anomalies rather than representative of the broader population.
They further point out that partial African ancestry does not equate to being “black,” especially since mitochondrial DNA indicates that both individuals had northern European maternal lines, suggesting that the isolated African input likely came from male migrants or slaves via Byzantine or Frankish trade networks.
Critics of the media sensationalism have also pointed to the blatant deception involved in the earlier claim that Cheddar Man, a Mesolithic individual from around 9100 B.C. found in Somerset, southwest England, was of black African descent.
This report, which led to widespread claims that “the ancient Britons were black Africans,” stemmed from a 2018 study by University College London and the Natural History Museum. Its authors said that DNA evidence of pigmentation genes showed Cheddar Man had dark skin, likely similar to modern sub-Saharan Africans, based on pigmentation genes. This was widely reported by outlets like The Guardian and the BBC.
Although this has since made its way into the education system, it has been debunked as misleading by geneticists and historians. The dark skin attributed to Cheddar Man reflects pigmentation typical of pre-agricultural Europeans, not African ancestry. His genome aligns closely with Western hunter-gatherer populations. While they had blue eyes, they did carry genes for darker skin, but these are quite distinct from sub-Saharan African genetic profiles, just as Greeks or Italians can have darker skin tones without being deemed “Negroes.”
Critics, including geneticist David Reich, argue that equating Cheddar Man’s pigmentation with “black African” ancestry is a misinterpretation, as his ancestry was entirely European, with absolutely no evidence of sub-Saharan genetic markers.
Darker skin was a natural feature of early European populations, shaped by evolution and environment, not recent African origins. Skin color is a polygenic trait, controlled by multiple genes like SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, which affect melanin production.
Darker skin was the original state for humans, useful even in Europe to protect against sunburn and perhaps to be less visible to hunted animals. The hunter-gatherer diet, rich in fish and game, provided enough vitamin D, so lighter skin wasn’t needed.
Genetic analysis of ancient DNA from European hunter-gatherers, like Cheddar Man and others from Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary, shows they lacked light-skin mutations. They did have darker skin, not because they were African but because it helped them survive in the European environment in which their ancestors had lived for tens of thousands of years.
Mutations in these genes, which lighten skin by reducing melanin, are common in modern Europeans. They arose around 6,000 to 12,000 years ago to help early farmers absorb more vitamin D in low-sunlight northern regions.
Critics of the “ancient Britons were black Africans” fantasy point out, too, that pigmentation predictions—which are based on genes such as SLC24A5, SLC45A2, and TYR—have uncertainties. The models used might overestimate darkness, possibly making Cheddar Man more like a light tan Mediterranean or Native American in appearance.
The current consensus among geneticists is that the skin tone of Mesolithic Europeans was likely similar to or slightly darker than modern Mediterranean populations, such as those from southern Italy, Greece, or North Africa, who often have olive to light-brown skin.
Of course, such science-based explanations make no difference to the leftists, who insist on pushing the African line for ideological reasons, part of their much broader attack on “whiteness.”
This reminds one of the deluded Afrocentrists who claim again and again that Cleopatra was a black African woman, as depicted in a 2023 Netflix docudrama and also in many modern-day illustrations.
In fact, Cleopatra was of Greek-Macedonian lineage, descended from Ptolemy I, a general of Alexander the Great. Historical records, including coins, busts, and ancient texts from sources like Plutarch, confirm her Macedonian-Greek heritage. Her mother’s family had ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years, intermarrying only with Greek and possibly local Egyptian elites, not populations from sub-Saharan Africa.
Facts, however, have never been permitted to interfere with cultural Marxist propaganda.
