Latest / Thinking Class / #054 - Tom Rowsell - An 8,000 Year Story: Exploring The Genetic Histories & Identities Of The British Peoples

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#054 - Tom Rowsell - An 8,000 Year Story: Exploring The Genetic Histories & Identities Of The British Peoples · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Tom Rousell.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Tom is a historian and an independent filmmaker, director and editor, known for From Ruins to Ruins, released in 2014, and his YouTube channel Survive the Jive, which includes documentary films about pagan religion and ancient European cultures.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Tom and I delve into the genetic ancestry of the British peoples and how genetic studies reveal the stability of Northwestern European ancestry over time, the significance of ancient monuments in Britain, and national myths such as those surrounding King Arthur, the impact of Christianity on Germanic cultures and the evolving narratives that shape British identity, the complex history of Christianity spread in Europe, particularly in the British Isles, the nuances of invasions and alliances among Celtic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, and why modern pro-immigration narratives in an era of mass immigration obscure Britain's development in the context of historical migrations and ancestry and much, much more.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Tom is an impressive figure.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: He knows this subject inside out, keeps up to date with all the latest research, and he has built an exceedingly popular YouTube channel on the genetic, cultural, and religious histories of the peoples of Britain and beyond.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is the first part in what is turning out to be an unintended series exploring the history of the British peoples, their genetics, their cultures, their values, and the island's history.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: There are some great guests to follow this episode, so as ever, stay tuned and let's grow the show together.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Press follow, subscribe, share on whichever platform you watch or listen to Thinking Class on.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: And enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Tom Rousell, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me here, John.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Tom, I've been looking forward to the discussion.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone with a rich background, and you've certainly got one of those, is someone who has been a journalist.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: You've worked for the World Health Organization of all places, very topical, I think, in this political climate.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: You've worked for NGOs that have supported the rights of indigenous peoples around the world.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you're also a filmmaker, you're a historian of the religious, genetic, and folk histories of European peoples.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And recording this from Edinburgh, I also know you have some pretty august ancestors, as it were.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's a monument to them on top of Carlton Hill in Edinburgh, which is where I record this from, the the Stuarts.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: So quite quite the background.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um for for those of you who don't know Tom, and many of you may do because he has a big YouTube footprint, is he has a channel called Survive the Jive.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose within that you can find all sorts of things.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can find you talking about and traveling around the green and pleasant land that is Britain.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: You can see you talking about the Vikings while standing next to the Bosphorus in in Turkey and how they've used their great strength to push boats over bridges.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: And you can also find Tom boxing with other YouTubers at nightfall.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's got something for everyone.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: But as you can imagine, dear listener, I think the the question of genetics likely draws Tom some opprobrium from those who'd prefer not to believe that the English and British peoples are distinct in some way, um, or that there are even genetic differences amongst people.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And Tom, your channel, I think, seems to be motivated about fighting the cultural amnesia that seems to have swept over the peoples of of the country, and perhaps more broadly in Europe, and also this culture of standardization, homogenization, and moving people around and acting as they were all the same.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: What is it that saw you leave behind your job in science communications at WHO and the work you're doing at NGOs to focus on survive the drive and to to to uh bring all of this information to people uh to at a wider audience?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was mostly just because it took off and it was uh financially viable for me to do this as my uh main in job, basically.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: I had already had like even like uh 10 years ago in 2013 when I uh I was offered um paid PhD position in uh in Cambridge at Angia Ruskin, and um I turned it down because I had this feeling that I ought to be doing something a bit more uh I mean I don't want to get stuck into an academic sort of rut that like studying like something uh that no one cares about and putting it like you know, getting getting to contribute to a journal that no one will read, and that'll be my life's work.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I thought because my previous degree in communications, I knew ways of reaching, I knew I understood how to use social media, I'd manage social media for large companies, I've worked in social media startups in Silicon Valley, so it's like I knew how to make history much more popular than just what what would academics can.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I would I was kind of wanted to be an academic, but at the same time I thought I could probably do a bit uh something a bit more worthwhile in terms of like with my the skills I'd acquired.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh then I the YouTube channel at that time in 2013, Survivor Drive was still like a hobby thing, it wasn't a big deal.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh my first sort of idea then in 2013 was to make a film from Ruins to Ruins, which was not intended to be anything to do with Survive the Drive, it wasn't even meant to be presented by me, it was meant to be presented by uh a Channel 4 uh documentary presenter, uh Richard Rudgley.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it was going to be a BBC production, and I was in talks with BBC over it.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was in talks with Dan Snow's uh organization for it uh uh for a while.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then it fell through, and I was advised by a friend at the BBC.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: He said, why don't you just make it yourself?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because you've got this, you know how.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, and I actually at the time my video production skills weren't as good as they are now, but I knew a guy, professional video producer, was working during the Olympics in 2012 for uh produced like some of the videos for that.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um anyway, he worked with me on the proje on the film from Ruins to Ruins about the significance of the Anglo-Saxons to modern British identity.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the film, I had to present it myself because I couldn't, you know, have didn't have the budget to pay uh uh talent for it.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the film did really pretty well.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I put it on pay-per-view and I got some I got the money back for that, you know, spent on it.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: But then after that, people were like wanting more from me, and I thought I and like people started interviewing me about it, and then like I just sort of thought I'll just use the Survivor Jive channel, chuck stuff on there.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I just started putting more on it, and it'd been I had it for a while, uh, since it'd been like since 2009, but it got bigger and bigger, and then by like 2019, I was able to quit my day job, so to speak.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh I'm sure it's a much more fascinating day job that you've got now.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: I I'd like to get into the the English and I suppose more broadly the British peoples and who they are, and I think it's fair to say that your channel rails a little bit against uh this notion that uh history started after World War II, which is most people pretty much know our history from that point, but everything before that it's a compression of a few famous kings and queens from the Tudor period and perhaps William the Conqueror.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, with regards to who we are, the the founding myths of the country, uh pagan as well as Christian, people pretty much don't really understand.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: But you do all sorts within your channel, you get out to the the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and you explore the the past folk ways of the peoples of this these British Isles.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so perhaps we go back not necessarily to the beginning, but why don't we go back to some of those people that are the distant ancestors of the the British peoples today?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: So apparently with there is a genetic trace that you can go back to 8,000 years and that of the people have been populating these isles.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think most people, if they walk past a Stone Age or a Bronze Age monument, they just see it as a a bunch of rocks.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: But where where can we find traces of those early people who are the ancestors of the British peoples and and what is the significance of that today?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um all European people are a mixture of sort of you can say either four peoples or two peoples, but because there was one mixing event of two peoples who were comprised of two peoples each themselves, if you know what I mean.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: So one is a um an Eastern European group, uh, which brought Indo-European languages uh in the late Neolithic, uh early Bronze Age, which are the languages that most Europeans speak today, and in fact, most people in the most widespread language family in the world.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the other are the pre-Indo-European peoples of Neolithic, the late Stone Age Europe, um, who they mixed with uh as they expanded into Western Europe.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh these are the people who are responsible for building the stone circles and Neolithic stone tombs you find all around Western Europe.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um all Europeans descend from all these different groups.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um the Neolithic farmers, that these people were themselves a mixture of Anatolian farmers who migrated into Europe and mixed with the indigenous Western European hunter-gatherers.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um they uh the difference between Northern Europe and South South Europe is that the southern Europeans have more ancestry from the farmers, and the northern Europeans have more ancestry from indigenous hunter-gatherers and the Indo-Europeans.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: The um the stone monuments that you can see all over England are extremely enigmatic and an important part of our identity because they're such a prominent part of the landscape.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Go on Dartmoor, go on go in Cumbria in the Lake District, or go to the Wiltshire Plain, and you'll see fantastic monuments that are up to 5,000 years old.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, those people uh contribute that race rather, not necessarily the actual people who built those stones, but that Neolithic race of Western European or the farmers of Neolithic Europe, the late Stone Age Europe, um, contribute almost half of the ancestry of uh British people, and the other half would come from the Indo-European people.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the uh in Southern Europe, there is more like some something more like 75% from the far the Neolithic farmers and 25% from the Indo-Europeans.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: These these enigmatic stone uh monuments that you you mentioned.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I got my first feeling of that uh uh enigmatic nature of them when in the lockdowns, the first lockdown, I was living in London.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: As it hit, I decided to uh escape back to my um my uh ancestral home of Northumberland and decided I wasn't going back to London.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's far too lovely around here, never really appreciated it.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I ended up setting up shop in a small village called Rothbury, which I think has uh an Anglo-Saxon origin to its name, but it's been around much longer.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it it I found myself falling in love with all of these little parts of history which showed just how long people had been populating what seemed like a small little inconsequential village.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: So in the in the in the church, that stands that has been standing there since the the 600s, there's an Anglo-Saxon font in there with like various scenes from the Bible chiseled into it.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: But then just up the hill, because it's hemmed in by the Coke Valley, there's a few funerary Neolithic burial cairns, which I didn't know what they were at first, I just knew they were around.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: I knew they were something stone agey, but I didn't really know what it was.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then looked into it and thought, wow, so these people were either using them as you know ritualistic um uh points.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: They also had standing stones, which I I I still don't know the full backgrounds of them.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you can enlighten me, but you know, these standing stones were used to uh to be able to traverse the um the landscape, but they there's something uh deeply geometrical about them and very precise about their location, despite there being none of our you know automatic calculations uh that we have today.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then surrounded by hill forts, um and just knowing that there were people making a living uh and and and surviving and perhaps even thriving in these places which you think are just small little sleepy Northumbrian villages, was quite quite humbling to me.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it sent me on a bit of a a journey um down the exploration of the history.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that helped me feel a lot more rooted as a person, actually, um, instead of just thinking we just arrived on the spot.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, what what what are some of these things that we let's let's let's dig into Hill Forts?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: What are Hill Forts about?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I can say in before I just talk about Hill Forts specifically that the British um public have like their engagement with history is naturally colored by the landscape, and um the the parts of the landscape that uh have the historical aspects of the landscape that survive are not random because that it depends on what they're made of and and so on.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh therefore we have um a bias towards certain periods because those periods loom large in the landscape.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: The Neolithic world, we most of it would have been, you know, some fantastic structures made of mud and wood, all gone.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: We don't even know what they would have been, mostly all gone.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: We sometimes find evidence of it uh archaeologically, but the stone structures they made survive very well in parts of Britain where they haven't been turned, the stone hasn't been reused.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: In the eastern parts of Britain, generally there's fewer Neolithic monuments because later in periods of history where that there was less stone around, so any stone they could get they'd take.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look up on the moors and places where it were more less accessible, then you often find loads of Neolithic monuments.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then the period after that of the Bronze Age, we don't actually have well the beside the only thing that like stays in the landscape from the entire Bronze Age is the round barrows, which I find fascinating, but most people aren't as interested in because it's literally just a round lump of mud or earth that's raised up.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I find that very interesting because those are first Indo-European ancestors in the island.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: The Iron Age, the thing that looms lies on the landscape uh from the you know, the Celtic period in the first millennium BC is these hill forts, and there's literally thousands of them across Britain and Ireland, uh, thousands in Britain.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what they are exactly has been is if well, no one doubts that they have military purposes because they're military fortifications, but it's also certain that they weren't just for military fortications, they're sort of like the Iron Age equivalent of a castle, and they often developed into townships, so they became sort of trading centers and whatnot as well.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: But they were sometimes placed on the strategically military placed in a way because they're up high, but also they're sometimes not very well placed because they can be far from water sources and awkward in that defense, awkward to defend in some places as well.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: But they're also positioned sometimes on the middle of important trade routes or rather cattle-driving routes, like such as the Ridgeway.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that indicates that they were maybe meant to they were intended to disrupt a previous cultural system of the Bronze Age, which depended on the herding of cattle across these distances, and maybe they were ways of extracting wealth from farmers and you know, tech like you can imagine a bit like the Mott and Baileys of the Normans were built up around the Anglo-Saxons uh to control the Anglo-Saxons.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps the incoming Celts of the Iron Age used these hill forts as a way to subjugate the native population.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's hard to say, it's it's more speculative.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: But in the popular imagination, these hill forts are all kinds of things.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: In Ireland, they're often associated with the fairies, and in Britain, I can't a lot of the hill forts have local folklore associating them with King Arthur.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone wants to imagine that this hill fort is Camelot, this one here is where Camelot was.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I think there's several where locals claim the Camelot, but um, yeah, like they have and same with the stone circles, very often you have folklore around them from connecting them to Merlin or to Christian mythology where they say, Oh, the devil threw these stones here, or more often, these stones used to be women who uh didn't go to mass and say their prayers, and so they were turned into stone as a punishment.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, because they've always been there for thousands and thousands of years, these ancient monuments have developed new histories, new I, you know, new um meanings in the popular imagination of the British people.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And they continue to do so even now, with Stonehenge being very popular, with all kinds of hippies who go there and claim that it's on a ley line or that it's the aliens and put it there, or I don't know, whatever stuff they make up, but it's all you know an ongoing process of uh of the British people incorporating the landscape into their imaginations, and the landscape is always part of who British people are.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: So when British people change, they tend to try and change the way they interpret the landscape too.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're bringing up King Arthur there, recording this in Edinburgh.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: For anyone who knows Edinburgh, there's a big hulking former Voltano calls Arthur's Seat that overlooks the city.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And what I always find remarkable, and you'll be able to shed some light on this, Tom, is that the legend of King Arthur, or perhaps the story of King Arthur, how far it was able to travel, given its origins in you know the southwest of the islands, and yet here it is being the the Arthurian main being attached to uh an old volcano looking over the city of Edinburgh.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: How is it that in a world without mass communication and even in some respects uh you know one overarching sovereign and way of disseminating information and myths that that these things managed to almost leach into the soil and stay with us through the generations?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, there are some many there are many people who argue that King Arthur was a real person who lived uh in the the dark ages at the fall, at the time of the fall of Rome and fought against the Anglo-Saxons.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's some evidence that some people, there are a few candidates of people who could be Arthur.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's rather besides the point, because the actual Arthurian romantic phenomenon uh is a thousand years later in the High Middle Ages.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not talking about the 400s, you're talking about the 1400s.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what Arthur is.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: He is a he's like the Star Wars of the time.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And most of the really important like literature or Arthurian literature was being written in France, and it's French literature, and it's in the style of the romantic or European romance, which is the start of the novel, and in and like it's very influential on the entire European literary tradition.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is very different to say earlier forms of literature uh that were or or like storytelling that were enjoyed in the Germanic world, that you know, which could be seen in the examples of the Icelandic sagas or in Anglo-Saxon poems like Beowulf.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Those are completely different styles of literature.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: And Ice in Iceland they got replaced by romantic literature of the French type as well.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: So this style of literature became the fashion all the way, all around Europe.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's mostly of French origin, but you know, there's Arthurian literature written in Britain, there's Arthurian literature written in Germany.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and sometimes they add bits in, like you can know, like fanfic or whatever.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's kind of like that.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone thought thought King Arthur was a really cool story, and it was like by no means limited to Britain.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like people, I'm sure all over Europe were reading about King Arthur.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure they were reading about him in Russia and his adventures.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and he was an example of an ideal, a Christian ideal on the high Middle Ages.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: And often there's morality tales where they sort of give examples of someone not being very Christian, and then the problem is solved by being more Christian, something like that.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: So just like Hollywood today, it's like um you could think of Hollywood as being the center and France being its equivalent in the Middle Ages.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter if the Hollywood film is set in Africa, it's still a Hollywood film.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, King Arthur was set in Britain, but I mean, according to some of the author in text, he was the king of Scandinavia as well as Britain.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's complete nonsense.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's this is not real, it doesn't pertain to the reality of of the real Arthur, if there ever was a real Arthur.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: So of course, it's no surprise that in Scotland they were naming things after Arthur.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like he was the, you know, it was it was Superman, Spider Man, I don't know, whatever the equivalent is now, but everyone loved him.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: We've touched on a few of these these myths that have been uh or or or in this.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Case historical reality, uh, whichever way we're going to fall on that that, but that we touched on the myths of the the British Isles.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, before we delve into Christianity and how that changed the culture, the psyche of the British peoples, what what were the the founding myths, I suppose, of the English in particular?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so those derived from the Anglo-Saxons and perhaps even the Vikings, we could check into the mix.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is an interesting question because it sort of got disrupted.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Initially, the Anglo-Saxon founding myth, as described by the Venerable Bede uh in the um eighth century, uh pertains what we can tell now from archaeology and genetics, exactly to the reality of their history.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: They remembered in the eighth century the factual events of their founding migration in the fifth century, and they built a mythos on that.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um it had been somewhat disrupted by the process of Christianization because, well, Beeds, who wrote it down for us, has built it into a Christian narrative.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a little bit difficult for them to do that because already when the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the fifth century they were uh pagans, and so they the mythic progenitors of their race, the Hengiston Horsa, the sons of the you know, the sons or grandsons of the top god Woden, were said to be among the early migrants, or even they are the first English people on in Britain.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas we know from like in Holland and other parts where they refer to that, they these are actually gods, not people.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so they but they came legendary ancestors integrated into the settlement process where the gods participated in the colonization of Britain and legitimate.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Bead obviously can't go for that because he's Christian, but he also has a problem that he um is defining the English identity in opposition to the identities of the pre previous inhabitants of Britain who were Christian.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yet he is also wanting to construct an English identity as Christian in opposition to paganism uh of people on the continent, like other Germanic people on the continent were still pagan.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: So he was precariously building the ecclesia through the ecclesiastical history of the English people this idea of the English as simultaneously being not at all like the Christian inhabitants of England who were Celtic, but also being Christian.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: And um, he tries to dismiss some of the uh ideas of like uh the earlier Christians having miscalculated Easter and things like that as being uh you know significant.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that that builds into a mythos that something called a Celtic church existed, which it never did.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the uh the the reality is that they were a pagan people who became Christian, uh not entirely because of the influence of Celts.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly in your your part of the world, the Northumbrians were Christianized by Gaels from Ireland, Scotland, uh, or from Iona specifically.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and as a result, the Anglo-Saxon culture of the Northumbrians was extremely influential on the entire Celtic world, where whereby people call them Celtic knots.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this medieval artwork, they call it Celtic.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: It comes from Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pagan Germanic form of art that were pagan Anglo-Saxons brought to Britain.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: But then when in the process of Irish people Christianizing the Northumbrians, this this style of pagan Germanic art became definitive of Christianity and Christian art in medieval British Isles, not only among Germanic people like the Northumbrians, but also the Celtic people such as the Picts, the uh the Britons, and the Gaels.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: So um, yeah, the English founding myth was therefore this complicated mix of it was simple, it had to be, it couldn't be entirely based on Christianity because it had to be also in opposition to other Christian people.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it had to be focused on its unique Germanicness, but also it's not like Germanic continental.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be a new thing.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: And within um, you know, as a result of Bede writing that book, I think directly his his political propaganda there by of defining this idea of Englishness led into the actual formation of an English state, which was also contributed to by the invasion of the Vikings and the necessity of the consolidation of English powers to fight against them.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the that mythos had you know built up over the first 500 years of England's history, was again disrupted by the Norman invasion.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: And after the Norman times, like English people had much more interest in King Arthur and Arthurian romance than they did in their own previous heroes that they used to celebrate, like Beowulf and Ingeld, and uh people like all you know real Germanic heroes.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because uh, but then later on, especially after the Reformation, Anglo-Saxoness becomes again a really big important part of Englishness because um many of the like Protestant reformers saw the Anglo-Saxon past as a period of more devout non-Roman Christianity, which it wasn't, it was Roman Catholic as well.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: But they imagined it as being a period of more freedom for the for the common man uh without the Norman yoke.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is when the expression Norman yoke was developed, and um this uh idea that there was a more liberal time in the Anglo-Saxons was very popular with uh with the rising um sort of not middle class, but like the equivalent of a middle class in uh in parts of eastern England and uh that this sort of momentum led up to the Civil War.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: But uh ever since then, of course, we've we've as you know included Anglo-Saxons as part of our history as we originally did, uh, until the 21st century when people, oh no, and 20th century, sorry, early 20th century, especially, some people started to question whether we were really Anglo-Saxons at all and whether it was all just a mistake and Bede was making it up.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: And um, many people also, because of the success of the romantic revival of Celticness in the 19th century, which kind of just made up this completely non-existent sort of idea of a Celtic identity that never that never had never existed.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that was very attractive and mystical and still looms large in the British imagination, like this, the Celtic, misty like regions of the West Country and parts of Scotland are more seem to be more earthy and more even more pagan than the East, which in the complete reverse is the truth.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like the last part to be pagan in the British Isles is the Isle of Wight, uh, not the the West Country or Scotland.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: But um this uh this uh these all feature within our identity now, English identity, has all these different currents feeding into it, but they're competitive they're competing with each other.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: But modern genetics has reaffirmed the original narrative that Bede presented, and we certainly and which many you know Victorian scholars were well aware of, and they said we have an Anglo-Saxon type, and they sometimes use such uh racial um definitions to justify oppressing Scottish people, for example, in the the Highland clearances, they would say that you know that some people from Edinburgh, where you live now, would say that they were Anglo-Saxon.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: So people who would describe themselves as belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race in in Lower Scotland, whereas they would say the Highlanders were of an inferior racial type, destined to be um, you know, subjugated by the superior Anglo-Saxon type, which meant people from Lowland Scotland.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, now that is not justified by the genetics, but what is justified by the genetics is that the Anglo-Saxon invasion did occur, and the English people are distinct from other parts of the British Isles by having a greater degree of ancestry from continental North Europeans.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Dear classmate John here, this isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button.
• 30:00
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• 30:08
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• 30:11
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• 30:27
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• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: You've spoken a lot about the influence, I suppose, of Christianity on the Germanic peoples, but I also know, and it's something that I read about recently through, I think it was also old Spengler, who's talking about the through the rise of the West, as it were, which is based upon uh Christianity when it became the foundation of that civilization and the decline of it was having lost sight of that.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: He he said in that that we often think that Europe and northern Europe was Christianized, but actually Christianity was Germanized, and I think you've you've done some films that that make that exact point, which is, and perhaps you can unpack it for us, how did the peoples of the northwestern Europe, very different from those in um in I suppose the Middle East, uh, end up taking on the Hebrew god, as it were?
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's a popular narrative, I mean, of the Germanization of Christianity, which is based on a book uh that came out in 1990 by JC Russell.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I have no doubt that there are survivals of Germanic culture in the Germanic countries after they became Christian.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's absolutely certain because you see, in the law code specifically, that it it that the law, the laws in early Christian Sweden, in early Christian Germany, even among the Lombards in Italy and in England, Anglo-Saxon England, they still contained uh well, things that were trying to cope with the pre-existing culture of the Germanic peoples, which didn't just go away when they became Christian.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: They remained Germanic peoples, with like, for example, duties of revenge.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And they didn't just say, now you're Christian, you're not allowed to take revenge on people.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they had complicated ways of dealing with revenge and trying to discourage people from killing each other in revenge, for which is what Germanic people are supposed to do.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: But um that I think the book goes too far where it claims that Christianity itself in Europe has been changed somehow by Germanic people.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's true.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the things that like some people say, like, oh, it became a militant religion.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, it was already a militant religion because first off, the Jews in the Old Testament are extremely violent.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Secondly, it was the religion of the Roman Empire, and uh the Romans weren't exactly pacifists, they were extremely brutal people.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it didn't need it, it was already, by the time it reached the Germanic people, it was already, it was already militarized.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Constantine said, make of me, you know, he saw that make me as use me as a weapon or whatever, use me as a sword.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he saw the cross in the sky, or the this vision of Christianity for Rome, the Roman Empire.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: So if it hadn't have been militarized, it wouldn't have even reached the Germanic people, probably, in the first place.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I think that they exaggerate that.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: But how did it spread across Northwest Europe?
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is your question.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, the Romans brought it to Britain first, and there's a sort of a sort of like narrative which overlooks the nuances of the reality, where it says Romans brought it to Northwest Europe and it's been there ever since.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of, but actually not really, because after the Romans left, there wasn't a great deal of, I don't think Christianity was doing great in Britain.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: There were still some pockets of Celtic paganism, uh, even at the time the Romans left.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but Wales, the parts of Britain that really stayed very Christian are the parts where the Romans didn't go.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, or the British Isles rather.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, Wales, which was not particularly Roman, didn't have a large Roman presence, was very important uh for the survival of Christianity in Northwest Europe because Wales sent a mission to Ireland, St.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Patrick was involved.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then Ireland became vital for the survival of Christianity in Britain because they set up the mission, the the uh the Columbian monastery on Iona, from which missions were sent to the Picts to convert the Picts to Christianity, because the Romans never brought Christianity to the Picts.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: They sent a mission to Northumbria to make the Anglo-Saxon, the Angles there Christian, and that was successful.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they sent also missions to their brother Gaels who had inhabited Scotland because after the fall of Rome, Irish invaders called the Scotti invaded Scotland and settled.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: And those Scotti were not Christians, they were pagan Gaels living in Scotland, and um but the Christian Gaels converted them.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: So three different races of Britain there by converted by that mission.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, the Welsh were sending missions into Southwest Britain, into Devon and Cornwall, where there had been survivals of Celtic paganism.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: And at this same time, Germanic pagans, the English, were coming in from the East and conquering all of England and bringing paganism back to Britain, a new type of pagan, Germanic paganism.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: But those Germanic Saxons were converted also from a mission from Rome.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: There was a Gregorian mission, uh, as well as the Celtic missions from the north.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: So as a consequence, the Anglo-Saxons became one of the first properly Christianized Germanic peoples.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Although there had been, of course, long before the Anglo-Saxons, the Goths had been Christian, but uh they were Aryan Christians, that they the Aryan heresy, where they didn't believe in the divinity of Christ.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the Goths as people just disappeared from history because they all sort of blended in with all the different places they invaded in Iberia, Ukraine, wherever they went.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: But um the Anglo-Saxons remained a Germanic people and they kept their contacts with the Germanic world.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, um people like St.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Boniface, who's from here in Devon, he felt it was his duty to go and convert the Sax, like preach to the Saxons on the continent because they were his you know racial brothers.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: They were Germanic people, and he wanted to bring the word of Christ to them to save them.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: So these kinds of um missions that the Anglo-Saxons sent uh into the continent were very important because um, you know, Saint Weilbeck, also from Devon, she was uh she's now like uh the saint of a patron saint in Germany and Sweden.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um Boniface, of course, uh Willabroad, many Anglo-Saxon saints were or preachers were going into Germany, Sweden, even Finland.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Henry of Henry of uh Uppsala, he's called, who is uh in in eastern Sweden, he was actually an Englishman who was sent from Sweden into Finland to go and preach even further.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: So this knock-on effect, once the Celtic people had succeeded in converting a Germanic people, the Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Saxons then went on to convert many other Germanic peoples.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: So uh it was not, you can't just say the Romans did it because they really didn't.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was it it could have gone a very different way than it did.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was the the victory of Christianity in northern Europe was not assured at all, and many people rejected it, and many Anglo-Saxon kings who converted then went back to being pagan because they thought it was better.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Sweden wasn't even converted properly until like the 1200s or 1100s, so it's much uh its power in the north was tenuous at times, uh, and these Celtic monks living like uh, you know, like St.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Anthony and these little as hermits on little islands here and there somehow managed to um uh change the the course of history.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's fascinating just how humble their beginnings were when you consider the impact they have.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've been to Iona and seen this one person cell dug out at the top of this witch windy hill, and to think that there was a you know quite a militaristic um island kingdom there, which um uh effectively incubated the likes of Aidan, who went on to found Lindisfarne, Holy Island Lind, Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumberland, which then became uh a beacon within early Christendom.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it's it's it's absolutely remarkable.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: What what do you make of the the the um notion, which I think it was Peter Heather, who's a historian of the Roman Empire, he wrote a book called Christendom, The Rise and Triumph of a Religion.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: And he talks about the the Saxons coming to Britain and says that yes, whilst that ended up being uh a conquering, as it were, is that actually it didn't begin as a conquest.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: They were actually invited over by Romana Romano-British elites who were feeling exposed after the um fall of influence and support from from from Rome because of the the Imperial Center uh catching in and out around itself.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: So is that something you've come across in your research that the the the Angles, the Saxons were invited, and then over time they they became the de facto rulers, or was it was it was it more bloody or more benign than that?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: There um that is one of the narratives presented in a contemporary near contemporary med early medieval source that the um that the people were invited over.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: But those people that were invited over were Hengis and Horset, who, as I said previously, were actually gods.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously it's not it's a it's an anachronistic and uh it's a uh it's not a not it's not a real narrative, it's an apocryphal uh narrative of of that time, which might have some uh truth to it.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: We'll never know for sure.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's perfectly possible that like as I said, like it wasn't just the Anglo on the Eastern Shore, the Saxon Shore as the Romans called it, they were called it, it was always a risk of Germanic invasions.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the Western Shore was also the Welsh were afraid of Irish invasions.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: The um the I the Irish were uh the get the Scotti were like a a scare as as much a fearsome invading race as the Saxons were.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes they wanted protection from that, so they might say, Oh, maybe we'll get these, or the Picts for that matter, like you know, the wall of Hayrian's wall had been there to protect Britain from the Picts, but then that when the Romans are gone, it's like there's a free-for-so it's like the idea of like there was one Celtic world, there wasn't, there was all these different Celtic tribes, and maybe one tribe did think maybe a few Saxon soldiers could be helpful right now, and then once the Saxons arrived, they you know might decide not to leave, they could take over the whole place.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: But something like that could have taken a part of the narrative, but I suspect the overall narrative of settlement was much brought bigger and can't be condensed into such a large uh small thing because it's significant they're looking at like the eastern side of England, the initial uh migration would have they think it replaced approximately 80% of the population there.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that can't be just a few, you know, that's not a few mercenaries.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's in family, that's families, that's a mass-scale migration.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh and then those that 80% replacement in the east was then like blended into the rest of the country as the English moved westwards, so that we don't have the 80% uh continental ancestry now.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's it's only about half at most.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: You you you touched on the um the rivalries, the warfare between different Celtic peoples, tribes.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think what's quite a prevalent view in the modern day is that the history of the English is one of um invasion and subjugation of the the innocent peoples, the innocent Celtic, Celtic peoples, Brittonic peoples of the British Isles.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um you've touched on the fact that some of these peoples were not exactly shrinking violets when it came to warfare.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think, yes, it's probably fair to say that England's managed to gain a level of uh military and technological supremacy through, you know, from the from from the conquest onwards, perhaps before that.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: But what what what would you what would you say about the notion that it was a one-way street, that ultimately it was the English peoples always seeking to subjugate, or is it as ever more nuanced than that?
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's more nuanced, of course.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's always more nuanced.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: In history, you can always say to someone in response to anything they say, well, it's a bit more nuanced than that, and you always be correct.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like a bit of a an annoying thing to say because it's you can you can say at any given point.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: But um, the uh the the nuances go on and on because reality is always nuanced.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you go to a party and give an account of it, there's no account that you could give that couldn't be more nuanced because there's always so many little things that could have happened.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the the fact is, yes, like sometimes uh just give an example just to like sort of disrupt that narrative.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the pagan English were allied with Christian Celtic uh peoples against Christian English.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: So you know what I mean?
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like a kid, a king of uh an Edwin Edwin Northumber is a king, uh Christian, and he was fighting against I think it was Pender, who was allied with some Celtic Britons.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then later on, after the English are all Christian, that's the Vikings come, and then you think, oh.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, who are the pagan Vikings going to ally with?
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, sometimes they ally with Christian Celts against English people.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's not so much like Christian versus pagan or Celtic versus Germanic.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's more just like little kingdoms who are willing to make alliances with anyone if they can win against the enemy they happen to have at that given moment.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's uh that's something that I think I was expecting you to say.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh is something that I find um frustrating.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Not that I I find it frustrating because I'm some jingoess jingoistic, you know, uh anglophile that suggests there's there's not there's there are no skeletons in the closet of the English people.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mean I am I I also have some Scottish in me too.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I have sympathy for all of the British peoples, really, but I always find it quite remarkable when I hear people suggest that uh there is almost nothing uh nothing good, and that it's only ever been uh a one-way street.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh as though, for example, I think I think the I think the Irish, because of uh the um the in in I suppose the the Cromwellian um you know uh absolute uh subjugation of them, uh, which is going to really, really rankle them and the plantations for sure.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the notion that the the the Irish were just an innocent peoples is something that I've always found to be far-fetched.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this isn't trying to attach any kind of uh everlasting sin on a nation at all.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's interesting that when you look into the genetics, and as you've alluded to, you know, Anatolian peoples, people from modern-day Turkey came to these isles, and I think Ireland, particularly all of the men, are descended from Anatolian uh folks who arrived and effectively put the Irish men out of business.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, then in this respect, um Ireland is in no way unique at all, but for having Anatolian ancestry.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone in Europe is is between you know 75 and half of descended from the farmers of of Neolithic Europe who themselves have an Anatolian origin.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the the actual replacements that came, I mean, all Irish people, like all British people and all Germanic, Germanic and Celtic people in Northwest Europe, all have significant ancestry from the Indo-Europeans, and their paternal lineages all come from them, not from Anatolia.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: Very, it's very rare that anyone in northern Europe has their paternal lineages of Anatolian origin.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: They rather have Eastern European paternal lineages, and that's what Ireland is associated with now.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: This Eastern European, Indo-European um steppe uh component uh of R1B uh or R1A uh haplo groups mainly.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh yeah, but the Irish uh continued that warrior culture.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: The Irish, like like the Germanic tribes and the Celtic tribes, all of them continued this warrior uh culture of the ancient Indo-Europeans, um, which was often focused on cattle herding and things like that.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Irish, not uh industry being industrialized simultaneously, Irish are interesting because they're simultaneously one of these very early Christian peoples who adopted Christianity so early on in history, and in that sense, you would see them as being more civilized and being one of the more advanced peoples of Europe.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: But also at the same time, they had the industrial revolution so late, and they often depended on like pastoralist, pastoralist kind of economies, uh, high amounts of dairy, risk of famine, very violent uh internacing conflicts, the clan-based systems, which are actually very old-fashioned, sort of bronze age ways of living.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: So they're sort of it's interesting that Ireland are both those things at the same time.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's hard, it's hard to imagine why.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the Normans used to say, I think some of the Normans said that the Irish had green skin.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, even like as recently as that time in history, you know, a thousand years ago, the Irish still had this almost mythical quality of like, you know, not you know, like picks, you know, green-skinned monster people or something.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like no one really knew what they were, and their belief that they lived entirely off milk and stuff like this.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but those were probably exaggerations of the reality.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it just shows that like Ireland's quite an enigma in that sense.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's not easily defined, it is um different from the rest of the British Isles, different from the rest of Europe.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: But uh yeah, they're not then they are what were a warrior race.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, they were they were um oppressed by the English people, uh, but Cromwell particularly, and uh they suffered badly under the potato famines, but they uh historically didn't view themselves as victims because this they were colonizers, they invaded Scotland, the Scotti invaded, and uh they also did slave raids, they took like slaves from Cornwall, even and places like that, Wales and Cornwall.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's believed Sir Patrick was a slave made a slave in Ireland, you know.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: So they um they were slavers and warriors and fighters, and still are uh some of them quite keen on fighting, I understand.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: Tom, we've talked a lot about the movement of peoples, and I think uh the the most thought about, talked about thing in modern Britain today is pace of immigration.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we have had extraordinarily large numbers arrive on on these shores in the last 30 years, and uh last year alone, I think 1.2 million, and then you subtract the half a million that left, and that's 700,000 uh is the net figure, but 1.2 million new people, and often you will find folks set their stall out and say, well, we shouldn't get too worried about this because ultimately the history of humanity is one of movement.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is a bit of a an open giving you the field to expound on uh on the genetic settlement, I suppose, and the cultural settlement and the periods, uh uh the the long periods of time that uh has taken place here on the British Isles.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because I've seen you uh make reference to a few things within your videos, like for example, people point to the Elizabethan period and talk about how there were there were Muslim traders that I think you mentioned were called blackamores, but you've this paled in comparison to the the population of four million, there were 340 traders, and maybe only 12 of them were there at any one time, and then there was a wave of a couple of hundred Italians every year for 170 years or something, and then a a one-time influx of who knows uh as they were escaping persecution in France.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: Could you just tell us a little bit about why the the notion that immigration shouldn't worry us, it's just uh at this scale because people are just people, they move around, they become those people over time.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: What what's what's behind that and uh what the picture really looks like?
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that that expression and that mode of argument is uh disingenuous uh and depends on a truism.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like you can say that you know tides have always existed, but if a tidal wave happens, that doesn't really you can't tell someone as a tidal waves approaching.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, tides have always existed, or waves have always existed.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is something different, it's not the same thing.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: Geneticists have shown like I talk about all these different ancient migrations, and it's easy for someone to interpret that to say, oh, we really are a mongrel bunch, aren't we?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: We really mix all this.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, all of the different peoples that contributed, but all Northwest Europeans, like the Angles, the Saxons, the Celts, the Brit, you know, the Gaels, whatever, they're all Northwest Europeans.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the Belbiga folk, the first Indo-Europeans to come to Britain uh four and a half thousand years ago, came from Holland.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: We are uh an indigenous Northwest European people.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: All of the well, rather, all the peoples, the five peoples of the British Isles are indigenous Northwest European peoples.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: The the other migrations are insignificant.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: The only significant migrations historically have been uh going backwards, the the Bellbeaker migration.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, first we've got the the native, you've got the hunter-gatherers, and you've got 6,000 years ago, the first farmers come 4,500 years ago, the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans come uh 3,000 years ago, Celts, and that's quite a small migration compared to the others, and then the Anglo-Saxons.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_00: The Romans don't even count as a big thing because they didn't actually change the gene pool.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: And none of the subsequent migrations have contributed very much to the overall gene pool, they've not really changed anything.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's disingenuous to talk about, oh, well, there was this one guy who came in the 50s in the Elizabethan era, it was that it was a black guy or whatever.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, so what?
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't really change who we are, it doesn't make it change the makeup of the country or or the history of that uh of who we are.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to distort things, and the idea to say we're a mongrel people or we're muts or whatever, which is insulting.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: Compared to who, that does that is that meant to be because actually we're what what genetics has shown, then modern population genetics, is that we Northwest Europe is one of the is characterized by genetic stability over long periods of time, not instability, where other parts of the world are extremely always in flux with constant movements of different people replacing each people.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: There have been replacements here, but they're happening over the course.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: We have to talk about over the course of a 5,000-year span to talk about them.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: They don't happen on the way they're having now.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_00: In the last 20 years, more people have come to this country than have it come in the period previous 2,000 years.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like uh that's not you can't really talk about it anywhere near the same, it's not at all um equivalent, it's complete false equivalency.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: And to to try to use like the fact that we descend from Anglo-Saxons as a as a justification for hordes of unwelcome migrants to to who will you know not contribute to the economy, who will be a net negative to our to our way of life, who will cause uh house prices to rise, wages to go lower, and say and to say we should welcome that because 1500 years ago some Germanic warriors sailed over with sword in hand to conquer new lands.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's no connection to those events.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's complete uh it's completely dishonest to try and make them s seem equivalent somehow.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um this is our country.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we decide, we should decide uh who can and can't come in.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that we descend from people who have their origins elsewhere doesn't in any way distinguish from anyone else in the world.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone has everyone, all peoples have always moved, all peoples have always mixed to some extent.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: But it's you know, it's the mixes have happened naturally as two peoples, one person you have one people who lived in this country for thousands of years, then the new people move in, and then gradually over the course of hundreds of years, the two people sit there's a synthesis achieved and they and they mix together.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: What you don't get is hundreds of thousands of people from all over the different of the world crammed into one city and then expected suddenly to create a new people.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: That will that's never happened before, and it's not gonna happen.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's not uh it's complete, there's no there's not there's no consensus to to reach.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's not there's nothing that they agree on, they've got nothing in common.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's no actual agreed culture that they can all center themselves on.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, even the Roman Empire which successfully had, you know, some kind of it did it manage to incorporate the various peoples of the Mediterranean in into it, and they came into Italy and mixed, but they all centered on the on the Roman culture, they all became Roman.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: So even you know, Greek-speaking Arabs in the Levant worshipped Zeus, they even though they were that that made it possible.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's no common culture, there's no common agreement on anything, uh, and people aren't even willing to assert that there is such a thing as an English culture anyway.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, how can you possibly expect these immigrants to um assimilate to something that the authorities don't even say exists?
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it's absolutely hopeless.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh you have spoken about how people do, and if anyone goes and reads into it, you'll find that that argument you made, which is people uh think because there were an invasion of the Anglo-Saxons, which is at the root of the English uh nation as we know it today, and that the peoples, then that effectively is uh a carte blanche for just allowing new peoples to arrive en masse.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: But yet, in the same token, you will find that those same people are the people that are in the academic sphere, currently trying to change or even erase the notion that Anglo-Saxons existed before.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember what term it is they've uh uh alighted on, but it's something like early English, perhaps.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what they're referring to as.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, they they they they knock the they knock the foundations out from from beneath their own argument by doing that.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: Tom, I I I I think there are many things that we could understand might be common objections to your work when you're ultimately talking about the cultural um uh uniqueness of the peoples of the Northwest Europe in an age of multiculturalism and and and mass immigration.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you have done an awful lot both in your working life, you've done an awful lot in your academic life, and been exposed to lots of information, history, culture, genetics.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I suspect it that the the stage is probably set for you to have had quite a few changes in outlook.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it one question I like to ask all of my guests who come on to the show is what is something that you have changed your mind about that you once thought was set in stone, perhaps even a good thing, but that you since changed your mind on and why?
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: What was it that made you change your mind?
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I change my mind on things all the time when new evidence comes out.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: I, you know, I go with what the consensus of evidence shows.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_00: So when new evidence comes, often you have to rearrange your beliefs.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um there was a I mean, there was a kind of narrative that was popularized by Maria Gumboutas that the Neolithic Europeans who existed prior to Indo-Europeans were more well, she actually went so far as to say they were matriarchal.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: I never believed that they are matriarchal, but I did believe perhaps that they were relatively more egalitarian than the Indo-Europeans.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: But like when we look closely now at like evidence, genetic evidence and other archaeological evidence, it's very clear that the they were also highly stratified, highly stratified society, perhaps even more socially stratified than Indo-European society, patriarchal, uh based on uh rule ruled by uh dynasties of you know divine lineage dynasties of male patrilineally defined of inbred god, sometimes inbred god kings who were interred in these magnificent megalithic monuments of the Neolithic.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: So they were more akin to something like ancient Egypt, like uh in than any kind of feminist egalitarian utopia that uh that some uh mid-20th century authors imagined.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so that was uh I mean that's been constantly adjusting my view of them, that they are there were warriors, they were murderers, they were killers, they were not peacnicks of any sort.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_00: Although I never fully bought into that narrative anyway, but I mean now it's just completely it's gonna be completely demolished.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't have any basis at all.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh similarly, I I I've had to I've always I've always been a little bit interested uh curious about how to what extent Christianity survived among the brethrenic peoples of England after the fall of Rome, because there are narratives, especially perpetuated by the church, uh that that that it was always Christian.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: There was always Christianity, and that the the the the the worshippers of Woden were just a minor you know bump in the road and it would continue Christianity.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I didn't see a lot of evidence for that.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I thought the other way I thought it was quite likely that Christianity was completely eliminated in the southeastern parts of Britain when when the Anglo-Saxon came and then only came and had to be reintroduced.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: If it didn't have to be reintroduced, then why would Rome have sent a mission to England?
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why would the Gaels have sent missions to England if there was constant Christian presence?
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it seems now that um there's quite good evidence that actually, especially in burials like the women, because the Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic migrants were marrying into native families.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems very often you had mixed religious marriages, where sometimes a pagan man would marry a Christian woman, and um you could have a household perhaps with both religions in it existing, and maybe Christianity was it seems that Christianity in early England, early medieval England, was pop more popular with women, and that women played a crucial role in the survival of Christianity uh in for in Britain, in South Britain anyway, um, which is very interesting, and it would not be initially what I'd thought.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_00: But um uh yeah, that that this kind of thing, yeah, I'm always willing to change my mind on things.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think there could be uh a use for that amongst the rest of us and the general population can become far too stuck in the mud and refuse to see things when they they come across our our gaze.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: Tom, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: Before I let you go, you do have the substantial footprint online.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps you can tell everyone where they can find you and uh if there's anything that you're working on that you're excited about that we can expect to see in the coming months.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: My YouTube channel is where most of my stuff happens.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's YouTube Survive the Jive.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I also have another channel, Jive Talks, for live streams.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to see me just chatting like I've been here today.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the Survive the Jive channel is for edited documentaries, often filmed on location around Europe and other parts of the world.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I am going to do a video on the genetic ancestry of Trump and what how that might have attributed to his uh his but nature.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: That'll be out soon enough, I hope.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, next year I'm going to Iceland.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to do a documentary about Iceland's uh landscape and how it features large in medieval Icelandic literature of the of the Vikings, uh uh the sagas.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I also hope maybe to do a more a sort of interpret trip and go into Central Asia, parts of Russia, where some of the ancient uh remains of archaeological remains of the Aryans can be found.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um that that's uh on the cards too.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, please check out my channel Survive the Dive, and uh you'll see some lots of interesting documentary films you can see for free.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_01: I can stand behind that.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting, it's funny, and uh I would be very surprised if you weren't able to find history about your your own ancestry.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone should go and check that out.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_01: Tom, it's really an absolute pleasure uh to be able to talk to you again in the future.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I know you're you're headed off for your lunch now, so so bon acquisito when you get sat down at the table.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot, John.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_01: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.