Talk: Briton

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The last part seems more like the same nationalistic but mostly wrong stuff that was taught (or rather drilled in their skulls) in the first years of school of kids in France about "our ancestors the Gauls" about fourty years ago. The effective genetic research has used very low samples over small areas and even then, the densest area of the kingdom (I mean the east coast of England), according to their samples, had among the white population the heaviest proportion of germanic/scandinavian descended people, which allows to have heavy doubts about the idea that the "native population" is a majority in Britain.

Please feel free to incorporate this information into the article as you see fit.

I've tried to reword that so the implication that all modern Brits trace their ancestry to the Britons is less clear. --Saforrest 02:00, Sep 1, 2004 (UTC)

The commonly held view of the earlier 20th century that the Anglo-Saxons wiped out the Britons of England and forced the remainder out to Wales and Cornwall has been refuted by modern genetic analysis. The modern indigenous British have a definite link to their earliest ancestors. About 90% of the population of the United Kingdom today, or about 54 million people are matrilineally descended from women that were part of the original population of Britain 3000 years ago. Even in England, in which Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and later invaders played the most important role, about 50% of all men in that region claim patrilineal descent from the inhabitants of the British Isles 3000 years ago.

This paragraph is rather too unequivocal for my taste, especially since the debate about origins seems far from over (see [1] for evidence supporting the theory that the English are mostly descended from Anglo-Saxon invaders). If no one else tackles the job of making that paragraph more NPOV, I'll try to do when when I feel like it. --Saforrest 02:02, Sep 1, 2004 (UTC)