Geneticists have explored the relationship between Anglo-Saxons and Britons by studying the Y-chromosomes of men in present day English towns. In 2002, a study by Weale et al found a considerable genetic difference between test subjects from market towns in England and Wales, and that the English subjects were, on average closer genetically to the Frisians of the Netherlands than they were to their Welsh neighbours. This conclusion seemed to indicate that the Anglo-Saxons purged England of its previous inhabitants.[24] A 2006 study led by Mark Thomas used computer simulations to find a possible reason for the divergence between these finds and the archaeological record. They concluded that the likeliest explanation was that the Anglo-Saxons operated an apartheid-like system, preventing intermarriage between Britons and Anglo-Saxons and asserting political dominance.[25]
Other geneticists tell a different story. A follow-up study to Weale et al in 2003 by Christian Capelli et al complicated Weale's conclusions, indicating that different parts of England received different levels of intrusion from outsiders: while central and eastern England experienced a high level of intrusion from continental Europe (the study could not distinguish Germans from Danes and Frisians), southern England did not and the population there appears to be largely descended from the indigenous Britons (the scientists acknowledge that this conclusion is "startling"). The 2003 study also noted that the transition between England and Wales is more gradual than the earlier study suggested. [26] Stephen Oppenheimer has argued that the majority of English people, much like the other populations within the British Isles, have some genetic relationship to the original hunter-gatherers who settled Britain between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the last Ice Age. [27]
