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peoples there, like the Xhosa and the Zulu, gave them enough of a run for their money with spears that even though the whites ended up subjugating the blacks under apartheid policies, the blacks still today vastly outnumber the whites. There was no way to kill everybody.
    In that light, whatever havoc the Germanic invaders wrought, there were not, apparently, very many of them. Early Anglo-Saxon chroniclers like the Venerable Bede had it that the invaders “overran” Britain. But writers of their era did not have access to substantial and regular news from all over the land, satellite photography, or our conceptions of demography or even scholarship. Bede was even writing three centuries after said “overrunning,” which as Bill Bryson notes “is rather like us writing a history of Elizabethan England based on hearsay.” Bede could easily document as “overrunning” what was actually a compact number of violent, destructive encounters.
    Comparative genetics has recently confirmed that this was the case. By tracing mutations in mitochondrial DNA in women and on the Y chromosome in men, we can reconstruct the migrations of human populations since the emergence of Homo sapiens . It turns out that only about 4 percent of British men’s genetic material is traceable to a migration from across the North Sea. Moreover, essentially none of British women’s genetic material traces back to such a migration, meaning that the invaders were not couples with children, such that women and young’uns would bulk up the total. Rather, the invaders were just a bunch of guys. In fact, evidently the famous Germanic invaders numbered about 250,000, about as many people as live in a modest-sized burg like Jersey City.
    We will never be able to bring the Celts of this era back to life to ask them whether they felt terribly “exterminated,” nor do official records survive that would allow us to check for ourselves. However, there have always been clues that are problematic for the genocide account. A burial site with graves both in the style of Germanics across the North Sea and in the style of Celts (with the body buried crouching and facing north or northeast) suggests not genocide, but Celts living alongside Germanics. The very fact that after the invasion, archaeologists find no abrupt transformation in material culture suggests that Celts survived in numbers robust enough to pass on their cultural traditions permanently.
    A valuable snapshot comes in the laws established by Ine, a seventh-century king of Wessex (in an era before any individual considered himself the king of England as a whole). Two centuries after the Angles and company supposedly exterminated the Celts, the stipulations of Ine’s laws indicate a Britain where Celts are numerous and well integrated into society. The wealhs ( Welshmen in modern parlance) Ine repeatedly refers to and legislates for include lowly slaves, respectable landowners, and even horsemen serving the king. The main lesson, as Ine devotes one law after another to establishing precisely how much compensation a Welshman’s family or owner gets if he is killed, is that subjugated though they usually were, the Celts were there , in numbers.
    The scenario Ine’s laws depict brings to mind, in fact, the situation of American blacks before Emancipation, right down to the fact that wealh , while coming down to us as Welsh , was not the name the people had for themselves (which was Cymry ), and in Old English meant “foreigner,” with a goodly tacit implication as well of “slave.” In southern America before the end of the Civil War, Africans and their descendants were subjugated, but were still part of the warp and woof of existence for whites, outnumbered them, and included in their number a class of free farmers and artisans.
     
     
    The genocide story, then, has fallen apart. Genes, archaeology, documentary evidence, and sheer common sense leave it dead in the water. Typical assumptions such