Meet Rebecca Redfern (BA, MSc, PhD, FSA) lol. She is a senior curator of Archaeology at the Museum of London. She is dead set on making sure everyone knows Britain was as diverse 2,000 years ago as it is now. Lets go over why she is a liar and a hack: x.com
She has a had a number of popular articles over the years pushing a diverse Britain. Today the BBC published the article in the tweet I am quoting above, the Guardian also picked up on this. So, is there any truth to all of this stuff she is putting out there? Let's find out.
Both the BBC and the Guardian are working from the following 2019 book chapter on which Redfern is the first author. An interesting title for a book "Bioarcheology of Marginalized People". You can already tell it's going to be a very serious work!
The introduction to the chapter lays out the case that blacks and other non-white individuals in cemeteries have been anecdotally observed, but that they were never formally acknowledged, hence the title "Officially absent but actually present".
Why is this important? Well because the far right is taking an increasing interest in Medieval history, and they are wrong and evil, so Redfern feels it is her job to make sure that people are "present and correct".
Here is the Economist article she cites. The header image is from Game of Thrones. The article seems to think that presenting a Marvelization of medieval history will give people the view that the medieval period wasn't as homogenous as the far right thinks. Rigorous scholarship!
She then talks about the work they do in this chapter. Essentially what they have is 41 individuals from a medieval cemetery in London. And they want to explore the diversity of these individuals using a variety of methods. Mostly just bone analysis, some unremarkable DNA work.
Bit more writing but it's mostly just the usual lib slop. Talk of racism, sexism, disability, and the lived experience of Black people in Medieval London. Not worth getting into at all. We're concerned with what was actually in the graves, not what she wants to be there.
Moving on. Of the 41 individuals they picked, 3 were picked for DNA analysis (only mitochondrial DNA). And only 8 had complete crania. There more I read the more I feel like the data was not fit for the analysis she wanted to perform. Dodgy classifications and imputation too...
So, what did she find? Severeral individuals which she claims are either Black African or are dual heritage. All this purely from skull measurements of various kinds. How accurate are they? Not very it seems. Last picture from here: nytimes.com
You can see this in the confused discussion Redfern gives of the results. What has she actually done apart from demonstrate that these sorts of methods aren't very good?
What about the mitochondrial DNA analysis, surely that will back up her claim? Nope. Of the three samples they performed this analysis on, only one was successfully sequenced. The haplogroup? U5b2a5, very common across Europe. No actual looking at this haplogroup across time.
What does Radfern conclude from this very rudimentary DNA work and seemingly inaccurate bone work? This individual is mixed, and possibly a three-way mix at that. White, black and asian. She's a picture of modern London!
None of this analysis is very robust at all. It was published with a politcal agenda in mind. You can tell by the introduction and by the shoddy work she has done to concoct a story of a diverse Britain. This isn't the first time she has done this, Roman Britain was diverse too!
This work no better than the previous work. She begins by setting the political context, talk of migrants etc. She then begins to make claims about a skeleton having "Black ancestry" without ever defining what that is. I imagine the classifications are as bad as those above.
What are we to take from all of this? You cannot trust these academic people at all. They will lie through their teeth for their political agenda, and that agenda is: Your home was never white and homogenous, so you must accept infinity migrants.
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