The Frisians: The 'Real' Anglo-Saxon Ancestors? Reassessing the Anglo-Saxon Migration with Ancient DNA After Gretzinger et al. (2022)

No two living languages sit closer together than English and Frisian, the coastal tongue of the northern Netherlands, and for as long as that has been known the same flattering guess has followed: that the Frisians are the truest Anglo-Saxons of all, the purest surviving shard of the people who crossed the North Sea and made England. The ancient DNA keeps the cousinhood and trims the crown. The Anglo-Saxon migration was real and large, and early medieval Frisia does sit genetically right on top of the migrants who settled Britain, the closest continental match of all. But Frisia was not the homeland by itself. The Saxons of Lower Saxony and the Angles and Jutes of Jutland are just as much the source, all of them one coastal people strung along the southern North Sea, and the living Frisians hold no genetic monopoly over the Anglo-Saxons that the Dutch, the Danes and the North Germans do not equally share. What is uniquely Frisian is the one thing you can still hear: the language.

1. A people you can hear in English

Of all the languages alive today, the one that sounds most like English is Frisian, spoken by a few hundred thousand people along the coast and islands of the northern Netherlands and the German North Sea fringe. The old schoolroom rhyme makes the point in a single line that is nearly the same in both tongues: bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Frise. English and Frisian descend together from the North Sea Germanic dialects of the early medieval coast, the branch philologists call Anglo-Frisian, and that closeness has always tempted people to read the language as a pedigree. If the Frisians speak the nearest thing to Old English, the reasoning runs, then surely they are the nearest thing to the Anglo-Saxons themselves, the purest living remnant of the Angles and Saxons who sailed to Britain after Rome withdrew.

It is a clean story, and the honest way to test it is not to listen to the words but to read the genome. The early medieval North Sea is now sampled densely on both shores, from the Iron Age natives of Britain through the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries of England to the contemporary villages of Frisia, Lower Saxony and Jutland, and from the recent landmark studies of the Anglo-Saxon migration we can line them all up and ask the only question that matters: when the Anglo-Saxons crossed the sea, whose coast did they leave, and who, today, still stands on it.

2. The migrants came from the southern North Sea

The cleanest single test is distance. Using Global25, the coordinate system published by Davidski of the Eurogenes blog, each population becomes a point in a twenty-five dimensional space, and the scaled Euclidean distance between two points measures how genetically far apart they are. The chart below gives those distances, multiplied by one thousand, from a pooled early medieval Anglo-Saxon population of England (an average of more than a hundred and eighty individuals from the great Anglo-Saxon cemeteries) to the candidate homelands across the water, to the British people they settled among, and to the southern continent beyond.

Scaled Global25 distance (multiplied by 1000) from a pooled early medieval Anglo-Saxon population of England. The nearest point of all is early medieval Frisia, on the near side of the same sea, with the Saxon homeland of Lower Saxony and Iron Age Jutland close behind. The Britons of late Roman England sit at moderate distance, the minority ingredient in the mix, and the southern continent, Gaul and France and Iberia, lies far out. The migrants are a North Sea coastal people, and Frisia is the closest stretch of their coast.

The order is the argument. The Anglo-Saxons of England are nearer to early medieval Frisia than to anything else on the continent, a bare 8 units, and the next two points are the other two stretches of the same coast: Lower Saxony, the Saxon heartland, at 13, and Iron Age Jutland and the Danish islands, the country of the Angles and the Jutes, at 17. Only past that homeland cluster do we reach the people the migrants found waiting in Britain, the Romano-British and the western Brittonic survivors, sitting at moderate distance as the minority ingredient they were. And far beyond everything lies the southern continent, Iron Age Gaul at 37 and modern France at 54 and Iberia near 92. If the Anglo-Saxons had come from anywhere but the North Sea coast, the needle would point elsewhere. It points home, and home is the coast the Frisians still live on.

3. The recipe: three quarters North Sea, one quarter Briton

What ingredients build that position? A non-negative least squares model on the Global25 coordinates gives a clean two-part answer for the early English. Take the continental North Sea source, represented here by early medieval Lower Saxony, which the published work finds indistinguishable from the unmixed Anglo-Saxon migrants, and the indigenous British of the late Iron Age and Roman period, and ask how much of each it takes to rebuild a pooled Anglo-Saxon cemetery population. The model reaches for about three quarters of the continent and one quarter of Britain, and it asks for nothing else.

The number is the headline of the whole Anglo-Saxon migration debate, and the model lands on it from the side. The published genome-wide work on the early English puts continental North Sea ancestry at about three quarters of the early medieval eastern gene pool, and at roughly 38 percent even in the modern population of eastern England, a genuine mass movement rather than the thin warrior elite that an older generation of historians imagined. The Anglo-Saxons did not merely rule Britain. They resettled a large part of it, and the bulk of what they brought came off the southern North Sea coast.

4. Not Frisia alone: Saxons, Angles and Jutes

Here the romantic Frisian claim meets its first correction. Frisia is the closest continental point to the Anglo-Saxons, but it is closest by a hair, inside a cluster that includes the whole southern North Sea coast. Early medieval Frisia sits about 16 units from early medieval Lower Saxony and about 20 from Iron Age Jutland, and all three sit within 8 to 17 units of the Anglo-Saxon migrants themselves. In the published study the continental sites that prove statistically indistinguishable from the unmixed Anglo-Saxon source are specifically those of northern Germany, Lower Saxony above all, and of Denmark. These are the homelands the early sources actually name: the Saxons of the German coast, the Angles of Angeln in Schleswig, the Jutes of Jutland. Frisia belongs to that continuum, but it does not stand alone at its head.

There is a deeper reason the early medieval Frisians look so much like the Anglo-Saxons, and it cuts against the idea of Frisia as a separate reservoir. The Frisii of the Roman Iron Age seem to have thinned out along their flooding coast in the fourth and fifth centuries, and the early medieval Frisia that re-emerges is itself part of the same North Sea expansion that carried the Angles and Saxons to Britain, a coastal Germanic world repopulating both shores at once. Early medieval Frisia is not the ancestor of the Anglo-Saxons; it is their sibling, the same coastal people on the near side of the water. That is why a Frisian grave of the seventh century and an Anglo-Saxon grave of the seventh century are so hard to tell apart. They are two ends of one beach.

5. The same coast reached into Gaul, not only Britain

Britain was the largest target of the North Sea expansion, but it was not the only one, and this is the part of the story the Frisian legend usually forgets. The same coastal Germanic world that crossed to England also pressed along the Channel and into the shore of northern Gaul. The late Roman command that strung forts down both sides of the Channel was already called the Litus Saxonicum, the Saxon Shore, and it covered the coasts of southern Britain and northern France alike. Whether the name records the raiders it was built against or the settlers who were already there, contemporaries plainly saw one Saxon-haunted coastline running unbroken from the North Sea round to the mouth of the Seine.

The settlement is not only a matter of names. The oldest Saxon cemetery in France, at Vron in Picardy, holds graves from the fourth to the sixth century whose occupants stand out physically from the earlier local population and resemble the Germanic north. Further west, in the Bessin around Bayeux, Gregory of Tours writes of Saxones Bajocassini, the Saxons of Bayeux, who served in Merovingian armies through the sixth and seventh centuries, and a century later the documents of Charles the Bald still name a district there as Otlinga Saxonia. A scatter of Norman place names carries the same fingerprint, including the rare Normandy ending in tun, the exact cousin of the English ton, in names such as Cottun. The Channel coast of France held its own small Saxon settlements at the very moment the larger movement was filling England.

The Frisians left their mark on the same shore in a different currency: trade. In the seventh and eighth centuries the Frisians were the carriers of the North Sea, so dominant that the water itself was sometimes called Mare Frisicum, the Frisian Sea, and their ships tied the English coast, the Rhine and Scandinavia into one network. Its two great gateways faced each other across the Channel: Dorestad on the Rhine and Quentovic on the Gallic shore, near the mouth of the Canche in what is now the Pas-de-Calais. Quentovic was the continental doorway of this Anglo-Frisian world, a market and minting town on French soil worked through Frisian and Frankish hands. So the coastal people who made England also settled and traded along the northern French coast as well. The difference is what happened to the trace afterward: in England the North Sea input went on to make a quarter to a third of the modern population, while on the Gallic shore it was a thinner layer over a much larger Frankish and Gallo-Roman majority that absorbed it, which is why it shows far more faintly in northern France today than it does across the water.

6. The closest living kin: a northern pack, not a Frisian monopoly

If Frisia is part of a shared homeland rather than its sole heir, the living test should show the same thing: no single modern people should stand out as the unique reservoir of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. It does not. The chart below ranks present-day populations by their distance from the same pooled Anglo-Saxon migrants.

Scaled Global25 distance (multiplied by 1000) from the pooled Anglo-Saxon migrants to a range of present-day peoples. The Frisians sit near the front, about 13 units away, but they sit there in a crowd: the Danes, Norwegians and Dutch are as close or closer, and the whole continental North Sea pack falls within a few units of one another. No single living people is the unique heir. And the modern English, at about 20 units, are further from the migrants than the Frisians, Danes or Dutch. Northern France carries a visible trace of the same coastal ancestry: the pooled departments of Nord, Pas-de-Calais and the Somme, the old Saxon Shore and the coast of Quentovic, sit about 41 units from the migrants, appreciably closer than France as a whole at about 54.

Two facts jump out of the order. The first is that the Frisians have no monopoly. They are close, but they are tied: a Dane is nearer the migrants than a Frisian, a Norwegian nearer still, the Dutch a half-step behind, the whole southern North Sea and Scandinavian world bunched together because they all share the coastal ancestry the Anglo-Saxons carried. Measured against the named continental source rather than the admixed migrants, the picture is the same, a tight band of Danes, Dutch, Norwegians and Frisians between 18 and 20 units, with the Frisians fourth in a photo finish. The second fact is the quiet sting at the bottom of the pack: the modern English themselves, at about 20 units, sit further from the Anglo-Saxons than the Frisians do. The living people who most resemble the Anglo-Saxon migrants are not the English but the continental cousins who never left.

The northern French coast fits the same logic from the other direction. France as a whole sits far from the Anglo-Saxons, near the bottom of the chart, but the departments of the old Saxon Shore, Nord, Pas-de-Calais and the Somme, pull markedly closer, about 41 units against 54 for the country at large. That is exactly the faint North Sea Germanic trace described earlier: the Saxon settlements of Picardy and the Bessin and the Frisian traffic through Quentovic, still just legible in the modern coastal population beneath the much larger Frankish and Gallo-Roman majority that absorbed it.

7. The English diluted, the continentals stayed

That last fact is worth dwelling on, because it inverts the usual intuition. We think of the English as the Anglo-Saxons grown up, but a modern Englishman is a long way from his fifth-century forerunner. The early Anglo-Saxon settlers were about three quarters continental North Sea; the modern English are about forty percent. In between, two things happened. The migrants kept mixing with the British population that was already there, the Romano-British majority that never vanished, and then, in the centuries after the conquest, a further continental input arrived from the south, a French and Frankish related ancestry that the published work detects spreading across England, heaviest in the south and the east where contact with the Frankish world was closest. By the modern day the English are a three-way blend, and the original North Sea share has been more than halved.

The continental North Sea peoples were spared both dilutions. The Frisians, the Dutch of the coast, the Danes and the North Germans stayed where the source was, mixing mostly among themselves, and so they drifted far less from the early medieval profile than the English did. This is the deep irony of the Frisian claim. The Frisians really are unusually close to the Anglo-Saxons, but not because they are a special vessel of Anglo-Saxon blood. They are close because they are the homeland that stood still, while the people who carried that blood to Britain stirred it into a new and increasingly different mixture. The Anglo-Saxon, frozen in a seventh-century grave, would recognise a modern Frisian sooner than a modern Englishman.

8. What is uniquely Frisian is the language

So if the genes of the Anglo-Saxon homeland are spread evenly across the whole North Sea coast, what is it that genuinely sets Frisia apart? The answer is the one thing the chart cannot measure: the language. English and Frisian are the two surviving members of the Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic group, the dialects of exactly that southern North Sea coast, and they share sound changes and vocabulary that set them together against the Dutch, Low German and Scandinavian of their neighbours. When a Frisian and an Englishman find their languages uncannily alike, they are hearing a real and specific inheritance, the common speech of the early medieval coast, preserved on the continental side in Frisia and carried across the water to become English.

But language and ancestry are different kinds of thing, and they came apart here exactly as they always do. The Frisian tongue is special because it is the nearest surviving cousin of Old English; the Frisian genome is ordinary, the same North Sea coastal ancestry the Dutch and the Danes and the early Saxons all carry. The thing that makes a Frisian sound like an Englishman is not a closer share of Anglo-Saxon blood than his Dutch neighbour holds. It is a closer share of Anglo-Saxon words.

9. The purity trap

It is tempting to take the linguistic closeness, the coastal setting and the old name and read them together as proof that the Frisians are a preserved pocket of pure Anglo-Saxons, a living museum of the people who made England. This is the same trap that catches readers of every people with a resonant name, and it is worth naming. Modern Frisians are not a time capsule. They are ordinary twenty-first-century Europeans who have drifted, mixed with their neighbours and absorbed centuries of later history like everyone else, and on the chart they sit among the Dutch and the Danes rather than apart from them. Their genuine closeness to the Anglo-Saxons is the closeness of a homeland that stayed put, not the closeness of a sealed vault. To read the Frisians as the one true Anglo-Saxons is to mistake a shared coast for a private inheritance, and a living language for a frozen bloodline.

10. So, the real ancestors?

The romantic version said the Frisians were the truest Anglo-Saxons, the purest surviving fragment of the Angles and Saxons, preserved on the far side of the North Sea and audible in every word of their English-sounding speech. The honest version keeps the cousinhood and discards the crown. The Anglo-Saxon migration was a real and large movement of people off the southern North Sea coast, and early medieval Frisia sits genetically right on top of the migrants, the closest continental match of all. But Frisia was one stretch of a shared homeland, not its sole heir. The Saxons of Lower Saxony and the Angles and Jutes of Jutland are just as much the source, and among living peoples the Danes, Dutch and North Germans are as close to the Anglo-Saxons as the Frisians are, while the modern English, diluted by Britons and by a later French layer, are further from their own founders than any of them. The Frisians are not the real Anglo-Saxon ancestors in the sense the legend means. They are one coast of a vanished coastal people, holding, alone, the last clear echo of its tongue.

The story in five steps

Claim and reality

Reproduce it yourself

Paste the coordinates below into Vahaduo, the Global25 spreadsheet tool, to rebuild the comparisons in this article: the pooled early medieval Anglo-Saxon population of England, the three continental homelands (early medieval Frisia, early medieval Lower Saxony and Iron Age Jutland and Denmark), the British substrate (the late Iron Age and Roman England average and the western Brittonic survivors of Worth Matravers), the later continental source (northern Iron Age Gaul), and the living comparisons (Frisian, Dutch, German and North German, Danish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, Belgian, French, and Finnish and Spanish as far poles). The Anglo-Saxon, Frisia, Lower Saxony, Jutland, British and Gaul points are sample-size-weighted averages of the named ancient groups; the modern coordinates are scaled Global25 from the public Global25 datasheets and the Moriopoulos 2025 collection.

England_AngloSaxon_EMA,0.126742,0.132657,0.065990,0.056984,0.041238,0.020827,0.003226,0.007142,0.003346,-0.002551,-0.005400,0.005066,-0.010832,-0.010614,0.023675,0.007803,-0.007252,0.002345,0.004709,0.005499,0.007922,0.004033,-0.000743,0.014930,-0.001182
Netherlands_Frisia_EarlyMedieval,0.129596,0.135356,0.064542,0.054033,0.040491,0.020578,0.003743,0.008934,0.005770,-0.000755,-0.005335,0.004839,-0.010587,-0.009506,0.023528,0.006137,-0.009844,0.002489,0.005450,0.003600,0.007095,0.002394,-0.000061,0.014365,0.000573
Germany_LowerSaxony_EarlyMedieval_Saxon,0.116410,0.130149,0.062456,0.053875,0.040651,0.020226,0.001047,0.007442,0.003082,-0.002858,-0.005828,0.005266,-0.009697,-0.010106,0.022653,0.007579,-0.006039,-0.000060,0.004331,0.004840,0.007345,0.005778,0.001260,0.016095,0.000686
Denmark_IronAge_Jutland_Zealand,0.128336,0.130749,0.069202,0.063712,0.038007,0.018616,0.000176,0.011481,0.008846,-0.008656,-0.001137,0.007793,-0.012599,-0.011870,0.023683,0.005370,-0.012875,0.006524,0.005405,0.008879,0.007674,0.007759,-0.002095,0.017593,-0.001946
England_LIA_Roman_Britonnic_substrate,0.127036,0.134491,0.059708,0.047446,0.037866,0.017297,0.002493,0.005518,0.004451,0.004726,-0.005412,0.006044,-0.014469,-0.015516,0.019954,0.007610,-0.003336,0.001710,0.002549,0.003298,0.003890,0.002742,-0.001881,0.006970,-0.001296
England_Brittonic_WorthMatravers,0.134311,0.132628,0.060490,0.047546,0.035699,0.012327,0.002256,0.004384,0.005277,0.010278,-0.003021,0.004946,-0.017007,-0.015524,0.019462,0.004243,-0.007354,0.003471,0.002916,0.000350,0.006588,0.007246,-0.002563,0.003133,-0.000503
Gaul_IronAge_North_LaTene,0.127953,0.137762,0.058246,0.036967,0.043085,0.012329,0.003185,0.003756,0.010424,0.013033,-0.002167,0.006517,-0.013882,-0.009377,0.013371,-0.001518,-0.007994,0.002097,0.002315,0.000379,0.003980,0.001258,-0.000404,0.000499,-0.002081
Frisian,0.133119,0.130418,0.062530,0.054578,0.037030,0.023297,0.007785,0.005816,-0.001277,-0.002359,-0.005008,0.002190,-0.009778,-0.009389,0.022920,0.007773,-0.008634,0.000382,0.003382,0.003615,0.008465,0.004253,0.001070,0.016339,-0.002666
Dutch,0.127471,0.134196,0.060275,0.044086,0.040840,0.016408,0.005397,0.007253,0.004204,0.001925,-0.005640,0.004435,-0.009857,-0.008677,0.017847,0.005634,-0.006518,0.001753,0.003909,0.002818,0.004478,0.003378,0.000001,0.013900,-0.000654
German,0.130322,0.137398,0.058070,0.038792,0.039481,0.015600,0.004302,0.006152,0.003735,0.001036,-0.004102,0.002271,-0.005227,-0.001568,0.008835,0.002675,-0.003706,0.001712,0.003653,0.001371,0.003039,0.001841,0.000339,0.008551,0.000244
German_North_Hamburg,0.128620,0.134177,0.062319,0.047178,0.040084,0.019627,0.007858,0.009014,0.003004,-0.002472,-0.003938,0.000187,-0.002917,-0.000740,0.010128,0.003936,-0.004392,0.002684,0.004148,0.001149,0.002004,0.002056,0.002442,0.007584,-0.000906
Danish,0.131201,0.135148,0.066281,0.052270,0.041428,0.019234,0.005115,0.007454,0.003401,-0.002581,-0.005304,0.003438,-0.008462,-0.006830,0.018733,0.005885,-0.006663,0.002082,0.003387,0.004425,0.005518,0.002339,0.000681,0.013836,0.000468
English,0.131466,0.137350,0.060288,0.042643,0.040231,0.016315,0.004150,0.006493,0.005071,0.005256,-0.005809,0.005341,-0.013190,-0.010062,0.020192,0.006328,-0.007441,0.002476,0.003208,0.003163,0.005836,0.002664,-0.001804,0.012428,0.000275
Scottish,0.131547,0.133905,0.062203,0.047518,0.038785,0.017363,0.003230,0.005261,0.003997,0.003150,-0.005823,0.005335,-0.012118,-0.012791,0.023049,0.004516,-0.009652,0.002613,0.002489,0.002101,0.003693,0.003483,-0.000588,0.014467,-0.001393
Welsh,0.131978,0.138163,0.060132,0.043024,0.040592,0.016622,0.003314,0.006392,0.006279,0.004337,-0.004230,0.005912,-0.012911,-0.010975,0.020595,0.005708,-0.008703,0.002356,0.003086,0.002007,0.004985,0.003852,-0.000012,0.011224,0.000808
Irish,0.133445,0.134416,0.061667,0.049183,0.037691,0.019439,0.003180,0.004700,0.003695,0.002656,-0.006706,0.005798,-0.014129,-0.013857,0.025809,0.005310,-0.010685,0.001885,0.000900,0.001739,0.004984,0.001574,0.000678,0.014585,0.000866
Norwegian,0.131912,0.129384,0.068208,0.054989,0.040515,0.019779,0.004503,0.006025,0.005776,-0.003221,-0.004613,0.004350,-0.009683,-0.009414,0.020299,0.005433,-0.007943,0.003537,0.003289,0.004789,0.005831,0.003743,0.000540,0.013349,-0.000398
Swedish,0.132146,0.125890,0.072477,0.059075,0.040285,0.020909,0.006420,0.009373,0.003665,-0.006648,-0.004065,0.000630,-0.003222,-0.003553,0.014586,0.006339,-0.004668,0.001557,0.002840,0.005253,0.006741,0.002457,0.001284,0.011774,0.000255
Belgian,0.128346,0.140342,0.051889,0.027878,0.039491,0.010441,0.003165,0.004764,0.007409,0.010533,-0.004308,0.005565,-0.011699,-0.008329,0.013139,0.003002,-0.004844,0.001414,0.002203,0.000788,0.003324,0.002547,-0.000445,0.008859,-0.000182
French,0.127251,0.142063,0.048036,0.019804,0.040455,0.005726,0.002875,0.003443,0.010964,0.017922,-0.003532,0.006966,-0.014030,-0.009219,0.011250,0.003576,-0.001526,-0.000238,0.001123,0.000848,0.002782,0.001824,-0.001304,0.005936,-0.001349
Finnish,0.129303,0.084939,0.090373,0.076338,0.031360,0.022088,0.009447,0.014367,0.003166,-0.023833,0.004167,-0.007766,0.013671,0.003207,0.002744,0.003291,-0.002144,0.000360,-0.000799,0.005848,0.009436,0.000329,0.002677,0.006565,0.002055
Spanish_Andalusia,0.108462,0.145286,0.036228,-0.004209,0.044226,-0.005920,-0.002312,0.002680,0.024160,0.031815,-0.002017,0.006439,-0.012665,-0.011769,0.009610,-0.001189,-0.005485,-0.001108,-0.004144,-0.001811,0.002488,-0.000642,-0.002063,-0.003918,0.001070

References and sources

1. 1 Gretzinger, J., Sayer, D., Justeau, P., et al. (Reich, D., Krause, J., Schiffels, S.). The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature 610(7930), 112-119 (2022). 278 ancient genomes from England plus continental references; finds about 76 percent continental North Sea ancestry in the early medieval eastern English and about 40 percent in the present-day English, with Lower Saxony and Denmark indistinguishable from the unmixed migrant source and a later France-IA-related layer. link
2. 2 Schiffels, S., Haak, W., Paajanen, P., et al. (Durbin, R.). Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history. Nature Communications 7, 10408 (2016). The first ancient genomes from Britain; finds the Anglo-Saxon samples closely related to modern Dutch and Danish populations and estimates about 38 percent Anglo-Saxon ancestry in the modern East English. link
3. 3 Schiffels, S. and Sayer, D. Investigating Anglo-Saxon migration history with ancient and modern DNA. In Meller, H. et al. (eds), Migration and Integration from Prehistory to the Middle Ages, Tagungen des Landesmuseums fur Vorgeschichte Halle 17 (2017). Reviews the genetic and archaeological evidence for the scale and character of the North Sea migration into post-Roman Britain. link
4. 4 Bremmer, R. H. Jr. An Introduction to Old Frisian: History, Grammar, Reader, Glossary. John Benjamins (2009). Sets out the close relationship of Frisian and English within the North Sea Germanic (Anglo-Frisian) group of West Germanic. link
5. 5 Lebecq, S. Marchands et navigateurs frisons du haut Moyen Age. Presses universitaires de Lille (1983). The standard study of the early medieval Frisian trading world and its cross-Channel emporia, Dorestad on the Rhine and Quentovic on the Gallic shore; background also for the Saxon Shore and the Saxon settlements of Picardy and the Bessin attested by Gregory of Tours and the Notitia Dignitatum.
6. 6 Global25 coordinates: Davidski (Eurogenes), with modern and ancient averages from the public Global25 datasheets and the Moriopoulos 2025 collection. Global25 spreadsheet tooling: Vahaduo. G25

Modern and ancient Global25 coordinates: Davidski (Global25), with averages from the public Global25 datasheets and the Moriopoulos 2025 collection. The Anglo-Saxon migrant point is the sample-size-weighted average of the major early medieval Anglo-Saxon cemetery groups of England (Dover Buckland, West Heslerton, Oakington, Lakenheath, Sedgeford, Hatherdene Close, Norton, Polhill, Rookery Hill, Hollow Banks, Eastry, Wolverton, Ely, Hinxton; 183 individuals in total). The Frisia, Lower Saxony, Jutland, British substrate and Gaul points are weighted averages of the named ancient groups. Global25 spreadsheet tooling: Vahaduo. Analysis: scaled Global25 Euclidean distances and non-negative least squares modelling in Python. Ancestry fractions are proxy-dependent and best read as directions rather than exact percentages; the two-source continental-plus-British model reproduces the published Anglo-Saxon migration estimate (about 76 percent continental North Sea ancestry in the early medieval English), which is preferred where the layers blur. The Iron Age Jutland and Danish sample is small and is read here through distance rather than through a precise mixture model.