The first humans to settle in Britain, travelled north from Iberia, at the end of the last Ice Age. The Celtic nations are direct descendants of these post ice age settlers.

The ancestry of the English is a matter of debate. After a genetic survey, Stephen Oppenheimer believes that the English are also descenants from Ice Age Iberians.

This would mean that the Anglo-Saxon invasion would have only been small scale and only replaced the ruling classes.

However, other genetic surveys have shown that the English are of Danish/German descent, and that the Anglo-Saxon invasion was a migration of significant size.

I personally think the latter is true, because the Brythonic language and celtic culture that once existed in what is now England, before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, all but completely disappeared.

If I am wrong, then the Britons in what is now England learned German so well, they forgot their own native tongue, and seemed to have forgotten their old place names.

In short the entire area went from a Romanised British culture, to entirely Germanic, within a century of the Anglo-Saxons reaching the western shores of the island (Deorham 577), in the area that became the Kingdom of Wessex.

The Norman invasion was a minority invasion, where only the ruling classes were replaced, and that had nowhere near the extensive cultural impact of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Influenced, yes, but not totaly replaced.

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