Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Continuity Model of British Ancestry

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus‎. The article saw some improvement during the three-week course of this AfD, but it isn't clear whether the concerns raised by the nom were addressed. I see no consensus that the topic itself is non-notable. Editors are encouraged to remove any unverifiable/WP:OR content, even if this whittles the article down to a stub. Owen× ☎ 07:36, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Continuity Model of British Ancestry

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There is no such thing as the "Continuity Model of British Ancestry", and the old sources being united under this heading are about different things, and are handled in various other WP articles. This new article fails in terms of WP:NOTE, WP:OR, and WP:V. There has been discussion already on the talk page, and no convincing source has been forthcoming.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:42, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United Kingdom-related deletion discussions. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 11:30, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:56, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Biology-related deletion discussions. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:58, 15 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep This is about a school of thought that was once dominant in British genetics as late as 15 years ago, which will mean that the subject is notable. which if included in other articles would give undue weight to the now largely abandoned idea that the British gene pool is substantially unaffected by subsequent invaders, because Wikipedia was being substantially written then. There was at two major TV series devoted to this, Francis Pryor's Britain AD and Britain BC, while you had some best sellers (as well as the accompanying books from Francis Pryor, they also included Blood of the Isles and The Origins of the British) which propounded a theory that was dominant in academia before more genetic testing of ancient DNA became practical. Some quotes that illustrate the thinking from that time:

"The gene pool of the island has changed, but more slowly and far less completely than implied by the old 'invasion model', and the notion of large-scale migrations, once the key explanation for change in early Britain, has been widely discredited." Dr Simon James - BBC article
"All these marker systems indicate a deep-shared ancestry in the Atlantic zone, dating at least in part to the end of the Ice Age" - Genetics and the Origins of the British Population - in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (accesible with Wikimedia)
"But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans." Nicholas Wade
"The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands." - Prospect article by Stephen Oppenheimer, a major populariser of the argument
"This idea of a ‘Beaker Folk’ became unpopular after the 1960s as scepticism grew about the role of migration in mediating change in archaeological cultures" - The Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwest Europe *"During the 1960s scepticism began to grow about the primacy of migration as a vector of social change in prehistory." The return of the Beaker Folk? Rethinking migration and population change in British prehistory academic paper that severely challenged the school
"By that time, many scholars favoured a model of elite dominance involving small, mobile warbands and the acculturation of the local British population" The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool - Later article that severely challenged this school

I intend to add others as this debate goes on. JASpencer (talk) 06:53, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@JASpencer: As discussed on the article talk page, what you are listing are at best different arguments (I think doubts would be a better term) against different possible migrations, in different periods of history and prehistory. They are simply not united by any "model" or "school" or "theory" or "movement". (To pre-empt another possible argument, they are also not united by being the results of genetic research. Doubts about the extreme "migrationism" of the late 19th and early 20th century, were, as you show yourself, common long before genetic evidence became available. Indeed your genetic-oriented sources are from the period before meaningful genetic evidence was available.) There are also other articles for every valid point that can be discussed about the sources you are uniting. Also, as discussed concerning recent articles you tried to create, putting everything else aside it wouldn't make any sense to make separate articles for models (for example the Germanicist extreme "migrationism") and diverse critics of those models [1][2].--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:42, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, but edit down, or merge. I cut out an entirely unsourced piece. If nobody objects, I'll do more editing down to a more manageable size, in the next 48 hours. Bearian (talk) 08:48, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And what is your source for the existence of the "Continuity Model of British Ancestry"? We should not have an article about something which does not exist, surely? Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:18, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'll take that as an objection. Bearian (talk) 17:06, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It is an honest question, and has nothing to do with your editing proposal. If there is a source, then maybe I should change my own opinion, which is that the article should be deleted (although there would still be major overlap concerns). Concerning editing the article, the whole idea seems a bit surreal unless we can define some notable topic which this article is about? Right now it is essentially a collection of snippets about different topics which are covered in other articles. Not only is there already an article about the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, but even an extra article about the history of debates about it, made recently by the same editor who recently made this one Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain. In the same series of events we also had two more articles created for BOTH sides of the specific continuity migration this article about [3][4]. These now redirect to Migrationism and diffusionism. We also have [[5]]. Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:45, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes editing would help, thank you for your interest. JASpencer (talk) 06:15, 21 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Here's a source for the term 'continuity model' as it relates to Britain, fwiw. Tewdar 09:02, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. I've added this as a reference. For those who don't have access to Wikipedia library the quote is "This approach could be described as the ‘continuity model’ and it remains extremely important in post-processual considerations of the transition period. Lots of other references there to chase down. JASpencer (talk) 14:18, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, asilvering (talk) 00:17, 23 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: We really need more educated opinions on this article so I'll try another relisting to see if we can arrive at some consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:21, 30 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.