French DNA: What is the Genetic History of France?

France is one of the largest countries in Europe, but what is its genetic history, and what is the genetic makeup of the country today? Now there are so many interesting episodes in the history of France in general. In the ancient world, this land was the home of Celtic civilization in the form of Gaul, which also included the territory of other modern countries such as Belgium. Associated with the La Tène culture, ancient Celts from Gaul actually sacked the city of Rome itself in 387 BC. The Romans would eventually go on to conquer this whole region in the form of Julius Caesar's brutal conquest of Gaul beginning in 58 BC, with this territory going on to become Roman Gaul. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, it was the turn of Germanic peoples to move into ancient France, notably the Visigoths and the Franks, with the Franks in particular establishing numerous different kingdoms down through the centuries. The Vikings also played a role in the history of France, with this illustration showing the Vikings' siege of Paris in 845 AD. After plundering and occupying the city, the Vikings only left Paris after the Frankish king, Charles the Bald, paid them a hefty ransom of 2.6 tons of silver and gold. Norsemen also had a significant influence in the north of France as well, establishing the Duchy of Normandy in the 10th century AD under the leader Rollo. Now in the 14th century, France was devastated by the Black Death, with bubonic plagues sweeping across Europe. In more recent history, the French Revolution of 1789 is one of the most famous events in history, with one of the most famous people in history rising out of this upheaval, Napoleon, and I don't mean the pig from Animal Farm, Napoleon Bonaparte, who went on to fight wars across much of Europe. But what impact did these events and many other episodes down through history have on the genetics of France? Well, a really interesting paper published in the European Journal of Human Genetics in 2020 looked at this very question, the genetic history of France, by analysing over 2,000 individuals who were born in France. The authors begin by noting that the ancient genetic makeup of France was formed by three main factors, three main groups. Western hunter-gatherers, then the first farmers that came in from around Anatolia, and then steppe-related populations connected to the Yamnaya culture, that also came into ancient France and other parts of Europe, and this is a similar pattern to many other parts of Europe. To expand on this, when looking at the mixture of these three sources in France, the model of the French genetic landscape is mainly Neolithic farmer ancestry, at between 46.5 and 66.2%, but there was also a substantial contribution from steppe-related populations, at between 19.6% and 41.2%. Western hunter-gatherer ancestry is smaller at between 6.3 and 16.2%, with the variation in the different percentages associated with the different regions of France having different combinations of these three. I should also quickly note as well that the Bell Beaker culture was involved in the spread of this steppe-related ancestry into modern day France, a 2020 study that looked at the genetics of France over a period of 7,000 years. Sampled a Bell Beaker individual dated to around 2500 BC, and found that he belonged to the Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b, with the authors writing that this provides the earliest clear evidence of the presence of this haplogroup in France. If we return to this study on the genetic history of France, one of the main results was that France can be grouped into 6 or 7 genetic clusters largely based on geography. These clusters are the southwest in the dark red, the south in the orange, the center in the yellow, the northwest in the pink, the north in the blue, and the southeast in the cyan. One other cluster that is labelled others in coloured in red also included individuals geographically dispersed over France. Now the authors note that the largest genetic difference in France separates the southwest from the rest of the country, and this may be partly at least due to the Basque influence, as the Basque country straddles the border between France and Spain. This southwest region of France also had high levels of Neolithic farmer ancestry compared to the other clusters in France, with Neolithic farmer ancestry also very high in Basque people in general. Another major finding of this study is that there's a north-south split in the genetics of France. One reason for this split is that the north of France has higher levels of northwest European ancestry, whereas the south of France has a stronger influence from southern Europe. This general division between north and south seems to have historical roots, with the River Loire being an important natural barrier that roughly runs through the centre of France, and has served as a political and cultural border between kingdoms. This general line also corresponds to the Von Wartburg Line, a language border named after the Swiss philologist, which divides France into a northern part, influenced more by Germanic-speaking peoples, and a southern part, which historically was closer to Roman-speaking. According to Von Wartburg, this linguistic border is the result of Frankish settlement north of the Loire River, and corresponds to the political and ethnic border that took form around the year 500 between the Frankish kingdom of Neustria in the north and Aquitaine and Burgundy in the south. As well as the Loire River, two other rivers in France separate some of the genetic clusters, namely La Garonne and the Adore River, both in the southwest. This map from the study shows it well, with the Adore River dividing the southwest cluster from the south cluster, and the La Garonne River a little further north, which separates the southwest cluster from the centre cluster. These river systems seem to have separated populations down through history. Strobel, for instance, the ancient Greek geographer, noted how the Garonne River was a border between the Aquitaines in the southwest and other parts of Gaul in the ancient world. Another really interesting finding from this study is that regions that have strong cultural histories seem to also separate genetically. Obviously we've covered this southwest region that had the Basque influence, and also Aquitaine was quite a distinct region down through history, even into ancient Gaul. But also Brittany, in the northwest of France, was shown in this study to be genetically somewhat distinct. And obviously in Brittany today, they still speak the Celtic language Breton. The study notes that Brittany is substantially closer to the population from northwest Europe than to the north of France. The migration of Britons into Brittany, which used to be called Armorica, may explain this closeness. Although there probably was a few waves of migration, one major wave was when many Britons fled south to Armorica from Britain after the Anglo-Saxon migrations. The study also noted the impact of the Black Death on the population of France. In general, when looking at the population of France over the different generations, they noted a very rapid increase over the last 150 generations, which equates to about 4,500 years, assuming a generation time of 30 years. They noticed however a bottleneck in this pattern around the 14th century, which seems to reflect the devastating Black Death from around 1347 to 1351 AD, when bubonic plague depopulated much of France and Europe more broadly. While the population size in the Kingdom of France was estimated to be around 20 million in 1348, it dropped to only 12 million in 1400, followed by an uneven trajectory to recover to 20 million at the end of the reign of Louis XIV in 1715. The authors note that this trend was more pronounced in the northern part of France, although it is not fully clear why this is the case. Now as far as the different haplogroups in France today and the general genetic structure of the French population, R1b is the most common Y-DNA haplogroup in France, although there is a mixture, including the likes of Jai and E1b. The different branches of R1b speak to the different historical migrations and populations down through history from different areas. R1b-P312 and its subclades Df27, L21 and U152 are associated with the Celts of ancient Gaul, whereas R1b-U106 is associated more with Germanic peoples than the Franks. Viking-related haplogroups are also higher in the northern parts of France, such as Normandy, including I1 and the Scandinavian R1a-Z284 subclade, which makes sense given the historical patterns in relation to the Normans. This map from Eupedia gives a good overview of the different influences across the various regions of France, with the influence of Germanic and Nordic peoples more pronounced in the northern regions, with Greco-Roman influence on the other hand more pronounced around the historical trading ports, such as Marseille, which was founded by Greek settlers around 600 BC and was known as Massilia in the ancient world. Now it's going to be interesting over the next decade or so to see what different research is done on the genetic history of France to expand our understanding of this and the genetic legacy of different, you know, historical migrations and invasions down through the ages. But as we've seen, there is obviously an influence from various different forces down through history, including the Celts, the Romans, the Vikings, Germanic peoples, and many others. Another takeaway from this video is that regions of France that have quite a distinct cultural heritage, such as the Basque country and such as Brittany, are also genetically quite distinct. Speaking of the Basque country, what is the genetic history of Spain more broadly? Are countries just south-west of France? To find out, please click here. Thanks for watching, please subscribe and hit the bell, and let me know your thoughts in the comments below, and I'll see you next time.