Tom Rowsell Profile picture
Historian, YouTuber, Heathen community leader 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 some tweets are satirical. Over 27 million views on YouTube https://t.co/fk3pIUNubH
May 12 6 tweets 5 min read
A preprint for a new large study by Silva et al titled "Genomic history and selection in Roman and early medieval Britain” uses new data with 1039 ancient samples and new methods to confirm what previous studies have found about our island history.

Namely that the Romans didn’t affect us much but the Anglo-Saxons did. There are also some surprising findings in there... 🧵Image
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-Roman Britain had strong genetic continuity with Iron Age Britain overall.
~80% of Roman-era skeletons are native Britons.
-The other ~20% (mostly 200s–300s CE) include Scythians/Sarmatians, Gauls, Germans & southern Europeans — mostly in cities & military contexts, matching Roman policy of using non-local troops on frontiers.
- Matrilocality (women staying local, NOT matriarchy) confirmed in multiple Durotriges sites + Yorkshire.
-Men from tribes practising matrilocality in Yorkshire left home and mixed with neighbouring girls, while women stay put.
-In some cases such tribes (with reduced mitochondrial haplogroup diversity as on pie charts) were more inbred - Sporadic cousin marriage disappeared in Roman times (except for a couple examples in Somerset).
-No lasting genetic impact from foreigners in Roman timesImage
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May 12 4 tweets 3 min read
For the last 16 years this supposedly "black" Roman Briton from York called "Ivory Bangle Lady" has been rammed down our throats as an example of the alleged diversity of our island history and of the presence of black people in ancient times.

For over three years the Francis Crick institute has been sitting on her DNA and not revealing whether she really was black or not. I have been saying all these years "I bet she isn't black, and will formally apologise if I am wrong."

Now a new MASSIVE paper on Roman and medieval British DNA by Silva et al 2026 has been published and buried in the supplements is a little sample from York Museum sequenced by Crick and labelled C12826. The entry for this sample includes archaeological context tying it directly to the Yorkshire Museum collection, specifically the high-status late Roman female burial from Sycamore Terrace, York (Eboracum) which is the exact provenance of the Ivory Bangle Lady (excavated 1901, with characteristic ivory/jet bangles and other grave goods) and is dated to 4th c AD, just like her. I am pretty sure this is her and that they tried to keep this quiet. Let's make sure everyone knows!

You can see her on the K=2 admixture plot, Supplementary Fig. 5. The green part represents native Brythonic ancestry, and the red part represents continental European ancestry. There is no Sub Saharan black ancestry or North African ancestry.

All the academics who counter signalled me owe me an apology. All the pompous media organisations like the BBC should issue a formal apology to the public for misrepresenting our ancestors and our history with their WOKE historical revisionism.

TRUST THE SCIENCE LMAO!!!

Photo of Ivory Bangle Lady skull is my ownImage
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This comes soon after the recent revelation that the other skeleton, Beachy Head lady, which the BBC and others have insisted was a "Great black Briton" from Roman times, was actually just a white Briton.
Aug 11, 2025 5 tweets 5 min read
🧵Thorsberg sacred bog offerings🧵

The moors of Denmark and North Germany preserve numerous Iron Age Germanic offerings. While bog bodies may be executed criminals (see Tacitus), and individual deposits of weapons and jewellery, hair and animals are thought to be offerings to the gods, other explanations are proposed for the deposits of vast numbers of bows, arrows, armour, swords, shields, horses and even boats.

One explanation is that because many Germanics from Scandinavia had to pass through this region in order to serve in the Roman army beyond the limes, they probably raided en route and were sometimes killed by locals (Angles) who offered the defeated forces to the bogs. Indeed many of the bog finds in Denmark are non-local.
These maps (see pic) show the origins of the "spoils of war" deposited in the bogs of Nydam and Thorsberg.

Clearly there was two-way traffic from Germany and Scandinavia passing through the land of the Angles who were not always friendly towards itinerant mercenaries!

Also pictured are Thorsberg bog finds (shields, byrnie, swords and fittings etc) dated to 200's, at Gottorf Castle in Schleswig - my own photos

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This silver mask from Thorsberg bog was evidently owned by a very high status military leader with clear connections to the Roman army.

However it is uncertain whether it is of Germanic manufacture, influenced by Roman styles, or if it is a Roman cavalry mask which was modified by its German owner - possibly cutting out the face section to increase visibility.

My other photo is of a Roman helmet from the same bog - obviously worn by a Germanic mercenary/auxillary of the Roman army 2/5Image
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Aug 8, 2025 7 tweets 4 min read
🧵 A Saxon chieftain's burial from Germany at the time of the Anglo-Saxon migration 🧵🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇩🇪

In 421 AD, as many Saxons were migrating to Britain, a Saxon chieftain was buried at Fallward near the river Weser, in a boat shaped coffin. 1/6 Image Conditions of the soil allowed for excellent preservation of wooden items including a chair and foot stool (mentioned in my swastika video) with a runic inscription saying what may be the chief's nick name Alguskathi "elk -harmer".

(my pics shows the foot stool) 2/6 Image
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Aug 4, 2025 6 tweets 3 min read
Danish photographer Jonas Radtke has produced a series of images depicting people from different periods of Northern European history.

Here are some of his work, beginning with two Mesolithic people (WHG) of the Ertebølle culture Image
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A shaman woman and a sexy fisher woman also of the Mesolithic Ertebølle culture Image
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Dec 11, 2024 5 tweets 4 min read
What are Zierscheibe? 🧵
On the internet, the word has been used to describe the specific Germanic sun wheel which was used by Himmler to decorate the floor of Wewelsberg castle (used as a school for the SS). In fact Himmler took the so called “sonnenrad” or” black sun” design from a Zierscheibe, but Zierscheibe just means “ornamental disc” and such discs have many different symbols on them. The example here was found in Niederbreisig. 1/5Image
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The decorative discs, cast from bronze, were part of a Germanic woman's belt-fastened sash in the late Merovingian period (6th-7th century). They are particularly common in Germany, and Holland, but are also found in France, England, Scandinavia and Italy.

Today they are associated with allegedly solar motifs. These include sun wheels, black suns and swastikas. You can see why the Nazis liked them. However such geometric designs are no more common than theriomorphic and anthropomorphic-figurative motifs.

Pictured: Alemannic Zierscheibe from Herbrechtingen (6th century), from pfahlheim, a Frankish eg with sunwheel, several german designs 2/5Image
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Oct 29, 2024 7 tweets 5 min read
🧵 Some British and Australian people WRONGLY dismiss Halloween as a commercial American custom. Others think the origin of pumpkin jack-o'-lanterns is exclusively Irish or at least “Celtic”. In reality these lanterns are as much British as Irish, and the tradition is found in other Germanic nations such as Germany and Sweden too.

pic: Traditional turnip lantern at the Museum of Country Life in Ireland 1/7Image Prior to the American pumpkin tradition, people in Ireland, Scotland and England used turnips, swedes and mangelwurzels. The lanterns were associated with the Catholic holiday of All Hallow’s Eve in Ireland, but protestants in Britain sometimes moved the festival, such as in Somerset where it was held on the last Thursday of October and was called “punkie night”. Punkie means ‘jack-o-lantern’ in West Country dialect and these were carried about in a tradition much like trick or treating in America. They didn’t always have faces carved on them, but they were always intended to scare away evil.

The word punkie probably comes from Old English Pūcan or pūclas which were evil spirits in Anglo-Saxon folklore, cognate to Swedish and Norwegian puke “evil spirit”. The Irish word púca”spirit” is probably a loan from Old English as the p sound didn’t exist in primitive Gaelic.

pic: punkie night in Hinton St George, England. 2/7Image
Jun 24, 2024 6 tweets 6 min read
Some controversy has arisen recently about the “Dark Briton” phenotype. Such people are found all over Britain and Ireland but are more common in Wales, Cornwall and Southern Ireland. In Britain prior to the 1950’s we used to refer to such people as “black” which is confusing now due to modern racial terminology. In this thread I will explain that British people have diverse phenotypes and that these swarthy people are just normal natives of the British isles.



Historically there have been a number of popular pseudo-historical explanations for these darker people. The most common was that they were descended from Spanish sailors washed ashore after the Armada sank in 1588. This is nonsense. A somewhat more plausible theory that was common among academics of the 19th century is that they are native Britons who have less Anglo-Saxon blood. 1/6 🧵Image While it is true that such people are more commonly found in Western regions like Cornwall and Wales (Tom Jones pictured is Welsh - the 1st map shows averaged regional phenotypes) they are also found all over the island. What’s more, many Welsh and Cornish etc are very fair with blonde hair and blue eyes. The fairest skinned people in the world live in Northern Ireland which is “Celtic”. So we cannot say the pre-Saxon Britons or Celts were all dark, and that blondism in Britain was a Germanic introduction. In fact, many Danes are dark too, so this narrative is just a crude simplification. That said, it is probably the case that the frequency of the phenotype being rarer in the East has something to do with Anglo-Saxon ancestry being higher there (pie chart map w data from Gretzinger et al 2022 shows red as Anglo-Saxon which is up to 50% in the East, compared to just 25% in Cornwall, blue = Iron Age Briton). 2/6Image
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Apr 26, 2024 4 tweets 2 min read
How old is the steppe hypothesis of an Indo-European homeland? 🧵

A European origin for the PIE language was first suggested by Heinrich Schulz in 1826. Most people still thought it was in Asia because Sanskrit is so archaic. In 1851 Robert Gordon Latham, in a prologue for Germania by Tacitus, argues again for a European urheimat (see pics)Image
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Latham suggested Lithuania as a possible origin, but significantly, he also identified the Pontic-Caspian steppe as of likely significance to the PIE speakers, mentioning the Volga and the Dnieper. Image
Mar 11, 2024 5 tweets 2 min read
Left: 19th c. Japanese depiction of an Englishman
Right: 18th c. Chinese depiction of an Englishman
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Left: 1860 Japanese depiction of an Englishman walking Right: 18th c. Chinese depiction of an English people
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Feb 28, 2024 5 tweets 3 min read
🧵Fairy euhemerism 🧵
A popular current within Victorian Fairy lore was a belief that fairies of British folklore (deriving from Saxon/Norse elves as well as Gaelic Sidhe) were in fact an historical aboriginal race of the isles who were darker and shorter than the "Aryan" invaders (a term they used to refer to the Beaker folk in those days) who replaced them. 1/5Image In his effort to prove that the fairies derive from racial memories of the "small-statured pre-Celtic race", folklorist David MacRitchie was determined to demonstrate that the focus of longbarrows in fairylore is due to their being of pre-Indo-European manufacture.
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May 22, 2023 9 tweets 4 min read
Ubba was a commander of the Great Heathen army which invaded England in the 860’s. He may have been a Frisian but most of the army were Danish. Ubba was slain in Devon at the Battle of Cynwit in 878. But where did this take place? 🧵 Image Asser’s Vita Alfedi and the Anglo-Saxon chronicle both point to Devon which the army approached from Wales after having raided at Dyfed. In a later tradition Ubba is said to be a son of Ragnar Lodbrok. Here they are both depicted worshipping idols of their gods. Image