Along with the decline of the world capitalist economy and the growing poverty - especially in the countries of the "South", there has been a growing need for populations to migrate in order to survive economically and
With the increasingly lethal constraints of a system which relies on competition for finite markets, there has been a rise too, of anti-immigrant politics and politicians with the job of redirecting anger against this rotten system at the easiest targets they can find - strangers... foreigners... people who look different... As a result, there have recently been what can only be described as racist pogroms, for instance what happened recently in North Belfast.
Britain and the US have long since had home-grown propagators of anti-migrant scapegoating; immigrants blamed for all social problems, caused, not by too much immigration, but by a capitalist class that lives off exploiting the labour of the poor and appropriates all the wealth from their sweat and blood into its own hands, for its own enjoyment. It was ever thus. From Oswald Mosley to Enoch Powell, to Tucker Carlson, Trump, Farage and Tommy Robinson, they all try to stir up racial hatred for the sake of maintaining this rotten class system based on exploitation.
But it was Keir Starmer himself - the now former British prime minister - who echoed the notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech by Enoch Powell on May 12, 2025, when he argued that Britain needed stricter immigration rules to avoid becoming "an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together". This wasn't the first time a Labour politician had implied immigrants were to blame for the parsimony and greed of the capitalists and the lack of state investment in public services (over decades!). When he was Home Secretary under Tony Blair in 2001-4, David Blunkett accused immigrants of clogging up the NHS. Starmer ended his speech by declaring the previous "one-nation experiment in open borders" a "squalid chapter" in the country's history!
As far as the working class is concerned, this is hogwash. We know very well why there is "undue pressure on housing and services" and it's definitely not due to "too much immigration", but too little squeezing of the rich, who haven't paid their share in decades, hence the degeneration of services, in this, the 6th richest country in the world!
The following article uses science and history to explain why we are all immigrants and how our genetic make-up today still bears traces of our extremely interesting and very colourful prehistoric past.
Migration is in our DNA
It is in Africa that modern humans - the species Homo sapiens sapiens - emerged 300,000 years ago. It is there that we spent 240,000 years, or 80% of our evolutionary history. Africa is the cradle of humanity, because it is there that the oldest Homo sapien fossils have been found, but also the fossils of all known intermediary steps in evolution which have occurred between the first appearance of ape-like species - our common ancestors - and the modern human.
Today's fossil evidence established that humans emigrated from their African "home continent" in multiple waves, the first one as early as 250,000 years ago. But it was 70,000 years ago, that a major wave of migration began that led to the population of Islands as far away as New Zealand and the Southern tip of South America.
It is precisely because of this common beginning, that the DNA of all human beings - whatever our skin tone, hair, eye colour, etc. - is extremely similar at 99.9%. Even when comparing humans with chimpanzees - our closest living relatives - two individuals within a troop are more genetically different than two humans from far away parts of the world.
Migration was (and is still today) an engine for humanity's advancement. In prehistoric times, it allowed populations to mix, exchange ideas, knowledge, and technology. It allowed populations of Homo sapiens to create links and share their experiences and resources instead of having to re-learn or re-discover things from scratch - relying on a widespread social web for survival. This is shown by findings of similar tools, implying similar crafting techniques - but also volcanic glass (obsidian) materials which were found in locations hundreds of kilometres apart, but traced as originating in the same site.
We were nomadic hunter-gatherers (i.e., travellers, as a small minority of us still are), moving from spot to spot as soon as resources became scarce, in search of more abundant hunting grounds. If our existence was
What does a Brit look like?
Britain has only been continuously inhabited since 11,700 years ago. At the time, warmer spells marked the end of the last Ice Age, causing the enormous ice sheet which covered Northern Europe to recede. This allowed Nomadic hunter-gatherers to access Doggerland - the vast green steppe which is today submerged beneath the North Sea. There was no such thing as the British isles then; our ancestors just walked through a land corridor, following herds of reindeer which moved northwards looking for new grazing lands.
Human remains found in Somerset, dating from this period (Mesolithic), so called "Cheddar man", were submitted to DNA analysis. They found that these first "Brits" had dark brown to black skin (similar to men originating from sub-Saharan Africa today), curly hair and striking blue eyes. In fact, their black skin was a trait retained from their/our African ancestors.
This was the common appearance of the so called Western European hunter-gatherers who reached Northern Europe from the near East. It was as they wandered near the Black sea, that the first blue-eyed human was born some 14,000 years ago - before then, we all had brown eyes. Within our eyes - whether blue, green or brown - we have one single pigment called melanin. Melanin is excellent at absorbing U-V rays, thus protecting our inner eye from damage. When it is produced in too-small quantities, light is not absorbed and gets through the iris, where it's scattered by collagen fibres - making the iris look blue. This trait didn't seem to offer any particular advantage, and seems to have been socially selected - to the point where most early Western Europeans had blue eyes. As for white skin, it became common much later, when populations of farmers spread to Europe from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East and Anatolia (Turkey). While the earliest individual with paler skin dates from 22,000 years ago - based on genetic evidence - the spread of white skin in the region, was an indirect outcome of the Neolithic revolution, which began 12,000 years ago. At this time, humans learnt to domesticate plants and animals, crafted the first ploughs and harvesting tools, i.e., agriculture was born. While this allowed an enormous increase in food production and led to a population explosion, their diet became much less diverse and cereal-rich - and much poorer in vitamin D. Such deficiency in vitamin D, was detrimental to their survival, since it's essential to be able to process calcium in order to form strong bones, essential for the intense labour in the fields. Our main source of vitamin D, even before our diet, is sunlight. But in regions where the sun is weaker, like in Northern and Central Europe, vitamin D deficiency was common, and it resulted in fragile bones. This is why paler skin was selected in these regions, since it allowed more UV light to go through the skin, producing more vitamin D, and making bones sturdy.
Hunter-gatherer populations like "Cheddar man", for instance, had a very diverse diet including a lot of fatty fish and seal fat (very rich in vitamin D), compensating for the lack of sunlight - this is why their skin remained dark. It's for this same reason, that Inuits today - who live close to the North pole, where the polar night lasts four entire months - have a darker skin compared to peoples further South - like Europeans.
Following the Neolithic revolution, in the space of two thousand years, farming spread to the whole of Europe as cultivated crops became the main source of food. In fact, the early inhabitants of "Britain" became paler 8,000 years ago, after a second wave of migrants arrived - farmers from Anatolia with brown eyes and (paler) olive skin. It is they who introduced agriculture, and whose populations outsized the smaller and sparse hunter-gatherers within a few centuries.
However, the uneven spread of agriculture, side by side with hunter-gatherer populations, meant that many people in Europe maintained black/dark skin until as recently as 3,000 years ago - that is the Bronze Age.
Mixing is the norm: "coffee-coloured people by the score"!
It is worth pointing out that the points above are completely left out of the National Curriculum taught in English schools. There is no mention of the first humans (or pre-humans) arriving in Britain as "travellers" and migrants, let alone any mention of their common African origin - or that their skins were black! Students are left with the impression that humans had been in Britain since time immemorial. Some ancient fossils are used as examples (the Happisburgh footsteps and Boxgrove Man) but only to corroborate that stance.
In a way, what's interesting about these really old fossils - they're 900,000 and 480,000 years old respectively - is that they show how far early-humans managed to travel out of Africa several hundreds of thousands of years before (we) Homo sapiens sapiens did. These early fossils are identified as Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis - but they left "Britain" during the latest ice age.
Homo heidelbergensis became isolated in Europe during the ice age, and evolved into the Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) - one of the few pre-humans to emerge outside of Africa. When Homo sapiens migrated outside of Africa, towards Europe, they mixed. Modern humans have got 1 to 4% of Neanderthal genes in our DNA. Neanderthals became paler - despite their vitamin D-rich diet - after 400,000 years of weak sunlight of which 100,000 years were dark Ice Age winter, but this trait wasn't passed on to us. As mentioned previously, pale skin re-emerged much later on different genes. What Homo sapiens sapiens did inherit from neanderthalensis, were immunity genes allowing it to survive Eurasian diseases. Neanderthal was the only modern human species (different from ourselves) with which we cohabitated and mixed, for a "short" window of 10,000 years. All other species, were extinct for at least 50,000 years before Homo sapiens spread globally.
If we were back in a history lesson in an English school, the timeline would skip the entire Paleolithic and Neolithic periods of prehistory and jump strait into the Romans and the Vikings! The Neolithic revolution, the bronze age and iron age would be mentioned very superfi cially and briefly - once upon a time - in primaryschool!
In this way, the curriculum skips through the most important migration event in Britain, that is, the arrival of the Bell Beaker peoples, who arrived 4,500 years ago - after the Anatolian farmers - from the great Russian steppes. These pale-skinned (although still darker than Europeans) "Russians" - the Caspian Yamnaya culture - were really good at making pottery, and were named after their bell-shaped vessels from which they used to drink mead and beer at feasts and during rituals. They had wheeled vehicles pulled by horses, since they were pastoral horse-riders, but were also farmers and very skilled in metallurgy.
They took Britain into the bronze age. A site in Llandudno in Wales shows smelting of copper at 1,100°C in clay containers fuelled by charcoal, which was then alloyed with tin to make bronze, and later cast into daggers.
Before their arrival, all tools had been made of flint stone. This was possible, thanks to their mining skills, including "deep" mining - 70 metres deep, and only limited by the lack of water pumping technology! As shown by the Great Orme prehistoric mine (at the same Llandudno site), where 12,600 tones of copper ore was extracted to make 2,000 tones of bronze. The resulting daggers found their way all over Europe.
Within a few centuries, the Beaker civilisation represented 90% of the population in Britain. This was due to their mobility - on horses with wheeled carriages - while the static Neolithic farmers suffered bad harvests due to soil exhaustion. The Anatolian farmers were probably already in decline, due to the plague when the Beaker people arrived, since there's no evidence of war. And traces of "Yersinia pestis" DNA (the bacterium responsible for the plague) were found conserved inside their tooth pulp. The Beaker people had already developed some immunity against it.
The prevalence of the Beaker people during this period, is often called a "replacement", i.e., their network of tribes grew and spread to the point of representing the majority of inhabitants - the greatest "replacement" in British history. But in actual fact, all of the populations mixed, just as the Anatolian farmers and the Western hunter-gatherers had done before them.
Today's Britons are like all other humans around the world - thankfully! Apart from very minuscule differences, which come from our pre-historic black elders. But to spot these differences, scientists are compelled to zoom into the DNA looking for markers called Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP). These are single isolated changes (mutations), at the scale of our DNA - which is made of 6.4 billion nucleotides (the building bricks of our chromosomal make up)! It's the sequence of these assembled SNPs which allows forensic scientists to identify unique individuals.
"Replacing"... what was already fully merged into our rich mix?
Today's talk of "replacement", of native British people by immigrants and immigrant culture echoes the anti-Semitic "great replacement" conspiracy "theories" which claimed that through some secret plan carried by an elite ("the Elders of Zion"), the Jewish "race" was going to take over and replace the "white race"! This was spread by Nazi propaganda in the run-up to WW2. Today similar racist poison is repeated by some of the farright, substituting Muslims for Jews.
Suella Braverman, former Tory Home Secretary and now Reform member, speaking during a visit to the US in 2023, said migration to Britain and Europe in the past 25 years had been "too much, too quick" and that "If cultural change is too rapid and too big then what was there is diluted. Eventually it will disappear". She selfproclaims to be the living proof of her own replacement theory, given her upbringing in the international London suburb of Harrow, where her family was among the many Ugandan and Kenyan Asians who came to live there after being expelled from Africa.
In the last 500 years, and particularly since the beginning of migration as the basis of the supply of labour in a world market, the movement of peoples has increased enormously. It follows that the mixing of populations has also increased by several orders of magnitude, of which Braverman's ancestry is a proof. But despite all the movement, contrary to her claims, it just amounted to bringing new ingredients into an already mixed stew!
Research published in 2024, in the scientific review Nature, concluded from the analysis of DNA over 5,000 years, that it was the mixing of populations as a result of migration that accounted for most of our human diversity. And that this has far outpaced natural selection as an engine of human evolution. What's more, it is this diversity that can help us face some of the major problems that our species is likely to face in the future, like global pandemics and climate change.
Genetic mixing gives individuals a broader immune repertoire against diseases - so-called "hybrid vigour" provides the best "immunity cocktail". So the more migrants from the more diverse places around the world, the healthier everyone will be - and the less "the burden on the NHS"! Not to mention the massive reduction in harmful genetic diseases which occur when there is too little genetic mixing.
Uproar against our black ancestors
In 2018, when a Channel 4 documentary called "The First Brit", revealed the discovery of "Cheddar man", it caused an uproar. The producer of the documentary, Afua Hirsch, a British-Ghanaian mixed-race woman, writer of the book "Brit(ish)", had intended to challenge, precisely, the idea of a "pure white British identity" and the fact that non-whites in this country are treated as "perpetual foreigners". Politicians and right wing commentators, jumped on the occasion to call the fi ndings "fake news" and the result of "mixed race agenda and liberal elite" leaning desperately on the technical limitations of the scientific method used.
Never mind that by 2018, there was already a strong scientific consensus regarding Western huntergatherers, as several studies across Europe had confi rmed their dark skin tone and blue eyes. Several reputable geneticists had already discovered that this combination was the norm for Mesolithic Europeans. "Cheddar man" only added a British example.
Far-right Tommy Robinson voiced his outrage at this "removal of the claim to be an 'indigenous' white British person and their right to Britain". And yes "white British identity" was indeed being delegitimised - by science!
And rubbing salt in the wound, the Daily Mirror pointed out that the fossils of "Cheddar man" had been found in the constituency of the reactionary former Tory MP, "Sir" Jacob Rees Mogg - living proof of reverse-evolution and in the eyes of "Cheddar man", certainly an unwelcome immigrant! Of course, we all know that anti-migrant views whipped up by the political establishment have nothing to do with truth or science. They are designed to set worker against worker; an attempt to break the tried and tested resistance workers have practised over millennia, that united we stand, divided we fall. They want to try to divide us.
Real "replacements" or exterminations of peoples have taken place during the colonial period of the "progressive" stage of capitalism. So, for instance, 95% of the native American population was exterminated, as were the Tasmanian and Australian aborigines in the 19th Century. And then later, during the imperialist phase, came Hitler's attempt to kill the whole Jewish population of Europe. The working class - an international class made up of migrants from everywhere - will not forget any of this. An injury to one, is an injury to all.
What's more, migration, beyond spreading genes, spreads ideas and knowledge, memories and history. The ruling class knows and fears this vitalising cross-pollination. Hence its relentless checks on immigration and its mounting of borders! But no matter what they do, they cannot stop the inevitable consequence of human development - which is the movement and mixing of the whole human race, as and when needed - and also, as we so wish!
30 July 2026