Reference on Numbers of Saxons

[Anthony Appleyard]

INDO-EUROPEAN mailing list <indo-european at xkl.com>
  "David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:-

> ... by which the original Celtic inhabitants were expelled or exterminated
> ...

It is likelier that any big loss of Celtic population in lowland Britain at
this time was due to natural causes. I saw a TV program a year or two ago that
showed that at that time something, perhaps a very massive volcanic eruption
in Indonesia, darkened the sky so badly that across the world two successive
harvests were wiped out, causing famine. It also said that in those conditions
cattle survived better than horses, and that gave the Central Asian Turkic
people an advantage over their Mongol etc neighbours and started the big
expansion of the Turkic peoples in Asia and into Europe. Mike Baillie
(m.baillie at qub.ac.uk) has theorized about a natural disaster at this time. I
have seen speculations that there was a Tunguska-type comet fragment impact in
the English Midlands at that time.

As to where the eruption was, the TV program said Krakatoa, but I and Baillie
suspect not. I read that the Javan `Book of Kings' records about this time a
massive blow-out-and-subsidence eruption in the east end of the Sunda Strait,
sinking land called Kapi which previously joined Java to Sumatra.