The widely accepted new paradigm of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons abandoned the old idea of mass arrivals in favour of an elite takeover. Small groups of warriors sailed over from Europe, killed the native kings and took over their kingdoms while the native population gradually adopted the language and customs of their new rulers.

Then something new came on the scene that had the potential to completely confirm the new paradigm: DNA and isotopic analysis. Among other things, isotopic analysis of teeth allows us to find out where somebody was born and brought up. As teeth are the parts of the body that survive burial best, they offer a valuable insight into the origins of the person excavated. DNA analysis can show the descent of the individual concerned.

The first tranche of DNA studies provided somewhat contradictory findings. These studies attempted to extrapolate backwards from the contemporary population of England to work out where people came from, rather like the popular DNA testing kits that purport to tell people their ancestry. However, it proved very difficult to reliably work backwards as far as necessary to find the origins of the Anglo-Saxons. A much better way for testing this would be to take DNA from people buried between the 5^th and 7^th centuries and test what their ancestry was. But extracting usable, and uncontaminated aDNA (which simply stands for ancient DNA) was initially very difficult if not impossible.