The Ancients - End of Stone Age Orkney

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

Around 5200 years ago, during the Neolithic period, when farming first took hold, Orkney was a hugely influential cultural centre. Yet, as Europe moved into the Bronze Age, the islands’ influence dwindled and Orkney became more insular. But what do we know about the arrival of the Bronze Age in Orkney and Scotland?In today’s episode of The Ancients, Tristan is joined by Professor Martin Richards from University of Huddersfield, one of the leaders of an exciting new research project. Working along side researchers who uncovered DNA evidence that brings to light new information for this moment of Britain’s prehistory, Martin and the team's work is helping change the way Stone Age Orkney is viewed.By combining archaeology with the study of ancient DNA from Bronze Age human remains, researchers now know much more about this time than ever before, and the results have come as a great surprise to geneticists and archaeologists alike.To watch our brand new documentary series on Prehistoric Scotland click here:https://access.historyhit.com/ancient-and-classical/videos/mysteries-of-prehistoric-scotland-episode-oneFor more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. For your chance to win five non-fiction history books - including a signed copy of Dan Snow's On This Day in History - please fill out this short survey: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/survey-taken/?sm=IthGeoCcJUiKNx0R8Pv7Ogn50xYWgriQdyDMjMZwy8jmNE1jQh63NtWjK1DQdAssMjnsuFzX5eJOGw0w3NS4sgHthi59y72wWjesdfmNxyU_3DIf you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code ANCIENTS for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription.To download, go to Android > or Apple store >

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, recently on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, well recently on History Hit TV, very excitingly we released our new series all about prehistoric Scotland. We released our first episode all about Stone Age Orkney and this podcast is almost a continuum from the end of that

first episode. Today we're looking at Stone Age Orkney but we're looking at the end of the Stone Age in Orkney, the end of the Neolithic and the arrival of the Bronze Age. What do we know about this incredibly important time in Orkney, in Scotland, in Britain's prehistory? Well, joining me today, I was delighted to get on the podcast to interview a few months back, Professor Martin Richards from the University of Huddersfield. He and his team have been working on new evidence that is bringing to light new information about this seismic moment in British prehistory, focusing on a site called the Links of Knotsland. Now Martin, to explain all of this, it was great to get him on the podcast and without further ado, to talk all about the end of the

Stone Age on Orkney, the beginning of the bronze age what happens now here's Martin. Martin thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. You're very welcome. Now Orkney I mean ancient Orkney whether Neolithic or whatever it's such a fascinating place isn't it and our minds may instantly go to Neolithic Orkney, but Martin, the story of what happens next, the next step, the next phase of Orkney's ancient history, it seems it's just as fascinating, if not more. Yes, well, it's certainly unexpected what we've found. So yes, I think so. And I think it's been a surprise to quite a lot of people, if for different reasons in some cases. Well, let's delve into the background, first of all. Now, Orkney, this island off the northern

coast of Britain, major cultural centre during the Neolithic. But can you give us a bit of a brief overview about Orkney and Neolithic, how we know so much about it, and why we know that this was such an important place, shall we say? Well, I suppose that I'm not an expert on the archaeology of Orkney, but it's obviously very famous. And that's partly, I suppose, because of the fact that being so far north, unlike most of Neolithic Europe, everything was done in stone. So there are stone houses and stone monuments and so on, which have survived exceptionally well. So I think that's probably one thing that shows us that Orkney was a very exceptional place during the late Neolithic, at least. And that may be, I suppose, for all sorts of possible reasons. One that springs to

mind is that the climate was more favourable in Orkney for longer than it was. I think when people first, when farmers first came to Britain, the climate was sort of heading towards the end of what we call the Holocene climatic optimum. So a very nice period that had lasted for a few thousand years was slowly coming to an end. And that had consequences across the whole of Europe. And it did for Orkney but it was later in Orkney so the decline came later and the populations had longer to persist. Well you mentioned late Neolithic there so let's start delving towards your research and these incredible results that you and your team have found. I mean what time period are we talking

there for in regards to your research the end of Neolithic Orkney, that time period? How far back are we going? 1600 or a bit earlier BC. And we're talking about, if we're talking about the late Neolithic, that's from about 3200 onwards to about 2500 BC, which is when the big transformation to the metal ages sort of starts across Western Europe. The period that we're focused on in this research is to some extent the Neolithic because that nobody had really, so although there was some data, some genome data from Neolithic Europe that we had for comparison, that had been part of a much bigger study and hadn't really been focused on previously. And that goes back to 3500 or so, I think we have published genome data from about 2500 to 3500 BC. And then we ourselves sought more genome data from a Bronze Age cemetery,

which dates to between about 1400 and 1700 BC. And what was this Bronze Age cemetery then, Martin? I mean, talk us through your aim of your research, your team's research around this cemetery, what you were hoping to find from the data that you were able to extract. Well, we looked at a cemetery at the site of the links of Naltland, which is in northwest Westray, right in the northwest of the whole Orkney Archipelago, actually. So right on the edge. And we looked there because we had made contact with a couple of archaeologists who'd been excavating that site. And it's really one of the best studied, or if actually probably the best studied, Bronze Age site in Orkney.

And they'd already been doing a lot of work, which was changing our view of what the Bronze Age in Orkney was like. So they were archaeologists Hazel Moore and Graham Wilson, and they've been working on the site since about 2006, I think, or something like that. So for quite a long time. And the links in Auckland is it's a site which goes right the way back to more than 5000 years ago. So it runs through the Neolithic into the Bronze Age and right the way down to the Iron Age. So it's not necessarily exhibiting continuity of settlement, although it may do, but it has more or less continuous occupation

right the way through from the late Neolithic through the early Neolithic through to the early Iron Age. So it's come up with some quite spectacular finds as regards. So there was a Neolithic village there, sort of analogous to Scarab Ray and other Neolithic villages, which, as you probably know, are sort of very nucleated. So it's a village structure. And then in the Bronze Age, it is replaced by,

as the Bronze Age is elsewhere, much more dispersed farmstead settlements. There seem to be three households organised around a cemetery, with a sort of cemetery in the middle, which itself is in three clusters, as if they're kind of household cemeteries. So we see this sort of general thing that you get in the Bronze Age of a much more individualised culture, much less communal and much more sort of family groups rather than, but no burial mounds, anything like that. Nothing spectacular, no evidence of elites there at all, unlike some other parts of Orkney. Just simple farming community, I say community, but yeah, sort of a collection of households.

I say community, but yeah, sort of a collection of households. I mean, Martin, it's so interesting. I mean, when we get to Bronze Age Orkney, and you've mentioned the cemetery and you mentioned the nearby settlements at the links of Northland. I mean, when talking about Bronze Age Orkney, the sources for that, the archaeology that you do, is it mainly centred around these cemeteries? Are cemeteries some of the main things that survive from Bronze Age Orkney?

Do you not get as many settlements, as say in the preceding Neolithic, at least that survive from Bronze Age Orkney? Do you not get as many settlements as say in the preceding Neolithic, at least that survive in the record? Yeah, it's mainly burials. And I guess to some extent, that's true of the Bronze Age as a whole, that really, especially in the early days of the Bronze Age, you were talking about pastoralist communities. So there's this big change, not right the way across from Western to Eastern Europe after about, well, coinciding, I guess, with this climatic downturn towards pastoralism across Europe as it became harder and harder to grow crops, especially wheat. So we see that later on after the downturn in Orkney, which is about 4,800 rather than the mid-third millennium BC.

And Martin, so what burials did you and your team, which burials in particular, did you study for this project? Well, we studied some burials from each of the three clusters. They're very varied. So there's one, we studied some individuals from a multiple burial of 22 individuals, but most of them are single or just several burials. And we just studied, we had 25 samples and a PhD student called Katerina Dullius extracted those for DNA. And of those, 23 were successful. So the preservation is fantastic.

Quite often, ancient DNA is very difficult to recover. As I'm sure you know, quite often you'll get less than 1% endogenous DNA. So less than 1% of what you get out of a sample is from the original material. And some of those samples that Katerina extracted had more than 60% endogenous DNA. endogenous DNA. So they're very, very nicely preserved, which is, I think, a common thing in Orkney. Of the 23 that were successful, they represent 22 individuals. So it was possible to see that one of them, two of the samples were from the same individual. So we had 22 in total. And she also extracted three from an Iron Age cemetery on the south of Westray as well. So there were 25. And another 12 from across Scotland and England during the Bronze Age and Iron Age as well. I mean, now, Martin, it might seem a very, very basic question. But for a Joe Bloggers like myself, it's really, really interesting.

And I'd love to know a bit more about it. How do you or Katerina or you or one of your team, how do they go about extracting DNA from one of these burials, from one of these skeletons and going about the process of analysing their genomes? What's the crazy science behind that? Okay, well we have an ancient DNA clean room which is a good distance away from the rest of the science block. So one of the main issues that's always been a problem with ancient DNA is, as you can imagine, it's very degraded, very fragmented. And as a result, and damaged, and as a result of that, it's very easy to contaminate with very, very small amounts of modern DNA because the ancient DNA is very fragile.

So we have this lab, a lab that she has, you know, she walks to, she has to get suited up with looking like she's wearing a space suit when she goes in. I mean, two people go in, I think sort of it's, you know, the sort of general situation is that she would go in with either another PhD student or with Corridor and Edward who manages that lab and is our ancient DNA expert here. with Corridor and Edward, who manages that lab and is our ancient DNA expert here. And then they grind. So it's not so different from extracting modern DNA from blood, but obviously you're starting off with either bone or teeth.

So they have to be ground up and powdered, and then that's extracted more or less with the same kind of reagents as a modern DNA sample. you know with the same kind of reagents as a modern DNA sample then they having done that she can then prepare that for DNA sequencing that involves various stages including going through to the modern lab which is in you know in the biology block and then the actual sequencing process is done in Korea so we have a lab in, a sequencing company that is used to doing, you know, to working with ancient DNA samples and is able to do that. And the sequencing is done with nowadays with what's actually, what's made the whole thing possible is what's called next

generation sequencing, which is another world for it is massively parallel DNA sequencing. You're sequencing in very, very small fragments multiple times and sort of take an average of all the sequences. And you hope that you get enough information from that. So you sequence across the, it's called shotgun sequencing. They sequence randomly across the whole of the human genome.

And so we have a random sample. It's not like having a whole genome at the end of it, like when you do a modern human genome, but you have a reasonably good fraction of it and it's enough to compare with other genomes, other ancient samples or other modern samples as well. Hi there, I'm Kate Lister, sex historian and author, and I am the host of Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a new podcast from History Hit. Join me as I root around the topics which have been skipped over in your school history lessons. Everything from the history of swearing to pubic hair, satanic panic, cults, there is nothing off limits. We'll be bed hopping around different time periods from ancient civilizations to the middle ages to renaissance and early modern right up to now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You know I never used to be that interested in the science behind the archaeology at university and i kind of regret it now because whenever i listen to these sciencey things of new discoveries

or whatever it always blows your mind you know you say the distances involved you know lab and career but all that kind of the and the information that you guys can now gather out of it to find out so much more about these people living thousands of years ago is really astonishing. And go on then, Martin, we have been waiting long enough now. What about the results from the genomic data? What did these burials and the genomes, what did it reveal about these Bronze Age Orcadians and their ancestry? Okay, so what I think most archaeologists have typically thought over the years about the Bronze Age in Orkney, and this may be, well, it's surely to some extent a bias because Neolithic Orkney was so spectacular with all its monumental structures and stone circles and all this sort of thing, is that Bronze Age Orkney was a culture in recession, really, in deep decline. It was isolated, it was

a backwater, and the population was sort of puttering on by itself with no real contact with the rest of the world, despite having been extremely influential on the culture of Britain and Ireland across, you know, the span of the late Neolithic. So I don't think, well, I know that archaeologists did not expect to see any evidence of much contact with the rest of Europe. And what we actually do see is, in some ways, a very similar pattern to what is seen across the rest of Britain, and in in fact the rest of Europe, more or less, which is a massive transformation that was going on from the beginning of the third millennium BC right the way through until the period that we're talking about,

which was an expansion of populations from the steppe region around the Black Sea across Europe, pastoralist populations who were most likely speaking Indo-European languages, into Western Europe, where they formed the well-known Belbeaker culture. And this Belbeaker culture we've known for a couple of years, not for very long, but from ancient DNA work done elsewhere, we know that those bell beaker populations spread into Britain. And I hate to use the word replacement, but they really drastically transformed the genetic structure of the British population. So there was a very large immigration about 2500 BC into most of Britain with copper and with bell beakers. And this, you know, led to the Bronze Age in Britain.

And I think most archaeologists did not really expect to see that. So you don't see very much evidence of bell beakers in Orkney at the end of the Neolithic, beginning of the Bronze Age. You don't see much in the way of evidence of archery, which is another characteristic of the bell beaker culture in Western Europe, or of metal, actually. I mean, there's not much copper or bronze at all. And I think the, you know, it was imagined that Orkney went its own way, really, and just, you know, just carried on as a backwater. And in actual fact, what we see is that by the end of the early Bronze Age in Orkney, the population had been completely transformed. So more or less, there was

rather similar to what had happened in the rest of Britain. There is a virtually a 95% change over in the genome structure of the people that we looked at in comparison with the Neolithic. So in the space of a few hundred years, there has been, I mean, we're talking about, as I said, we're talking about between about 2500 BC and about 1800 BC. So it's, yeah, to the resolution that we've looked at, it's over 700 years. There is a complete change in the genomes of the Orcadians. So that was unexpected for the archaeologists. And that's one thing. But for us, who, you know, obviously, we're very aware that this transformation being

discovered by ancient DNA research coming across Europe in the last few years, is that we don't see the same pattern of transformation that we see elsewhere. So in Orkney, what you see in across most of Europe is that that transformation looks to be male-led. So the male lineages, which you can trace using the Y chromosome, change almost completely across Europe by the Bronze Age. So from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, there is almost complete replacement of the male minor descent. Whereas the female lineages, there are various stages as the Copper Age or the Bronze Age expands across Europe,

where women are drawn in to that population. And you can see that with the mitochondrial lineages, which trace the female line of descent. So the mitochondrial DNA you get from your mother, just like men get their chromosomes from their fathers. So you can look at those independently of the rest of the genome. And what we see in Orkney is that, in fact, most of the mitochondrial DNAs seem to be coming from outside, and most of the Y chromosomes, so the male lineages in the Bronze Age, have been inherited from the local Neolithic. And we don't see that pattern anywhere else in Europe at all. It's completely unique. So for us, that was the most unexpected thing. I mean, Martin, that's absolutely fascinating. You mentioned its uniqueness there. So what does

this therefore potentially suggest that you have these Bronze Age women, rather than men, coming to Orkney and changing the landscape somehow? Yes. So there are various possible ways of looking at that. Given that the male lineages in Orkney persist, and given the strength of the late Neolithic culture and the sort of hierarchies and elites that have been established during the late Neolithic in Orkney. One possibility. So we're not looking at elite settlements here. That was, you know, one obvious possibility was,

well, we're looking at a persistent male elite. So Hazel and Graham told us this is not possible. This is just, there is no evidence for this at this settlement at all. It may be, you know, it may be the case elsewhere in Orkney, but we're right on the fringes here. And this is just a simple farming settlement. But it may be that the marriage patterns that were established in the late Neolithic, which appear to have been just as patrilocal as those of the people coming over from, you know, the Indo-Europeans coming from Eastern Europe, where you have marrying out, basically.

That may be what explains it. So if they were sufficiently well-established across Orkney, perhaps they had a pattern of marrying out set up during the late Neolithic, which involved maybe other parts of Orkney, but the Scottish mainland as well. Then as the population on the Scottish mainland became to be dominated by people who'd spread in from the continent, then maybe those marriage patterns were what then enabled women to be coming into Orkney preferentially rather than men. And of course, it may be that men were coming in, but they just weren't having any children.

I mean, and of course, it may be because one thing I didn't mention is that, of course, it may be that men were coming in, but they just weren't having any children. I mean, and of course, it may be because one thing I didn't mention is that, of course, one of the features of the Bronze Age is a lot of cremations. So more than half, roughly half of the burials at this site are cremations as well. So maybe all the cremations were males from outside, but we'd need to look at more sites. But I don't think that's likely because you don't see that in mainland Britain. So, you know, you see, as I said, you know, amongst the inhumation burials, you see this replacement. So it looks different. Martin, it must be absolutely extraordinary. Now you've got this research and you say how unique it is compared to the rest of Britain, you know to compare these barrels and their genomes to places such as

a beaker grave and kilmars in glen or in scotland or one near stonehenge down in england and just to contrast it looking at the genomes and as you said you know how the neolithic genome persists with the men but not with the women and and to draw those contrasts it must be wonderful you know thanks to all this new research and science to be i guess building together more of a picture putting more pieces of a puzzle together to try and figure out more about this this migration and how it unfolded in orkney compared to the rest of the uk the rest of the british isles absolutely it's something i would never have dreamed possible. I started working, trying to work with ancient DNA decades ago until next generation sequencing was developed about, you

know, only about 15 years ago or so. None of this was really possible at all. It's just, I could not dream of what we're able to do now. It's just, it's just absolutely mind blowing really, yeah. Well, Martin, you also mentioned how the Neolithic male genetic lineage, it persisted into the Bronze Age. Do we know how long those genomes, do we know how long it persists in the Orcadian population? So we don't have a huge amount of post-Bronze Age data yet. You may say we don't have very much data at all.

I think you'd be right. But we have even less for later on. We had three Iron Age individuals in Westray, had Y chromosomes that evolved originally on the steppe, you know, north of the Black Sea. So those male lineages traced all the way back to hunter-gatherers in Russia and Ukraine. So I think there is one Pictish individual subsequently that has been picked up that still has one of those Neolithic lineages. And there is one family amongst hundreds and hundreds that have been looked at in modern Orkney that still has that lineage. But it is vanishingly rare. The rest of Europe, it pretty much completely disappeared after the Neolithic.

And it looks as if, you know, even in Orkney, it dwindled away over the ensuing millennia, maybe even the ensuing centuries. Things changed and those male images pretty much died out by the look of it, almost not quite died out. Well, Martin, it's so, so interesting to hear all this. As you mentioned, looking at Bronze Age Orkney, looking at genomes, genetics, to figure out what was going on at that time putting more pieces of the puzzle together this has been absolutely fascinating chat over the past 25

30 minutes as we wrap up now I'm guessing you and your team or we humans in general we've only just scratched the surface of this topic there must be so much more research so many more cemeteries so much more work to be done to find out more about this next stage in Orkney's ancient history. Yeah, well, of course. I mean, at the moment, we're just looking at one site, and we're mainly looking at one period, you know, over a few hundred years. So yeah, to build that up, to look, I mean, Orkney is such a fascinating place, because then you have, you know, the Pictish populations, and then you have the Vikings coming in, and there was a big genetic transformation with the Vikings, and then gradual sort of immigration from Scotland as well.

So it's an amazing place and it would be nice to really take it step by step. And of course, to look across the rest of Orkney, even in the Bronze Age and the Neolithic as well. So there's quite a lot of variation in the Neolithic. And we find in Bronze Age that another distinctive feature of the genomes in the Bronze Age is that they suggest very small population sizes. So the people we're looking at, even in these multiple burials, are not very closely related, the ones that we've looked at. And yet, they indicate a very small population size. So despite the fact that people had been coming in, women had been coming in, the Orkney Bronze Age has a much smaller, what we call an effective population size,

but it's a kind of a measure of how large the population would have been, even if you can't really trust the numbers. And it's much smaller than in the Neolithic in Orkney. It's much smaller than the Iron Age in Orkney. It's much smaller than the Iron Age in Orkney. It's much smaller than anywhere else in the Bronze Age. I mean, by orders of magnitude. So things were very unusual there. That means you need more data really to unpick the picture more thoroughly. Well, it sounds like you've got many more projects therefore lined up, my friend, you and your team and many others too, to find out more about this awesome chapter in Orkney's

ancient history. We will put a link to your article, to your team and many others too to find out more about this awesome chapter in Orkney's ancient history we will put a link to your article to your team's article in the description of the podcast below so you can all have a look at that and read more on it but Martin it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today you're very welcome thank you for having me well there you go there was professor martin richards explaining what the latest research is revealing and suggesting about what happened on orkney at the end of the neolithic at the end of the stone age i hope you enjoyed the episode now as i mentioned at the start of this episode linking in shamelessly to a new documentary series

which we have just launched on History Hit TV called Mysteries of Prehistoric Scotland. It's one that I've been working closely on for the past few months with a brilliant team. The first of the episodes we've now released is going to be a three-parter and the first episode was all about Stone Age Orkney. So if you want to learn more

about Orkney's incredible prehistoric past, then definitely check out our new Prehistoric Scotland series exclusive to History Hit. And you know what you can do? You can sign up, you can enjoy the free trial. And if you sign up with code ANCIENTS, you can enjoy 50% off

your first three months access to History Hit TV. So there you go, a new prehistoric Scotland series and that ancients code which gives you a sizeable discount for History Hit. Have a look, have a peruse, see if it tickles your fancy and if it doesn't, absolutely fair enough. But anyway, enough History Hit TV promoting from me. Last but certainly not least, if you'd be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on Apple podcasts on spotify wherever you get your podcasts from or we the whole team we'd greatly appreciate it as we continue our mission to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you but that's enough rambling on from me and i'll see you in the next episode side.