The Ancients - The Bronze Age Burials at Stonehenge

Episode Date: December 5, 2021

Today we’re talking all about science, Stonehenge and what we know about a massive migration into Britain at the start of the Bronze Age some 4,500 years ago: the Steppe migration. For years the details of this incredibly important event have been hotly-debated. But recently, a huge new study has analysed the remains of several hundred individuals buried in Britain and dating to this time period, hoping to uncover more about the nature of this migration. Among the remains that were studied included a series of bronze age burials discovered around Stonehenge. So what did the results of the study reveal? How did this migration affect the Neolithic British population that already inhabited this island? And how did these new people perceive ancient monuments such as Stonehenge? To talk through the study and its results, with a particular focus on certain bronze age burials around Stonehenge, Dr Selina Brace returned to the show. An ancient DNA specialist, Selina works at the Natural History Museum and previously appeared on the Ancients podcast for the hit episode ‘Cheddar Man: Science and the Skeleton’.

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, where we are talking all about Stonehenge,

science, and the early Bronze Age populations of Britain. We're going to be talking all about the Beaker people and a huge migration that came to Britain in the early Bronze Age, in the Chalcolithic period. We're going to be looking through the lens of burials discovered and analysed in the area around the ancient historic monument that is Stonehenge. We're going to be looking at these Bronze Age burials and what they can tell us about the whole nature of this huge migration, how it affected the local

British Neolithic population and also how it affected Stonehenge and that monument's importance to the people in Britain, to the people who lived in that area of our island. Now to talk through this, I was delighted to get back on the show Dr. Selina Brace. Selina, she is an ancient DNA specialist from the Natural History Museum. She's been on the podcast once before to talk all about Cheddar Man. She is a legend and it was wonderful a couple of weeks back to head over to Selina's and interview her in person about this incredible topic. So without further ado, to talk all about Stonehenge science and the early Bronze Age populations in Britain, here's Selina.

Selina, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me, Tristan. You're very welcome. We're meeting in person as well this time. Our last podcast on Cheddar Man was a huge hit, now got you on again for this other topic. I mean, Stonehenge, and it's got this quite strong, through the burials around it, this strong Neolithic Bronze Age connection. got this quite strong through the burials around it, this strong Neolithic Bronze Age connection. Yeah, no, I mean Stonehenge is always just a fascinating monument, isn't it? I mean, when you think about it, I think it's arguably the most famous prehistoric monument that we have. I mean, I guess we'd better give some credit to the pyramids, but it's still a very, very famous

monument. Someone would imagine at the time it must have packed a pretty heavy punch there too. And let's set the background for what we're talking about today, because when we're talking about this Neolithic Bronze Age transition, I mean, what time are we talking at? And is this a time of great change? Oh yes, absolutely. So the Chalcolithic early Bronze Age begins in Britain around 2450 BC and so this is the period directly after the Neolithic which is when we had the farmers and these were people who were having a more sedentary lifestyle after we've seen the people before who were the Mesolithic who were the hunter-gatherers. So the people in the Bronze Age had a different kind of lifestyle. I think things like roundhouses were very common at this time. They had a very omnivorous diet, but I think it was relatively high in things like animal proteins, such as cattle and sheep and deer. Although weirdly,

actually saying that so even people who lived in the Bronze Age in like coastal regions, we see very little evidence of a marine component to their diet. So they seem to be a bit off their Although weirdly, actually saying that, so even people who lived in the Bronze Age in like coastal regions, we see very little evidence of a marine component to their diet. So they seem to be a bit off their fish in the Bronze Age. Oh, I mentioned the Chalcolithic. So the Chalcolithic is a term that we use to describe the very end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age. And it's specific to the type of metalworking technology that they were using at the time. So this is when people started to use copper and gold and whilst they initially used copper they then work out that if you add tin to copper you get bronze which is a much harder metal alloy

and so that's why we have this period called the Charcoalithic, then when people stop using copper and work out about bronze then it turns into the Bronze Age. And at this time we've got these words, I know it's a huge question, I've got these words in front of me which seems to connect to all of this. The Beaker People. Selina, big question, who were the Beaker people? Beaker people, yeah, no, these are a really interesting group of people. So it's at the start of the Bronze Age that we see this very distinct new culture in Britain called the Beaker culture, which is named after these very distinctive beakers, these drinking vessels that they would have used, that we find in the archaeological record at this time. So the people who were part of the beaker culture can be identified because they were buried with these very distinctive beakers.

But it's not just about the pottery. It ain't just the pots. So we often call it the beaker phenomenon or the beaker package because it's not just about these beakers it's also about the way that they lived their lives and the type of people they were in terms of they have very different like inhumation rights so they were actually more prone to burying their dead as complete bodies rather than cremating them as i say it's not just about the pots. They have other very specific grave goods that we see buried with them. So things like copper knives, stone wrist guards, flint arrowheads, bone pins. So yeah, it's a whole package of things. It's not just about the beakers.

Not just about the beakers. But the beakers are interesting. But it's not just about the beakers. And linking into all this as well, I've got my notes. I mean, step, the word step, sometimes when you think step you think maybe as far as Kazakhstan, you think, you know, Eurasia and all of that, but at this time alongside the big people, or is this including the big people, there's a step migration. What is this? Yeah, this is a massive migration. This starts from the

region, it's probably to do with the Yamnaya culture, who were a Bronze Age archaeological culture around 3000 BC. And these were people from around the Pontic steppes. So yes, you're right, around the Caspian and the Black Sea. These people were sort of nomadic or semi-nomadic. They were herders. They would have been herding things such as horses and goats and yaks. And these people, or people very closely related to them, have this massive expansion that sweeps from the east of Europe all the way west. And it's in terms of the genetic landscape, this is what we call the steppe-related ancestry, or the western steppe herders and it's this migration that's actually associated with the origins of both the Belbeke culture and things

like the corded ware culture as well which is another culture based on pottery but you see these corded things along that embedded into the top of their pottery and so the expansion of these people literally changed the genetic landscape of Europe and even today if you look at modern populations you can model them based on the ancestry of western hunter-gatherers, neolithic farmers and this steppe-related ancestry. That was the impact that it had. And of course you've told you a lot of genetics of these ancient bodies. Can you just quickly, before we go on, can you give us a bit of background into that and how you can look at genetics to determine where people came from and all of that from ancient history and ancient communities? Yeah, so this is about looking at

the dina itself and versions of genes sometimes. And so we can tell that a version of a gene is more popular or more associated with a certain region. And so when you see that version cropping up, but it's not just one single thing, it's a whole group of this, it's not just one gene, obviously, then that gives us an idea in association with other things as well. We don't work in isolation, obviously, but that gives us the signatures that we're talking about, the proportion of their DNA that we can attribute to a certain type of ancestry. Does that make sense? Yeah. Science and ancient history. They work brilliantly together.

Awesome. So if we move on from that, we'll leave the background of this time period in Britain's history. Now talk to me about this sample, Olalade sample? Olalade? Olalde, yeah. Olalde. Olalde sample. I mean, talk to me about this project. What were its aims and what was it all about? So this had two different starting points actually. It's one of those. So I was working with a group of scientists at the NHM on a Wellcome Trust funded project. We were working with our other colleagues from UCL and we were looking at genomes, ancient DNA from people in Britain from the Mesolithic right the way through to the Bronze Age in Britain. Then we got wind of

the fact that some people from Harvard University at the States were also working on Bronze Age people from Britain. So of course, we did the sensible thing and we joined forces and we put our resources together and our data together. And then along with like a bunch of other people, hundreds of authors on this paper, we actually came together and this resulted in writing a joint paper looking at 400 different individuals from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, but really focusing on the Bell Beaker-associated individuals from Britain. I mean, this isn't just a normal paper then. Over 100 authors and over 400 individual samples. This

is huge, Selina. This is huge in terms of its size. Oh yeah, they're still bigger out there. But it was a big study at the time yeah absolutely fair enough i'm just going back to my days at university you know when i had to write like a 12 000 word dissertation and thinking oh that's a huge paper but compared to this it's nothing no when i started doing dna we were working just on mitochondrial genome the studies i was doing was on a few hundred base pairs of like maybe 20 individuals so going from that to whole genomes of hundreds of individuals, it's changed dramatically in the lifetime that I've been doing this work. Career progression, Selina, career progression.

Not me, no, it's the technology that's changed. I mean, I've probably changed too. Okay, so talk about these like 400 individuals. What individuals were sampled? So a lot of the people that we were something we sampled some people from the continent but most of the people that we were looking at were from Britain we were targeting people who were Bell Beacon associated individuals. And so if we go to the results you've done all these sampling of these individuals what do they suggest

about populations in Britain in the Chalcolithic early Bronze Age? Yeah so looking at these people who are associated with this particular culture we detect a very complex it's always complex isn't it process of cultural spread and so this was defined by both cultural transmission and human transmission. So what I mean by this is sometimes culture is defined by people moving and bringing that culture with them and on other times cultural practices spread without the movement of people. So for instance we went to Iberia and in Iberia most of the Beaker associated individuals showed no or very, very limited steppe-related ancestry. So although the culture came, the people didn't come

with it. But in most of Europe, what we see is a very clear association with the movement of the culture and the movement of the people. So by the DNA, we can tell by looking at this step-related ancestry that otherwise you would just expect to stay on the step, moving across with the culture. And the change in Britain was really strong. And the association there that we see with the movement of the culture and the spread of this step-related ancestry is quite intense. In fact, we see a 90% shift in the change in genetic ancestry at the same time

as we see this movement of people into Britain. 90%? Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. I mean, for something as striking as that in the results, what has therefore emerged as the narratives, the conclusions for these people in Britain at that time? Well, this actually created quite a lot of speculation, not just our study, but lots of studies as well, I have to say. So lots of ideas started coming out, particularly about the spread across Europe, because Britain's still a bit different at this point. But in Europe, these ideas started to emerge that this was actually a very rapid and a very violent takeover. We've got marauding males coming in here now, Chester, and we've got crazy magazine headlines of things like most murderous people of all time found from their DNA, kind of

sensationalist stuff. But some of it was actually based in scientific research. So there is an argument that some of this steppe-related ancestry was moving, sweeping across Europe by bands of what they call them war bands of young men who are setting new territories and possibly practicing what we call exogamous marriages. So migrating males into marrying with local women. So that was one of the thoughts, this very violent takeover by just male war bands. Yeah, so that's something that has been promoted for Europe. The question is, did that happen in Britain? And I would suggest probably not. And why would you suggest probably not? Well, I think quite a few reasons. One of them is that we see quite significant cultural continuity across the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic early Bronze Age. So we see things like late Neolithic ceramics continue to be made in the Bronze Age. And we also see Neolithic motifs appearing on Bronze Age ceramics. So it looks like people are talking,

they're using the same practice, doesn't really sound like a violent takeover. We also have the idea that if it was a violent takeover, that this would sort of infer that it was a very rapid event, that it was like very sudden, of course, you know, you can fight for hundreds of years. I mean, although wars do go on for hundreds of years, I mean, although wars do go on for hundreds of years, I suppose, but a violent takeover would infer rapidity. However, when we look at the DNA evidence, it doesn't look like that's the case in Britain. Because when we look at the proportion of Neolithic ancestry, so farmer ancestry of people at that time, although yes, the huge amount of it is step-related ancestry, we still in the

beginning see groups of people who have some Neolithic ancestry still within their DNA, within their genetics, sometimes up to about 40 percent and when we model this and suggest that there are two populations here, so the ones with very little Neolithic ancestry and ones with some Neolithic ancestry, we get a synchronicity for about 10 to 16 generations and perhaps a direct overlap of I think it's about 145 years. So we think the process in Britain was actually very, very gradual, may have taken about 500 years. And another thought that we have about Britain and whether or not it was a violent takeover is, of course, if it was a violent event, we would then expect to see an increase in the

evidence of violence in the osteology, so in the skeletal remains. But in fact, in the Bronze Age, we don't. Indeed, if we look to the Neolithic, that generally looks to have had a lot more what we call interpersonal violence. I seem to remember, I think it was a curator said to me, oh yeah, Neolithic, there's loads of axes to the face in the Neolithic, which has kind of always struck me as a very vivid image of the Neolithic, but the point here being that there's no sign of an increase in violence in terms of the skeletal remains that we see anyway at the beginning of the Chalcolithic Early Bronze Age. Well let's then get to continue this further and look at some more evidence. Let's get Stonehenge into the conversation

now. Stonehenge, obviously this was a very important place for Neolithic British communities and this importance, can we say, it seems to still be there at this time that we're talking about now? Yes I think so so although Stonehenge was built over long periods of time I think it started about 5,000 years ago the actual stone circle I think was just at the end of the Neolithic 2,500 years ago people were still building on and looking at Stonehenge and building around it even in the Bronze Age. There's like a large community settlement, Durrington Walls around that time and clearly yes it was still an important place for people. And Stonehenge and the area around Stonehenge it's not just above the ground, which is really interesting. It's also what's been discovered below the ground.

Absolutely. So there are a lot of really interesting burials that you see around the Stonehenge area. And we've looked at a few of them in terms of their DNA. We've got a site called Amesbury Down. We've got a site, it's not my site. There is a site, I think Wessex Archaeology has been working. It's all of our site. But Amesbury Down is probably most famous for a grave, an individual called the Amesbury Archer and his grave is the richest in terms of Bronze Age artefacts ever found in Britain. Something like a thousand

objects were found in his grave. I think it was like copper knives, gold hair tresses, wrist guards, arrowheads and of course beaker style pots. This is Bronze Age beaker time. Buried near to him is his companion, called his companion because they found a similar gold tress in his mouth, in his jaw. And interestingly, they both share the same genetic oddity in their feet. They have a strange tarsal morphology in their toes that indicates that they're genetically related. We've got some interesting people called the Boscombe Bowmen. Ah, yes.

We've heard of the Boscombe Bowmen. They like their alliteration don't they with the names. Great isn't it. It makes it easier to remember anyway doesn't it. Yeah so they're a collective of bones from at least nine people but there's a burial which is one complete articulated male skeleton accompanied by about five or six other people, but who are all incomplete and disarticulated. And you've got a skull at his feet and some bones all around him. So it's a really interesting grave sites in and around the Stonehenge area. And these people you talked about, like the Ainsbury archer, the Boscombe bowman,

were these some of the figures that you studied or were there other figures that you and your team studied? Yeah, so we studied these individuals and we studied a number of individuals from all the way around here looking at the DNA and also we didn't but other people looked at the isotope analysis of these individuals as well. Well let's get into the fun stuff then. Selina talk to me about the genetic results of these bodies. What did it reveal? You know what I like talking about. So one of the really fascinating things that we found looking at the DNA from these individuals is in this case actually about their genetic familial relationships. So you can identify closely genetically related individuals by looking at

the length and percentage of DNA that they share between each other, which makes sense, yeah? So we can typically tell first-order relatives, so these would be parent-child or siblings, and we can also tell second, third-order relatives, so grandparents, aunts, cousins. And what's fascinating is that, so out of the 21 individuals we looked at from Wiltshire, so from around Stonehenge, 12 of them were close genetic relatives. Eight out of the 11 people that we looked at from Amesbury Downs were close genetic relatives. So this indicates that, you know, in some cases people from the same genetic family are actually being buried in the same cemeteries, but not always. So one of the interesting ones we saw

is a story of four individuals from three different cemeteries, only a few kilometres apart and just a few kilometres from Stonehenge, where we have a male from Willsford who is the paternal uncle or grandfather of two males from Amesbury who are cousins and one of the cousins is the father of a woman from another cemetery, Porton Down. So it's kind of weird, we've got three generations of genetic relatives and no constant burial ground and the Boscombe Bowmen, of course they're going to be interesting, of, there's fun relatedness stories there. There we have further related individuals. In fact, the disarticulated skulls of the skull that's on its own at the fit of the complete skeleton turns out to be his half brother or cousin.

Go figure. Which is, of course, in stark contrast to the cousins that we see in Amesbury who were buried as complete bodies side by side whereas in Boscombe yeah we've got this strange setup yeah no it is it just seems to change all the way through there's no consistency I think we see some people in Yorkshire in windmill fields where we've got four individuals who are a few meters apart but none of these are genetic relatives because they these are genetic relatives. Because they're not genetic relatives doesn't mean they're not non-biological kin, of course. So they could still have some form of community, but they're not genetic relatives.

So, yeah, no, it's a real mixed bag of people that we see. This is absolutely astonishing, the amount of people who seem to have been related to each other in these various barriers around Stonehenge, but also, as you you say which I think is perhaps one of the most trying things over these generations they're not all buried in the same way too so you can see differences but when you went into the analysis that was when it must have like really you know shone out as you say the big revelation that actually these people are all linked in one way or another. Yeah it's really interesting and it was quite surprising at the time, actually. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era or yoga era,

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Find your push, find your power. Peloton, visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. What did Tudor men like their women to look like? They should have broad shoulders, fleshy arms, fleshy legs, and broad hips. What did 17th century Londoners think of coffee? A syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes. And what did executioners wear? A lot of these guys, they were clothes horses because it's a big public spectacle. All the eyes are on you.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything from monasteries to the Medici, sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So talk to me therefore, we're talking about genetic relatedness, what about their ancestry? Yeah, so from their DNA, looking at the ancestry, again, it's not a simple thing. looking at the ancestry again it's not a simple thing. So a lot of the people that we see at this time have this steppe related ancestry from these bronze age shows which is what we would expect. This is this migration coming on through so these are the ancestors of migrants from the continent but not all of the people have a strict stepperelated ancestry. Some of them have higher levels of Neolithic ancestry in them, a significantly higher proportion.

So some of these people, in fact, yeah, one of our most famous people, the Amesbury Archer, he has an isotopic signature that suggests that he spent his childhood in the Alps. But when we look at his DNA, he has very, very high levels of Neolithic farming ancestry plus the steppe ancestry. Yet his companion falls within the standard steppe ancestry pattern that we see from most individuals. So perhaps it was actually sort of non-homogeneous communities

and these people weren't all from the same homogenous population. One of the Boscombe Bowmen is the same as well. He has very high levels of Neolithic ancestry. In fact, he's got some of the highest levels of Neolithic ancestry that we see in any of the individuals from Britain at this time, so much so that actually we think probably his father was from an entirely Neolithic population whereas his cousin, the chap who's just the head at his feet, has no signs of Neolithic ancestry. So the ones that did have this Neolithic ancestry, because if we're talking about Stonehenge and its importance as a monument, could those people have been related to those who had built Stonehenge previously?

have been related to those who had built Stonehenge previously. So they may have had some ancestry involved with them yes absolutely although what we see is that it's not the case all the time so the majority of people don't have any Neolithic ancestry some of them do but the majority of them don't so the people who we do see something yeah sure yeah no they could be but they still have step ancestry as well so it's not it's not just that they have come down the line just directly from there no so when we say the proportion of it i just mean that they have a higher proportion so that's what i'm saying like their grandfather or in this case the one with the highest, possibly his father. But we use programs that look at the date and the timing of admixture events. And it can show us,

so we can estimate how far in the past an admixture event would have occurred with someone who had a wholly Neolithic background. So it's kind of this computational bioinformatics test that we can use for these things as well. But the majority of people, coming back to the Stonehenge question, so the majority of people that we see don't have a genetic link to people from Stonehenge. And yet a lot of them are buried in really significant places in Stonehenge. So those two cousins that I was talking about, the two cousins from Amesbury, they are actually buried very close to a Neolithic timber post. And there's other examples of this as well. There's a woman from Yonton who's buried in a Neolithic enclosure, a very, very prominent position. And none of these people have any

Neolithic-related ancestry. But because they're buried near to these monuments, near to Stonehenge, near to these, actually in these, the Tilbury Post, one must imagine that they have like an association with it. They certainly have an understanding or a knowledge of these monuments and what was important to them so they've taken this on board as part of their culture one could imagine i mean it just they're not ignoring it that's for sure stonehenge has become important for them that's what it seems anyway i mean i can't tell that strictly from the dna i must stress but it certainly seems to look like that from looking at the levels of ancestry that we see they're not related to these people

and yet their burials and their burial sites would seem to suggest definitely an understanding or certainly a fascination with it's not like it wasn't part of their culture anymore. So Selina what does this therefore suggest about the whole nature of steppe related ancestry? So what this tells us about the movement of people into Britain at the beginning of the Chalcolithic, the early Bronze Ages, it seems unlikely that this was in the case of Britain, groups of, A, just men. It seems very unlikely it was just about the men. We see lots of evidence of women. In fact, actually, the first skeleton that we find that has an isotopic signature of the continent and steppe-related ancestry is, in fact, a woman. So we really don't think in Britain

it's just males coming in in sort of war bands and a violent takeover. No, the picture that we're picking up from both the genetics and the archaeology and the burials that we're seeing is that of communities of people, of both men and women coming across into Britain, potentially living side by side for periods of time with the people who were there before. We think that there is some level of interbreeding. We see this neolithic farmer ancestry sort of cropping back up again in places and we think some of that is actually a resurgence of local british people so intermarrying so these people are not violently coming over and taking over no no i don't think that's the picture the picture we get is much much more peaceful much more zen coming across bringing with them this

culture this beaker associated culture living side by side perhaps a little bit of intermarrying but generally yeah it's about the communities that's what i'd say is the key point here it's about communities of people and as you say this is neolithic population ancestry it is still there maybe slightly underrepresented in that previous study? Yes, so this is actually a really, really interesting point because of course with genetics there can be an absence during this time point and so one of the major problems that we have from this period is about funerary rites that leave no archaeological trace. So cremation is a big problem. From an ancient DNA perspective, it's a bit of a pain for us. He destroys DNA. That's no good for us. We can't get any DNA from

cremated remains. So if lots of people have been cremated, they are then, what we say is, they're invisible to us. But it's not just about the cremations. We also see lower numbers of cremation at the end of the late Neolithic. So people were doing quite varied and often, as we've seen, quite creative things with their dead. So sometimes we think that they just left them outside to decompose. Other times they've been cremating them. Other times there's actually cases where they found body parts of ancestors in people's houses. So sometimes they were keeping them indoors. And other times, yeah, they were disarticulating skeletons and burying them with whole skeletons and all kinds of interesting things.

But the point being, if they don't bury them, they become archaeologically invisible. We can't see them. So there is an absence at this point, which is something that we have to be very, very careful of when we're interpreting our results, because it creates biases. So if we know that a lot of burials leave no trace, then we have to be thinking about this and think, OK, so maybe it's only certain types of people who are buried. So what if it's only the rich or the upper classes who are being buried? Then if we're only getting our DNA from those people, then we're getting a very skewed, non-random subset of the population. And so the inferences that we make might not be representative

of the population as a whole. In some cases we can try and counter this by making sure we look at burials from all sorts of different sites and different types of burials to hope that we're getting a more broader picture of the population but in some cases as in the late Neolithic and also into the bronze age as well because pre-equation becomes popular again just to be annoying for us then there's just nobody there so you there's not much that you can do other than be aware of it and try and add that potential bias into your thinking fair enough yeah i mean uh thankfully i didn't have to deal with that that's all up to you but it sounds like a very annoying issue indeed. But it's interesting to know that. I guess when you

do realize that, it completely alters the perspective, the results, the conclusions that studies like this can show, can suggest. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push, find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.

I've got in my notes a possible second migration. Now, possibly we've got the Anaya, we've got the step migration, but later on in the Bronze Age, there might have been another migration too to Britain. Yeah, that's absolutely right right this is another study that's just about to come out it's a study I've been very fortunate to be involved with again it's with our colleagues in over in Harvard where this time they've looked at 800 individuals from the Bronze Age. 800. 800 individuals from the Bronze Age and Iron Age, again focusing on Britain. And so this massive study, absolutely massive. And what they start to see, where I was talking earlier about having that resurgence, a slight resurgence in Neolithic ancestry during the Bronze Age, what they've

detected is that there's actually a massive resurgence of it. So we see a strong increase in this version of the allele from the Neolithic coming in with the steppe ancestry as well, but it's the continental version of the Neolithic ancestry that we see. And we see this as a massive increase coming into Britain at about 1000 BC. So it seems really likely that there was a second wave of migrating people coming from the continent, bringing with them their mixed version of alleles, which include Neolithic continental farmers and steppe-related ancestry. And it's these people that we see coming in that second wave, this continental version of the Neolithic genes and an increase in people that indicate that we have a second migration into Britain at around a thousand BC. I mean you mentioned like from the

continents do we have any idea where possibly from the continents they came from? Yes so in this paper we look at lots of potential source populations where this migration may have come from and it looks to be that it's probably from France so certainly the individuals with the closest fit come from France they themselves can't be the true sources of the population because they predate the migration event but they might well be descendants of but if I had to put money on it i'd probably say france yeah geographically quite close as well so i guess exactly i mean it's you know it's a reasonable shout yeah no absolutely absolutely but we can't not have a chat and not talk about before we finish dairy we can't not talk about milk because what is the interesting

dairy link with the second migration lactose persistence yes oh it has thrown us so many curveballs over the years yeah lactose persistence it really has so just to clarify this is the gene that allows us or the version of the gene that allows us to persist drinking milk into adulthood it's a funny one one would imagine that that would have come in in the Neolithic when we have farming, when we start dairying. That's what we all assumed would happen when we looked for this version of the gene. No, it's not there. We don't see it. We don't really see it in the Bronze Age either. We start to see it in the Iron Age, but it's very, very low

frequencies. So for instance, if you look at Iberia in the Iron Age, the frequency, the proportion of individuals of the population who have this allure is about 7%, whereas today it's 48%. Central Europe, it's something like 9%, whereas it's about 40% today. But Britain, in Britain, the frequency in the Iron Age is up at 50 percent compared to 73 percent today so we're seeing a massive increase in lactase persistence alleles in the iron age of Britain that seems to take a further millennium to catch up in the rest of Europe you're going to ask me why I know you are why and I don't know i'm sorry i don't know well possibly it's possibly to do with some kind of selection pressure

maybe there is different use of daring in britain we don't know but yeah it's just so interesting isn't it and i'm putting on the spot now but and if you can't remember the exact percentages of the exact times fine but i remember my last chat with shed a man one of the most striking things was this change of how quickly there was this change these percentages or the exact times fine, but I remember from our last chat with Shed a Man, one of the most striking things was this change of how quickly there was this change, these percentages, in the amount of people who could drink milk who were lactose tolerant. Do you remember that fact, how quickly it goes from people being lactose intolerant to lactose tolerant?

So at the time of Shed a Man, we don't find anyone who's got the lactose persistence genes. I think one of the things that we can say about it is the fastest, it's the fastest shift when it happens. It takes a long time to pick it up, but then when it happens, it's the fastest shift in allele frequencies that you see of any allele ever. So it clearly has some very significant effects on our fitness. It has to have something very positive that it's selected for

incredibly fast as i say it's the fastest selected for gene or version of a gene that we have ever found i think that's just so cool that's just such an interesting fact to leave it all on i mean selena this has been a fantastic chat all about this tell me a bit about your work at the natural history museum before we finish so as always just and i'm always involved in lots of projects at the Natural History Museum before we finish? So as always, Tristan, I'm always involved in lots of projects at the moment. We're still really interested, still looking at some Paleolithic people from Gough's Cave, and these are the people who were cannibalised, the people who were cannibalised from Gough's Cave. Yeah, we're working hard on that.

We've got a PhD student, William Marsh, working on that, so always going to be coming back to you and talking about that. Please do. We're looking at a group of individuals from medieval Norwich that may have been victims of a pogrom at this time that's interesting and I don't just work on humans doing some work some giant ground sloths from Chile all sorts of stuff awesome just awesome like hdn dna specialists not just humans all these extinct animals as well selena always great to catch up great to meet you in person and thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today my absolute pleasure thank you so much for inviting

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