Cheddar Man and the Genetic Prehistory of Britain

Description: An online talk by Thomas Booth, Senior Laboratory Research Scientist at Skoglund Lab Ancient Genomics Laboratory, on ancient DNA and what we have learned about Britain 15,000-2000 years ago. Next Generation Sequencing technology has enabled vast improvements in the study of ancient DNA over the last 15 years and we now have genome-wide data from thousands of humans from the last c.50,000 years. The long history of archaeology in Britain, ranging from antiquarian digs to modern commercial excavations has meant that archaeological institutions collectively have accumulated a vast assemblage of human remains dating to a variety of periods over the last 20,000 years. As a result, Britain has been a particular target for studies of ancient DNA, and we now have genetic information from over 1000 ancient people who lived in Britain over the last 15,000 years. Reconstructed head of the Cheddar Man based on the shape of his skull and DNA analysis, shown at the National History Museum in London (2019). Wikimedia: Werner Ustorf. The proliferation of ancient genetic information from Britain means that we now have a clear idea about the demographic history of Britain before written records, revealing amongst other things several major episodes of migration and genetic change and patterns of relatedness amongst burials at significant sites, including those around Stonehenge. In this talk Thomas Booth discusses what we have learned from ancient DNA about Britain 15,000-2000 years ago, from the end of the last Ice Age up to the development of written histories.

Transcript: okay well it is 7 o'clock so I think uh we will get started I'm sure there'll be people trickling in but uh yeah welcome um hello folks Welcome to our our first in our series of exclusive online talks for the Kent archaeologic society and my name is Craig I'll be doing introductions and trying to keep things running smoothly um trying to bring a wide range of subjects into your your homes um over the the rest of the year so we've got some excellent speakers lined up and we hope you'll join us for those as well this is our first time um our personally our first time doing this as an online talk uh so apologies for any teething problems we may come across fingers crossed it'll all go perfectly we have any trouble um one second there we go so housekeeping just the boring bits to start with uh the we will have Tom's talk um after which we'll have time for some questions if you have any hope it goes without seeing but please be courteous and polite want to keep it light if we can H you can either so I'll put a thing in the chat there um you can either raise your hand if you want to speak and ask your question directly to Tom and we will unmute you and you can do do that or if you prefer you can type your uh question into the chat and we'll keep an eye on that and we will ask it for you can you please keep yourself muted and with cameras off throughout the talk so that we can hear whoever's speaking nice and clearly we will be recording the session we're recording now um and it may be posted to our video channels in the future but no personal data will be shared and um if you ask a question question you prefer it not to go online we can edit all that out so just please send us an email and say so if that's the case so that's me and the boring stuff out the way let me get on to our amazing speaker this is Dr Thomas Booth Tom studied at the University of Sheffield he has a degree in archaeological science and Masters in human osteology and funerary archaeology and a PhD in archaeology he also has a postdoc with the Natural History Museum and if his LinkedIn profile is up to date he is currently a welcome funded senior research scientist and bioarchaeologist in the ancient genomics laboratory at the Francis criek Institute investigating the genetic history of Britain that sound right yeah well done that's good perfect fantastic uh Tom has contributed a wealth of published material on Ancient DNA and is opening the door to new understandings of our genetic history at a rapid Pace we are delighted to welcome him here tonight and to tell talk to us about cheddaman and the genetic prehistory of Britain so it's all yours buddy thanks Craig thanks for that introduction and thanks for inviting me to uh talk to you all I'm sorry I couldn't uh come in person but this is the the next best thing yeah so at the at the Crick Institute um we we I'm working on a project where we're trying to generate at least uh a thousand ancient genomes from the last from people who lived in Britain over the last 10,000 years and the aim of doing that is to um look at just the broad add to the the already P the picture of population history of Britain that we already have as as I'll outline in this talk in terms of U migration and and genetic change but also look at Natural Selection Through Time particularly natural selection on genetic variants that are linked to disease and diet uh because you know the uh Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical research center so there has to be some bio biomedical applicability and that's what we'll get from looking at these disease risk variants but also we get loads of interesting fun stuff coming from from an archaeologist in terms of looking at migration change as well as things like um uh kinship so um over the last oh so yeah this is the ancient AGB project at the skull ancient genomics labor so yeah that's the Francis Institute if any of you have been there before it's a marvelous uh place to work although the ancient DNA lab is a bit of an anomaly and that we're probably the only lab in the building that would prefer it if you were dead everybody else tries to keep people alive um so in terms of the the genetic uh ancient DNA on the last 15 years or so um there's been a big revolution in the technology um that um lies behind ancient DNA which is why suddenly ancient DNA syic much more viable and uh robust Prospect than it was maybe uh 15 20 years ago so the way we were doing ancient DNA in the sort of early 0s and the late 90s was through uh polymerase chain reaction and S sequencing where we uh if you think about the the human genome is three billion uh base pairs long so Bas pairs being these letters CG a and t that make up a genetic sequences three billion of those in the human genome and these methods you could look at maybe hundreds to thousands of these um base pairs um and usually would Target a particularly informative part of the genome that you would emphasize whether it had something to do with their ancestry or something to do with um genetic Health um and you would sequence those small informative parts so a tiny portion of um an ancient individual's genome and the problem with these techniques was that it was very difficult to control for contamination you were never sure whether the sequences that you got back were genuinely from the ancient person from say the last person who happened to touch um that bone in the in the recent past what's happened in the last 15 years or so has been the Advent of Next Generation sequencing which is um amongst other things meant that the cost of sequencing is plummeted which allows us to sequence um hundreds of thousands of sequences of DNA representing sort of millions of of base pairs of data from samples so that not only gives as much richer information rather than these tiny little portion portions of the genome uh we get genome uh data from all across an individual's genome uh it also allows us to develop tools for assessing contamination so we can assess whether the sequences that we get back are likely to be from the ancient individual or from a modern contamination and it allows us to um control for that and then potentially discount the stuff contamination and from that genetic information from across the whole genome we get an assessment of an ancient individual's whole ancestry and this sort of brings me to the question of what is what do geneticist mean when they talk about genetic ancestry um and I think sometimes genetic ancestry and the way that people popular understand their ancestry in terms of just being all of their ancestors going back into the depths of time uh the two concepts are slightly different from one another um it's not direct genealogy because it's only the ancestors from whom you've inherited DNA and the farther back in time you go um the smaller proportion of your genal itical ancestors you've actually inherited any DNA from and this is because even though your DNA sequence is a incredibly rich source of information is finite and it you only have to go back maybe 10 Generations or so where you have more ancestors or genealogical ancestors than there is space in your genome so what happens after that stage is that people who are geneological ancestors actually start to fall out of your genetic ancestry um so your genetic ancestry is from a a particular pool of your genealogical ancestors um from who um herited um DNA so when you get back to this graph that I've got up here it shows the number of your ancestors sort of 17 Generations back and that's in uh those the red bars and then the the x-axis is showing their geographical distribution so as you go back in time not only your ancestors increasing they're getting uh distributed across space but the the blue proportion is sort of 17 Generations back What proportion of those geological ancestors are your genetic ancestors you can see it's um very small so your genetic ancestry today is largely defined by way your ancestors came from over the last 300 years or so and then because they are more likely to have inherited DNA from ancestors that lived in the places where they lived sort of within their genome you have um within the genetics you have essentially a population history of the places where they're from or the population that they're from so using that you can kind of say where most of your genetic ancestors just the ancestors that you've inherited DNA from were living at different points in time so um and that's what ancient DNA can do is basically anchor those genetic sign signatures at different points of time in different places um in the past sort of revealing genetic histories of places I talk about a lot about migration as well so genetic ancestry is always changing to some extent sometimes quickly sometimes uh more slowly so you have processes of migration leading to ad mixture genetic drift that's the uh random uh accumulation and um sort of predominance of certain mutations that happens just by chance um just by who happens to have more children um and carry particular ancestors and genetic variant than others in a group and migration is defined as people moving from area to another and having children so this is the thing about genetics is that we only see migration if um or we can only see it consistently if the people migrating have children in the area and we see the change in um in ancestry in sort of the gene pool over time uh substantial ancestry change over time indicates migration and mass migration or population replacement those terms reference um An ancestry change but it doesn't necessarily tell you anything about absolute numbers or or the mechanism of why that change has happened and often the large scale changes in genetic ANC without be talking about take period over quite large long periods of time over particularly centuries and so um it should when when we talk about migration and population chains linked to migration uh it shouldn't be inferred from that that we're talking about sort of invasion and conquest or even large numbers of people moving because uh at the Baseline level what we're talking about is that uh groups of people had to have moved but that for whatever reason they have more descendants that um live uh that more descendants that live until um child rearing age so lives to produce descendants themselves so over the long term there's lots of different factors that can influence those things differences in birth rates differences in um infant mortality particularly or things like birth birth control so the these migrations um that at the moment we're still sort of dealing with how to how to um interpret these ancestor changes of migrations that we see you don't necessarily have to read into them straight away that this is about um mass migrations and displacement of people because it's happening over hundreds of years so moving to the story of of of Britain at least from the end of the last dice age so so from around 18,000 to 11,000 BC um Europe and Britain were still coming out of glacial conditions Britain was still connected to Europe by um this vast La Land landscape known as um doggerland so Europe was just one part of the Europe Britain was just one part of the European Northwestern Peninsula and um it's glacial conditions but um Europe steadily War farming and inhabited by groups of Mobile Hunt gatherers using um magdalenian stone tools and what happens is the from the genetic information that we have so far from sort of Lake glacial Europe so after 20,000 years ago or so so 18,000 BC is that uh most of Northern and Central Europe is reoccupied by these groups that had sort of been living in Southwestern Europe so Iberia so you have the expansion of groups out of Iberia at the end of the last isas that come to occupy a lot of um Central and uh and Northern Europe and they carry this kind of ancestry that's named after the site where the the the site where we have the earliest indications of this ancestor that's Goya Q2 in Belgium and um they um expand outwards and occupy these areas for thousands of of years um but after around 14,500 years ago so 12,500 being or so uh the genes signature of the people living in Europe changes and it seems to be as a result of migrations out of what is probably Southeastern or um Southeastern um Europe people carrying what's referred to as vill Brun or Western European Hunter gather ancestries and there's mixing with the local people carrying these go ancestors but L but generally speaking these Western Hunter gather ancestors come to predominate across Western and Central Europe after after this date it seems like that perhaps they were moving um into Europe as um things got warmer and perhaps the the kind of game that they were hunting became more common in parts of um uh Northern and Central Europe rather than just in kind of the Southern Southeastern Europe from Britain we only we have about we have two genomes from this period in the late upper Paleolithic one from gos cave in ched gor Somerset where um uh there's evidence that it was that that that remains from here were ritually kind ofal IED and one that's about a thousand years later from Kendrick's Cav landed nor Wales where it seems the individuals buried at Kendrick's cave were subject to a more formal uh Cave burial there's no evidence for um cannibalism and also um stabilized stop analysis of of um diet suggests that they had a different kind of diet to the previous individuals they ate more fish um and I said there's no evidence for cannibalism and uh the the two individuals that that have been analyzed in this Charlton Nal paper by Sophie Charlton who was at the naal history museum at the time found that there was no um their ancestors did their ancestors were completely different from one another that the first individual from gos cave carried entirely these Goa Q2 ancestries whereas the individual a thousand years later in Kendrick's cave carried this Villa Bruno Western European Hunter gather ancest so they've been an almost complete genetic turnover in Britain um over the last thous A Thousand Years I mean I say it like that but I mean realistically probably what was more the scenario was that Britain as part of the Northwestern extremity of Europe was kind was probably um seasonally occupied by different groups of hunter gatherers um and so um when these new hun gathers with these new ancestors are moving in it's likely they were largely entering into a a kind of um largely empty landscape um and then this ancestry persists in um um Britain um through uh into the Mesolithic and through the younger dras actually Britain so the Yodas is this period where um particularly northern Europe returns to glacial conditions for a few hundred years and it seems as though that Britain was largely abandoned during this side we have very little evidence for sites during this in Britain during this side uh during this period And then after around 9,700 BC um the warming that occurs after that brings reoccupation this is the of the Mesolithic in Britain which sees a shift from postal grasslands to more Boreal landscape and a more varied range of um things to eat and hunt and it seems as though that the the ancestry of the people who reoccupy Britain through the mesic at this time um is similar to um that um Kendrick's C of individual carrying these Western European hunting Hunter uh gather ancestries whether it's exactly the same population or whether it's a slightly different one that reoccupy Brit from Continental Europe after the younger D is difficult to say what's interesting is that um The genome from cheddam man from again from gos cave and Somerset but dating a few thousand years later than those gos cave cannibalized people um they have around 15% of ancestry from um those that go Q2 population so so they ancestry that's represented in those Goss caves individuals so that might suggest that Britain was actually reoccupying by a slightly different population that had mixed more with that previous U those previous groups when they went back into Continental Europe or it could be that that cheddaman is a bit of an outlier in this sense and is a a recent migrant from somewhere else in um uh in Europe so in terms of the uh picture or the rest of the story in Britain and Europe generally through the next few thousand years um there's these broad ancestries that um are are relevant to understanding um what happen so this Western European hunt gather ancestry is a bit more complicated than this picture gives but broadly speaking this Western European hun gather ancestry is um predominant across uh Western Central Europe and you have this yellow ancestry which um through the the 8,000 BC is predominant in um Anatolia so what's now turkey and then later from around 5,000 uh BC or so you have um this ancestry called Western stephe head ancestry in pink which which develops as again as a result of mixtures of different ancestries just um north of the Black Sea and what's now um Russia and uh Ukraine and as I mentioned Mesolithic Britain um is largely continuous with um through the Mesolithic is their ancestry is large and continuous with those Kendrick's cave individuals carrying this Western European Hunter gather ancestry so this plot on here is a principal components analysis showing um uh uh what this does is distribute uh ancient individuals and modern individuals in space based and how genetically similar or different they are from each other so the space itself is defined by um genomes of living individuals so that's the paler genomes in the middle of the plot and the kind of Darker um plots are the ancient genomes and the burgundy ones are Mesolithic populations from um Europe so caring these Western Hunter gather ancestries and the green ones are the mesic populations of Britain so they fit perfectly with mesic populations from other parts of Europe and what you might notice is that these modern populations these more faded um markers are uh populations from what's living populations from uh Europe well Western EUR Western EUR Asia so Europe and um the near East and U what you be able to see is that the Western hunter gatherers the mesic populations of Britain and Europe kind of exist outside of the genetic variation that we see in um Europe today so um they have a longal population who um essentially in genetic terms don't exist at least in un mixed form um anymore and when some of the first genomes from Western hun gathers were published one of the things they looked at with these two variants that are strongly associated with lighter skin pigmentation in uh people in modern people from northern Europe and um as well as eye pigmentation as well and what they found was there these these two variants that are really highly associated with lighter skin pigmentation in um people with recent ancestry from Europe and but they were uh lacked those genetic variants the West H gatherers they looked at but they did have this genetic variant that's linked to lighter colored eyes which suggested that um Western hunt gatherers likely had darker skin and yet light colored eyes and this was interesting because it had always been assumed that as soon as human groups start moving into northern Europe into Northern latitudes they would have adapted to have had paler skin very quickly because the idea is that um um you generate vitamin D um through the absorption of UV light um but if you're not getting very much UV light um than uh such as in more Northerly latitudes then um lighter skin is more efficient at absorbing that UV light whereas dark skin is less efficient so if you have darker skin and more Northern latitudes generally tend to be more vitamin D deficient so the idea was that human groups moved into northern Europe and they developed lighter skin um to avoid vitamin D deficiency but um while there is a few light light light pigmentation variants amongst Western Hunter gathered groups it doesn't seem to be strong selection for them in the way that was expected so the kind of story of um the development of lighter skin pigmentation in in Europe seems to be different to the one that was was um considered when when I was working at the Natural History Museum and we looked at ched man genome we uh looked at a few more variants linked to pigmentation 36 variants Al together um using this forensic tool which predicts um skin pigmentation and that gave a result that um based on this Fitzpatrick's scale that you can see here of skin pigmentation with these faces it was somewhere between uh five and six probably more towards five and so this um the channel 4 and the were making a documentary at the time and they they commissioned a bust from their kenis brothers who that's what they produced from their pigmentation and as well as the potentially light colored eyes as well which we also got a result of light colored eyes for chenman too um and there's been what's clear when this has been done for mes people across Europe across mesic Europe in different times is that um actually the there's a lot of variation in skin pigmentation predictions for um these individuals across Europe so for instance this one in Lor and Luxenberg more had kind of olive skin pigmentation but these uh these two individuals from well one from Denmark and one from Sweden both were predicts to have a dark skin pigmentation and this one from Sweden is like liest P pigmentation skin pigmentation that's because um he has some ancestry from a different population that it's too complicated to get into here which which which means that he um ends up with probably has lighter skin pigmentation as well so broadly speaking it's true that mesic populations of Europe LLY had darker skin generally than um what we associate with northern Europe today but there was actually a lot of there was some variability around that with u there actually probably been quite a diverse range of skin pigmentation in northern Europe with generally more shifted towards um darker skin pigmentation and these are all probable profiles rather than um you know AB absolute uh predictions and they're based on predictions of skin pigmentation developed on living group but as I mentioned these earlier groups um there's no living group that's entirely like them genetically so we can't say for sure that the skin pigmentation genetics uh in these ancient groups worked in the same way as in um living groups so short of finding a mesic m we can never be 100% sure that this is definitely um uh a prediction but we can say that definitely the skin pigmentation genetics of chaman and other mesolith in habitants of of Europe and Britain were very different to what they are today and this reflects the fact that they're from this very different population than the one that lives in um uh Britain and Europe today supporting though that that um that they likely had darker skin than than on average than what we see in Europe today even if we can't Define quite how much darker that is very easily is that there's um evidence for very strong selection to for all these variants that are linked to light and skin pigmentation um over the last few thousand years so um in Britain at least those lighter pigmentation variants don't turn up in Britain until around um 2,500 BC and both in Britain and in Europe there's evidence in the genome for selection for these variants um from around 3,000 BC or so so um the fact that you have this strong selection for them tells you that and it's strongly associated with skin pigmentation says that if there selection for them then the skin pigmentation has to have been darker in the past otherwise what is selection acting on it's very diff I mean could be that there's some other traits that's being selected for that's linked to these variants but it seems really unlikely given how strong these variants are L to skin pigmentation um so that's another the sort of form of evidence in the recent years that's come to back up the idea that um of a mes the populations having darker skin skin P skin pigmentation and one of the things that everyone kind of knows of a certain vintage from um about cheddam man is is from the '90s when there was some original potentially quite a bit shoddy ancient DNA a work done um on cheddam man's skeleton that where they found a local school teacher in the village of cheddar shared um a maternal lineage uh what's called a maternal hler group with uh cheddam man suest and this was used to argue that there was 9,000 years of maternal continuity in um uh in chedda I mean there was a lot wrong with this interpretation at the time um obviously cheddaman couldn't have been a direct maternal ancestor of this person who lived in jeda because he's male so he couldn't pass on his mitochondrial DNA his maternal lineage uh but also it's more likely that if they do share a maternal lineage then um it's more likely that they share an ancestor in their maternal line in the distant past that they that they both share rather than one being directly descended from another that's um quite an unlikely um scenario and not to mention it turned out later that the teacher wasn't actually born in cheddar but moved there from the West country um when we talk thinking about the whole ancestry so what I discussed previously about that difference between genealogy and genetic ancestry means that the further back in time that you go the more ancestors that you have and it your ancestors are creasing exponentially genical ancestors eventually get to the point where um you have more um ancestors than there are than there is the population um of of a particular region uh and the way that's accounted for is that your genealogical ancestry goes through um C ancestors multiple times um and eventually you get to the point where everybody who exists in a particular place a particular time if they successfully had descendants is the an are the ancestor of everybody who um is alive with that kind of ancestry today so for Europe everybody with any kind of recent European ancestry um everybody who lived in Europe in the um 10th Century ad um is their and successfully passed on descendants is their ancestor that's the point at which sort of for Europe at least it it it all collapses down to the same group of ancestors so I put a picture of Charlemagne here because you know people famously uh have arguments about people being descended from Charlamagne basically if Charlamagne hasn't living descendants then anyone with any kind of European ancestry is is likely to be charlamagne's descendant and because cheddaman lived so long ago that if if he again if he did indeed have any living descendants it would be the vast majority of um of people alive today so moving on specifically to the coming on with the story of Britain um what we see uh at the beginning of the Neolithic across Europe is that you start to see these people with these ancestries that are these an these early European farmer ancestries ultimately from Anatolia um and where the people carrying these ancestries appear across Europe is usually where we the point at which we see the beginnings of um Neolithic farming uh begin so it seems like these migrations of people out of Anatolia over hundreds over thousands of years steadily introduce um the dispersals introduce Farming neic Farming practices into Europe and uh there's two dis two broad routes there's one that um goes up the danu into Central Europe and another that goes along the Mediterranean down and eventually ends up in Iberia and there's as these groups move there ad mixing with the um Mesolithic derived populations that they meet there sometimes what happens and often what's happens is and the dyamics are different with each sort of migration route is that groups of farmers move in and they live largely in parallel with the hunter gatherers that are living there and then hundreds and sometimes thousands of years later these two groups mix more um liberally um so you have these sort of parallel populations that are exploiting different Landscapes that living alongside um one another but those um the ancestry from the local Mesolithic of don't usually get even though that as you move further west and North the amount of the western Hunter gather ancestries increases but it never gets becomes the majority at least in um in a population level you get OD individuals where where it is but at a population level it's always in a minority and this is probably because that farming allows you to maintain larger population sizes and so when the farmers arrive they're able to maintain which larger population size that the Hun gatherers are so even if they mix completely the the kind of people who derve from the mesic groups will only have a small genetic Legacy over the over the long term so in NE I think Britain around 4,000 begins around 4,000 BC when they get introduced to the first Pottery uh new types of material culture like these groundstone axes and um and tombs and the particular megalithic tombs and megalithic cultures as well and uh going back to this figure if you look at the remember the genetics this is a figure of the ancient people distributed B and H genetically similar or different they are the mesic populations of britam in green and the neic population that we've got so after 4,000 BC or this cloud in Black here and these this Red Cloud here is um neic populations from Anatolia so you can see that the um there's been a a big change in the genetic ancestry of people in Britain into their NE lithic with them having more ancestry related to um Anatolia than to the mesic population of Britain and when you you sort of try and model the ancestry of neotic populations of Britain with ancestry from plausible populations in Continental Europe bearing in mind that they already had some of the western honaga ancestry in their genome as they mixed with populations as they moved across Europe so we see that um um there's very little ancestry from um the local neic population the local mesic populations of of Britain and the neic group so if you look at these teal bars at the bottom of this figure but groups from what is now Wales that there's no from what we can tell contribution from local Mesolithic groups in England there's a little bit in Scotland they definitely is some but again it's it's it's a minority of the ancestry um and unlike um most other parts of Europe there's no l Resurgence of this mesic derived ancestry so there doesn't seem to be as much of the case of parallel populations living um separate from one another before before mixing but this also this equalist doesn't mean that mesic descended groups were completely displaced or wiped out again this this might have a lot to do with the Dynamics of different um populations there might also be disease Dynamics involved um as well so to to bring it to Kent specifically and I will Pepper the talk a little bit with specific examples from from Kent one of the genomes in this study in the Natural History Museum on Neolithic Britain came from the buldum uh long Barrow um where there's two phases of deposition really early phase of deposition around 4,100 3,900 BC and a second one later um episode of deposition of human remains and we have one genome from here but unfortunately from an undata Bond so it's unclear which phase they belong to but their ancestry is entirely derived from um Continental uh Farmers um with little or no um ancestry from local Mesolithic groups uh where we do see ad mixture and and definite interaction between local groups is in between neic farmers and the local mesic populations is in Western Scotland where if you look at this figure here this gives you how much of the ancestry of uh neotic populations neic individuals in Britain is from these early European Farmers these EF fraction and you can see it's pretty constant from 4,000 BC and most of the population but you have all of these sites in yellow that have substantially lower levels of this early farmer ancestry so higher levels of this Western Europe Western H European Hunter gather ancestry indicative of recent ad mixture between these incoming or or recently arrived Farmers or their descendants and the local uh mesic populations uh and these are mostly cave sites so here we do have definite evidence that up until 3,400 BC at least BC at least in Western Scotland you have groups of people with the local mesic ancestry persisting and interacting with the uh farming group but what you can see is that what you should be able to see is that over the long term the ancestry of people in Britain doesn't NE Britain doesn't change so despite having evidence for the sort of interactions in certain parts of Britain it doesn't affect the population as a whole suggesting that where this happens um it only happens very regionally and doesn't affect the ancestry of the group as a whole so this could be happening in lots of different regions but because presumably because the Hun gathers have relatively small population sizes they could be mixing entirely with the local farmers that you see there but it wouldn't have uh we wouldn't be able to see that in the in the National picture we would have to sort hit those particular samples in those areas where we have um hunt gatherers from Britain uh persist in one of the things that has become a big thing with ancient DNA more recently and um unlocks all sorts of possibilities the ability to be able to detect genetic um relatives um at archaeological sites and the most particular example of this for Britain neic Britain is this hlon North long barel from gler where you have um uh six generations of a of a genealogy uh in the Tomb and you there's all sorts of dynamics of of um patterns of um who was having children with who that you can see a pattern of reproduction that you can see in this tomb so whether or not you ended up in this tomb largely depended although not exclusively depended on your descent from uh one man and then where you ended up in the Tomb whether it was the north chamber or the South chamber depended on your descent from four different women who he had children with um but then within that there were these four different women that had children with other men and then the the male children from those relationships were also inducted into the tomb so was potentially adopted into the this um Patra line so clearly at least in this case um this tomb was built the architecture of the tomb was built with these families in mind with the idea that these people would be um interred there I should emphasize that uh there was also a substantial minority of people in there who were not genetically related to anybody else in the Tomb so clearly there was some kinship there that had there was some kinship between these people that had no biological underpinning and this doesn't apply to every Neolithic tomb so I wouldn't other NE tombs where we have multiple individuals don't follow this pattern this seems something specific to either hlon specifically or to certain types of Tomb so we hope to return and get more samples from cauld to assess what whether individuals in cauldron show this kind of pattern or whether they are more like some other tombs we see where very few people are actually genetically related to each other and and um if that relates the architecture of the Tomb or where it's situated or anything else what it tells us about uh these societies so through the uh the late NE lithic the uh through it's from around 3,000 BC to 2,500 BC which includes things like the change to GRU a pottery Styles and development of a stone circle and henge building culture the genetic ancestry of people in Britain stays relatively constant but um across Europe what we see is that the ancestry of people in particularly Northern and Central Europe uh begins to change that um you the you start to see people appear ING with these ancestries these Western steep herder ancestors that come from um um around the Black Sea so um the again this indicates a substantial migration or expansion of people carrying these ancestries from the pontic Caspian step into um western and southern Europe and these migrations almost certainly introduced Indo-European languages into Europe and these dispersals are associated with and and add mixture with the local populations that they counter there in in Europe as well as interactions that occur between these groups before these sort of expansions of the step lead to the development of these corded we family of cultures in Eastern and Central Europe and to the west of corded where you get the development of these Bell Beaker cultures which uh potentially originate in what's now Portugal and diffuse um East uh up into sort of these corded we zones where aspects of the belbe culture were taken on by people who otherwise who who practice who have carry these step ancestries and also have aspects of these corded we cultures as well so there's this kind of in meeting of two um cultures and groups which which leads to these hybrid cultures that are kind of mixed between Bel beer and um and corded we but that diffusion of the beaker cultures from Iberia seems to happen without there being any substantial migration uh AC in Continental Europe at least so in Britain the Bel Bea phenomenon beginning around 2500 BC or so which is traditionally the beginning of the calcal lithic and Bronze Age so that's where we get the first metal working working potentially with a short couple of hundred year copper age and then bronze from 200200 BC defined by this distinctive beak of pottery greater prominence of single burials round Barrel funerary monuments and um different types of material cultures different types of arrowheads and and buttons this how how the beaka culture is manifested in Britain as exemplified by uh the Asbury Archer burial and when we look at beak burials um compared to sort of the earlier neic burials or burials from the beak period we see a what seems like a very dramatic change in the ancestry of um people in Britain so uh we go from a peri a point where from around 201600 BC where people seem to have no ancestry from these Western step herders to after 2,500 BC where everyone seems to this Western so these ancestry models that I'm showing you here contain the blue which is the British Neolithic ancestry and the red which is ancestry associated with um people associated with Beaker burials in Continental Europe so um they're actually a mixture of these step ancestries and ancestries from across neic Europe so actually the step ancestor in Britain is around 50% or so but the overall ancestry change in Britain is quite significant around 90% by 2000 BC and this seems quite sudden and uh impactful but what you got to bear in mind is that in the late Neolithic people are doing things with their dead are cremating the dead in which case we can't get any DNA out or are doing things with the dead which left no archaological record we have very very few particularly unburnt human remains that date to this period between 3,00 2,500 BC and the thing is if those people whereas the the people carrying these step ancestries are doing things with their dead which are both highly visible uh bearing them under big monuments and also preserve the DNA relatively well compared to these previous um rights so if we had a situation of what we've had previously where you have Parallel Group uh groups of migrants and sort of local people living in parallel if you have one group that are carrying on creating and doing things with the dead that leave no archaological record we wouldn't see them in the um genetic record whereas these groups these migrants that come in and have prominent burials they will be a bias towards them they'll be over represented uh in in the record so and what you see in the genetic data so if you look at this graph again this is a graph which a figure which shows you the amount of early European farmer ancestry in different baral through time uh in in BC you can see that while um there's sort of a quite a consistent signature amongst population or as a whole you get these red outliers that have higher levels of the early European farmer ancestry and that suggests that there are still populations around that are kind of invisible to us archaeology that are ad mixing with these uh groups of migrants and their descendants thus producing these admixed individuals these visible admixer individuals that that you see um so looking at these admixed individuals you could say that that you must have populations descended from the local Neolithic groups persisting in Britain uh up until around 2000 BC or so when the two ancestors seem to merge and if we won't go back to this figure after 2000 BC everybody seems to have around 10% ancestry from the local neic population um of Britain so certainly a big genetic change occurs but it seems to be a process that happens over hundreds of years and for whatever reason for all those potential reasons I mentioned above including things like violence or social structures or or dominance or um disease uh difference in birth rates in access to resources the the neic population of Britain have a much smaller genetic Legacy than the than than um these beak migrants there's also evidence that some of these outliers actually come from different parts of Europe so it seems like there's a mainstream of migration that's responsible for most of the ancestry coming into Britain from the lower Ry Valley and what's now of the Netherlands but you get odd individuals that are coming in from different parts of Europe southern Western Europe Poss possibly also Ireland and um as well as potentially further east as well so there's this kind of melting pot of different ancestors in Britain through the calcal lithic and early Bronze Age where you have these an main this mainstream of ancestry coming in from what's now the Netherlands you have different ancestors coming in of as a minority from other parts of Continental Europe as well as the ancestries and people carrying ancestries from local um Neolithic groups and again to give an example this from the East Kent Access Road uh near than on than uh you have this skeleton 22053 dating an unaccompanied female dating to sort of the later part of this period that was part of a linear series of flat Graves near Round Barrow they have very low step related ancestry you can see it in this figure uh yeah only around 45% of their ancestry around 45% of their ancestry comes from early European Farmers whereas they average for other Bronze Age burials of that age is around um uh 35% or so um so either that either they have it's difficult to distinguish between these different scenarios at this point but either they had a recent ancestor who descended from the local neic population so there was a neic a population descending from the Neolithic s persisting in Kent or possibly it's a migrant from somewhere different potentially southern Europe with that level of early European farmer ancestry um and again as with hlon North and the Neolithic we can look at um genetic relatives as well um it's interesting thinking about the Dynamics of of migration in in this period that the earliest beer Associated ancestry comes from an individual that was buried in a Neolithic tomb but uh 2,500 around 2,500 BC so this is interesting because this is um um neic tombs in Britain had been out of use for at least a thousand years before these Beacon migrants had started to arrive and they sort of reopen them and start reusing them for some of their burials so it's clear that um um migrants and their descendants were interested in these older sites as soon as they arrived and it's interesting to think about whether this is veneration or appropriation of of uh the cultures and and rights of the people that they encountered when they they moved into Britain and specifically you have this um set of genetic relatives from different Cemetery sites from around stor henge so you have a man who was buried in a round bar at Wilford g54 who was either the the uncle or the grandfather of these two individuals who are buried at Asbury a different Cemetery at Asbury but those two individuals who were cousins were buried next to each other um at Asbury but then the daughter of one of them was buried at another site at at Port and down and all of these sites are within the stor henge landscape and it's interesting because none of them have any ancestry from the local neotic population they their ancestry seems entirely derived from Continental migrants so this provides evidence both for the fact that communities of people were moving into um into Britain sort of contrary to how the media rends to report on this stuff there isn't necessarily this isn't all just um male invasions of male um Warriors from Continental Europe it has to have been uh communic of people moving in and settling uh but also that that they are they they're not going in for any specific iconic clasm they're um are sort of in some way incorporating um the cultures that they encounter into their worldview despite the fact that they're not descended from the people who built them so specifically with Stonehenge they're clearly revering Stonehenge to some extent and yet you know they they must have been aware that they weren't the ones that built it people that were there before them that built uh well potentially in the landscape at this stage um that built it so this seems to be a mixing to some extent of an inspiration of uh cultures between them at the same time um and what's also interesting about this group is that sort of more recent analysis of two of those male burials has found that they were actually the um offspring of third degree relatives so potentially first cousins so this seems to be highlighting that people who are buried in this landscape come from specific families and from specific families that seem to put an emphasis on kind of keeping it within the family as well at least in this small part of um small part of Bronze Age Britain um and the the BOS in terms of relative the boson Borman is an interesting example of the it's potential interesting Showcase of the Dynamics of sort of migration and connections across Europe during this period so the boson bourman was this grave that um seems to have been a wooden box where bodies were successively intered over um several uh potentially several decades before it was was buried and so what you have is that each time a new body was put in the grave it Disturbed the the the skeletons that were in there so you have an articulated Barrel which is the last one surrounded by disarticulated remains of um all the other people that have been putting before and two of them have been subject to um genetic analysis the articulated individual and then a disarticulated skull that was found at his uh leg found found at his feet and um they were found to be paternal cousins but what's interesting is their ancestry was quite different from one another so the articulated burial um had a lot of had very low levels of Step ancestry uh sort of enough to suggest that there either that their um mother or one of their parents was entirely came from the local neic population or that they came from somewhere further south potentially Britany or further south in in Iberia uh whereas their cousin their ancestry was entirely typical of of of um Bronze Age Britain with the sort of normal levels of the step related ancestry of the Continental Beaker ancestry um and so the interpretation is is more slightly towards um I'm having come from elsewhere because of a stabilized STP analysis suggests that both of them moved uh within their uh lifetimes so it's interesting in that you have potentially two people with different ancestries that happen to be cousins which might hint at there being quite extensive kin networks across Europe so you have there two people potentially from different ends of Europe that are cousins of one another so and it might say something about uh who was very mobile the people belonging to these particular kinship groups were mobile across quite long areas and had networks of exchange based on kinship over quite long distances which may Define some of the mobility and the the population movements that we see in um the calic and Bronze Age um again through from the early Bronze Age through into the middle Bronze Age from uh from around 2000 BC to um 1,500 BC the ancestry across Britain stays relatively the so it's pretty much constant but we see this increase in early European farmer ancestry particularly in southern Britain between 1,400 800 BC this is reported in this study by patteron atel out of deid re laab in Harvard um but it stays this changes in southern E Southern Britain so what's now England and Wales but um stays this this happens in Southern Southern Britain but not in Northern Britain so it's now Scotland and it doesn't come from ad mixture with neotic populations from in Britain if you try and model this ancestry change uh through using neic population from Britain it doesn't work this neic ancestry is coming from uh Continental Europe indicating that there's another um episode of of migration which affects the ancestry of people in um southern Europe and when you look more close this sort of between you have um these uh people showing if you look at this graph again this is the European early European ancestry fraction of individuals through time and you can see that um there's the sort of Baseline level of the country as a whole uh with the blue figures but then you have these red outliers and from around 1,200 BC to 800 800 BC you have these ones from marget pit and cliffs and farm which have this elevated level of this early European farmer ancestry um and when you try and model them their ancestor closer to individuals from U what's now southern France and so these seem to be either first generation migrants or represent enclaves of migrants in um Southeastern um England and and in Kent specifically so in combination with some of the stabiliz results from these as well which which measure Mobility suggests that that that they're probably either descendants or first generation migrants from uh Southern or Southern France probably Alpine France or Alpine um Europe um and the southeast of Brit Kent seems to be this focal point of movements because you see this ancestry change or begin to happen in Kent from around 1,200 BC but then um you see this uptick around 1,000 BC this ancestry that you see in Kent earlier then eventually disperses around uh Southern Britain um so about 800 BC uh in southern Britain this ancestry is in most places to varying uh degrees so it seems to it's difficult to say whether this is a single process or multiple processes happening over um hundreds of years but certainly there seems to be sort of earlier contacts with Southeastern Britain in the in the late Bronze Age in the middle to late Bronze Age and then in the late Bronze Age the ancestor spreads out across the rest of the uh of the country so yeah so just re restating what he said before Mar gets pit uh and cliffs and farm you have these burials that these early individuals that carry this Continental potentially ancestry from um Alpine um Europe um and this potentially makes sense in the context of what's happening in late Bronze Age Europe the development of the Atlantic Bronze Age and earn field systems of exchange where for instance um most of the metal that you get in Britain is actually coming from Continental Europe rather than Britain compared to the early Bronze Age where and middle Bron early Bronze Age when it was coming mainly from Britain but also just generally there's a lot of practices in Britain's develop that that brings it more into line with what's happening in Europe and there's a larger development of exchange and uh sort of systems of ritual exchange as well across Europe and so it makes sense that within that framework you start to get um more Mobility between Britain and Continental uh Europe as well and when we look across Continental Europe we see that there's the homogeneization of ancestries around through the same period so from around 1,500 BC to 800 BC um ancestors have people across Europe become more similar to one another maybe because partly because you have this signal of of of expansion out of Alpine Europe into other parts of Europe but also because people are just moving around more and there's this just churn of people that are more connected with Within These um exchange systems and this is just um a graph showing the impact of this of these Continental ancestry and um other parts of um in all parts of Britain see you can see that that the Orange is the this Continental Alpine or or Continental mixed ancestry when the blue is the ancestry derived from the previous Bronze Age population you can see it's very regionally variable so in Southeastern Britain the the Shi in ancestry is around 60% uh whereas when you get to kind of uh the north it's more like um 30 or 40% there could be smaller scale or different movements that are happening later on into the Iron Age um basically we need we need more sophisticated techniques to figure that out and there's some speculation that perhaps that these movements are in somewhere linked to Celtic languages it's um hard to say that these migrations introduce Celtic languages themselves because they don't seem to affect Ireland or Northern Britain where we know that people uh were more than likely speaking Celtic languages but it could have something to do with the development of brittonic in a specific form of Celtic languages in um Southern Britain um in the in the late Bronze Age just summarize first to go right back the genetic ancestry is not genealogy particularly not in the distant past genetic ancestry is always changing through time sometimes more slowly sometimes more rapidly and we have a good idea now of the key processes that shape the ancestry of the inhabitants of Britain in prehistory and as our techniques are getting more sophisticated we might pick up particularly in the Iron Age maybe um further change as a result of migration because what the the problem is that we sort of um with the techniques and the data that we've been generating so far we've reached the limit of what we can say but now there's a new suite of techniques coming along that can see fine scale differences between populations that are very genetic genetically similar to each other so by the Iron Age populations of Northern Europe for instance and Britain are very genetically similar to each other so picking them apart becomes very difficult but we're now developing uh tools to be able to distinguish between them might be able to see more subtle changes that we might not have seen before and more detailed studies on regions sites and patterns of relatedness are giving us more insight to the Dynamics of ancestry change and what the processes that are responsible for these changes are um as well as these relatedness giving us a sense of sort of social structures and how kinship is referenced in in death um and then we get these interesting dynamics of ancestry change and relatedness when we dig down into P patterns of uh relatedness and ancestry single science and regions so yeah that's kind of a parted history of where we are with the genetic prehistory of Britain so far and hopefully that was comprehensible and enjoyable so thank you very much for listening Tom thank you so much that was absolutely amazing and we've just whizzed through like tens of thousands of viers in record speed um and it was amazing now I've seen you talk a few times and I've also attempted to read some of the papers that you like send around on uh Twitter um and I got to admit most of them go way over my head it's very complex information um and science um but I feel like every time I I see you talk you're able to to get that across to people like me who have no idea what the what the papers are saying in in an amazing way so thank you so much um I really really appreciate you talking for us today it looks quite nice and bright where you are I don't know um I don't know if you're it's somewhere different it's like thundering where I am here I don't know if you've angered the gods a bit but I'm further north I'm in uh I'm in Burnley at the moment ah visting family yes some sets later here it's also been a sunny day it's not here it's Grim anyway so um questions if anyone has any questions uh you can either raise your hand or alternatively if you don't want to say them out yourself please feel free to um write them in the chat and we can uh we can ask them for you also um I've do see a question saying will the slides be available to have um I don't know about the slides but we will have um as long as Tom allows it we we may put the uh the talk up on our YouTube channel Chanel um in the future and I'm sure Tom will be able to direct you to places where the uh graphs and slides and things may be available in various papers um at some point we can certainly distribute that so do we have any immediate questions I see um one hand raised already Sandra so Jacob if you're able to unmute Sandra hi hello it was uh very interesting thank you very much um i' I've just typed the question in um if someone goes and has a DNA test and they come back saying oh I've got 2% Neolithic in me is that now untrue is that now a reliable test it it's it's complicated in the um it depends what they're testing if they're testing specifically neic people from Britain what what what percentage of your ancestry derives from them I mean it's probably next to nothing but what they can do is what but it's also very difficult to test for that um specific ancestry so what they normally do is actually test for that early European farmer ancestry that was widespread across Europe so that's not necessary from Britain that could be from anywhere across Europe and that's you know quite high in um and in in all populations from from Britain because uh you know you have first the the nearly people who were in Britain but then also obviously those populations associated with beer cultures that come in also carry some of that ancestry and similarly those populations that come in at the end of the Bronze Age also have some of that ancestry and then there are later population changes in Britain through history but usually with groups that already carry this bit of ancestry so it's it's ancestry that goes back to New it's probably if someone has given you an estimate like that it probably is ancestry that goes back to Neolithic Europe but it's um it's not spe very specific if you it's not certainly not specific to Britain and it's probably an amalgamation of ancestor over different periods when you get your I should say when you get your genetic ancestry tested through these companies really what all the ancestry is telling you is where your ancestors over the last few hundred years came from and you can model that ancestry as these Neolithic ancestors and things but that's not giving you a a real story of to what extent you descended from local neic people it's kind of a bit of a nonsense question because it's entirely defined by the population histories of the PE places where your ancestors are from so if your recent ancestors are from places that have that kind of ancestry then you will have some of that ancestry but if for instance say you have a recent ancest from Spain or somewhere they will have higher amounts of that Neolithic looking ancestry so you'll come back with higher amounts of that but it's a bit of a disingenuous thing to model you as because it's not like uh the genetics of Britain were established in the ne EIC and then haven't changed since then it's they exactly the same it's all these different changes that have happened since then and sort of looking at it just in terms of the neic cancers for these very ancient populations is misleading cuz it us this block sum that is actually um a culmination of all these changes that have happened in wherever your ancestors came from over the last uh over the last thousand years it's you can't get in terms of population history you can't get back to that ancient populations it's about way or recent ancestors came from so these genetic tests are very good in sort of telling you where your recent ancestors came from and for linking you with living distant relatives but a lot of the time particular your ancestry if you already know where say your great grandparents came from then you're not going to get any surpris yeah okay thank you very much okay I got a few questions in the chat and then Lis has a hand up so I'll start with the chat um Carol has asked uh she say she went to scar bra last month and it was an amazing Neolithic Village have you ever been there no I'd love to go there though we've been talking about maybe getting some human remains from the nest of broadard I'm not sure which they've been digging recently and they've just finished digging on um but yeah I'd love to go there great um okay okay Liz asks how common is the maternal hype of cheddaman in modern Britain population it's there there's a lot of diversity in maternal lineages in in most places and in Britain specifically so it's um it's a few percent but that is actually quite common for that that's actually means it's quite a common hler group but it's also common across Europe it's not specific to Britain um so yeah which which s of also adds to how nonsense that story was it's not a very specific lineage it's it's quite widespread thank you um Henny shter has asked assume case of a Roman cemetery is it already possible to identify from which part of the Roman Empire the people came from to a certain degree yes um to a certain level of resolution with the newest techniques we can sort of distinguish between populations from well certainly from um sort of Europe and from outside of Europe and from within Europe but then also northern southern Europe and then within northern Europe as well we can distinguish between uh people from Britain people with ancestry from Britain Scandinavia um and sort of Central Europe um at the moment with with more St techniques and that will continue to improve but yeah broadly speaking yes we can great all right Jacob do you want to unmute Louise for us she can ask a question yes hi um I'm really quite interesting because I went up to stting to and had a long chat with Duncan s about the DNA work being done around the Anglo-Saxon population quite interesting to connect all this up eventually so that you get a real picture of how these if it's possible these populations developed into each other um I was also talking to him about the fact that I was involved in the Chariot Barrels in East Yorkshire with a instead and he always said that he felt that they were probably an itinerant family that came over from the Champagne region so that would be another interesting thing to follow up to say are these actually related to some of the champagne stuff um so I'm interested to know um Duncan was saying that you they often use the Petra bone that's really the best place to get the DNA from I said to him that I understood you could also get it from a tooth but he said if you do that the tooth has got to be entirely intact including the root at the bottom which because I've done a lot of you know there's often a lot that's not um because otherwise you get the contamination so when you're doing this I mean yeah you can do it but if what if you don't have the Petra bone or wherever then what you do you can't do it presumably um so there's that and and at the moment I'm reading a wonderful book on what makes humans stand upright um about the pic uh the fossil record going back to Lucy and before what made man stand upright so I think it's really interesting how all this will slowly connect up yeah uh yeah it's cool and um increasingly I mean particularly into the pic I mean the DNA doesn't survive that uh Beyond sort of a couple of million years but what does substantially survive is protein so increasingly proteomic is becoming a thing where you can essentially treat proteins like you do DNA and look at relationships between extinct hominins based upon their proteins rather than the DNA but on the the petus point so the teeth thing a lot of DNA Labs ask for it to be intact but um I've sampled plenty of non- intact ones that have worked out fine so I think it broadly speaking it's it's all right yeah so also auditar oses which are these tiny bones of the inner air are also really good for DNA sometimes better than the petus but then the petus is is is the next best followed them by the tooth and to be honest there's a lot of um people searching for other bits of the body that are good for DNA too um it's just none of them I don't think they ever going to be as good as the petus but whether any can work consistently enough to be an alternative for the reasons that you're saying that sometimes you just don't have a score lead have a pet who don't have a a tooth so the the one that we've worked on recently is the Talis so that's the born of your ankle uh which seems promising in some cases at least is not as good as a tooth or a petus or an osle but seems to be better than anything anything else so in extreme cases we can try and go for that uh when we really want to get a result and see whether it works thanks Tom um thanks Lise so um Theresa has said Thank you really interesting I'm curious about the sample sizes we have he said that some individuals or cultures might not be preserved because of funeral practices yeah and I think that's definitely as as I talked about with the transition from the ne to the Bronze Age I think that we're very much disproportionately seeing migrants and The Descendants and not the local people who are doing things with the dead which leaves little archaological record but we know that these genetic changes that we see do occur um in part because we have genomes from later on we never see that the kind of earlier ancestry signatures reemerge in not only later genomes but we have modern genomes as well so we can see that um in people who live in Britain today everybody has that step ancestry that uh or everybody with recent ancestry from Europe has that step ancestry um that comes in the Bronze Age so even if these people are persisting for a few hundred years after words we know that eventually their genetic signature um is uh is is largely um shifted um or or or is much is much reduced because we've got the modern data to compare it to so basically if there's people Neolithic people who built Stonehenge if they were hiding then then they're still hiding now if you see what I mean because we don't have anybody that has who with recent an from Britain who carries that signature without the sort of Step ancestor that's with it so while this is why I say while we we can't be exactly sure about the process and the immed what's happening immediately with these ancestry changes we can be sure that they do happen eventually because we have the kind of the end of the sentence in terms of the living people as well as people who live later thank you okay uh Susan has asked are the modeling techniques used in Britain and Europe validated by the same techniques used in other parts of the world yeah the same there's now really a suite of techniques which are used uh everywhere really and new there's new techniques coming along that are kind of building up upon those but they sort of are the same sort of principles that are behind them they're all based on the same thing amazing okay we have possibly one more question um from Margaret Simmons but I don't know if is an actual question or not so we'll just wait and see one [Music] second Margaret are you able to maybe if Jacob can unmute we can um unmute Margaret we can see if it was a question or just an accident there right I think okay all right well oh one last one sorry um from Mike so you said step ancestry is related to Indo-European languages is that pretty much certain now yeah I think so I think um I mean there's there's probably still some hold outs but um you know while the correlation isn't perfect like for instance uh Basque who Basque language is non- indoeuropean but um Bas people do have some step ancestry um and there's some quarks it's just otherwise the association between step ancestry Indo European languages in Europe at least is just too um strong for it not to be there's a bit of argu disagreement about what's happening in Anatolia and how because it seems like that well there argument of whether the step whether Indo European languages get to Anatolia without there being step ancestry or movements of Step but broadly speaking I think there's a there's a consensus now that it it has to be those cuz both both the Linguistics point at a step origin for um Indo European languages and now that genetics is pointing that as being the most likely situation as well so there are a few things certainly to resolve but I think that yeah the consensus is now that that is pretty uh much the uh solution now I'll see um it's just people saying how great a talk it was um and I was just going to ask actually sneak in at the end so um the the your this talk obviously was just up to the sort of late Bronze Age early Iron Age are you working on late Iron Age Roman early sax and stuff now is that something that's happening or is it something that's already happened yeah absolutely I mean there's already papers that so so the previous lady was saying Duncan SE was worked on on the Saxon and um there's not much Roman but we're doing a lot of Romans doing a lot of Saxons we're doing a lot of um later period skeletons from the last thousand years as well so we're hoping to get a pretty comprehensive analysis and similarly more Iron Age as well because I think there's still potentially more going on the I age that we can't see because it's involving people and groups that are actually genetically quite closely related to each other but these new techniques that Leo speedle in our lab has developed means that we can now see the difference hoping to generate more genomes from in age Britain to look see if we can see some some differences like as well with those um Chariot burials from East Yorkshire which at least from the the glance that's been given so far with the techniques that have been available previously they didn't they didn't seem to be linked to the Paris Basin but it could just be the um or to the Champagne region barrels but it could just be that they're too genetically similar to pick up to to identify at the moment so it's still a bit of an open question at the moment the genetic says that somehow there at least the people at least are very local in fact most of the people in those um square ditch barrels from East Yorkshire in a square ditch barrels um seem to be related to each other and potentially matal lineally related as well so there seems to be a matal lineal pattern of um of um descent in terms of who ends up in those big squar ditch Barrel cemeteries including the people who end up in the Chariots as well I'm gonna pick your brains about uh late I age stuff probably over a bit at sometime one last question for you if that's all right if you're yeah people are working on Ancient genomes from animals as well and it's interesting because it it it's different with the different animals because obviously there's some animals that get introduced that weren't around like sheep and goats but you see with pig for pigs for instance because they're managed differently um by the time they get to Britain they just look like pigs from Mesolithic Britain or from Mesolithic Europe because they start off with pigs that they bring with them from Anatolia but because they're kind of left to run around in the forests they mixed with the local pigs very with local kind of b um until by the time they mix so much that by the time they get you know all the way up to Britain they just look like local or at least like the the pigs that were in Europe beforehand whereas the cows maintained to some extent the cows are a bit a bit more of a mix so it seems like that they do try and potentially breed them with local orox and maybe sort of try and uh do some domestication with local orox and by the time they get to Britain there's kind of a mix and then there seems to be further mixing with local uh orox when they get there so it's interesting is that it can really depend on the the domesticated animals it can depend on the type of animal and how they managed whether their ancestry changes as well in the same way okay so um I'm gonna leave it there so that uh Tom can get back to his life um thank you everyone for for attending today and thank you Tom so much for for that talk and for answering no problem my pleasure um it's been amazing uh just last thing to say is we have like this is the first of our series of upcoming talks so keep an eye out on the emails um and our social media for upcoming talks on Thursday the 29th of August we've got reinvestigating Richboro um connecting the narrative by Philip Smither on the DAT is changing on this one but um sometime in October probably we have Randall Manor revealed Community archaeological excavations in sha Woods County Park from Andrew Mayfield uh on the 24th of October diving with a purpose the SS TR Thompson project uh by from from Tad tabra um which will be amazing and the last on of the year I think is going to be coinciding with Gladiator 2 coming out the September septus seus talk with Simon Elliot um our very own so thank you again thank you everyone lots of um thanks and fascinating talk comments coming from through there for you Tom thank you really appreciate it so we're going to leave it now and we'll see you all again very soon take care guys