![]() It also adds new information - the first compelling evidence that the genetic mixing of populations in Europe was biased toward one sex, as hunter-gathered genes remaining in northern Europe after the influx of migrating farmers came more from males than females. The additional paper also reveals an additional migration as farming spread across Europe, based on data from 255 individuals who lived between 14,000 and 2,500 years ago. This vast migration helps explain the spread of Indo-European languages and it significantly replaced the local hunter-gatherer genes across Europe with steppe DNA, as happened in Britain with the migration of the Bell Beaker people to the island. But, according to a major new study, modern-day Britons are barely related to the ingenious Neolithic farmers who built the monument ![]() Stonehenge has a proud place in Britain's history as one of the wonders of the world and the best-known prehistoric monument in Europe. These people were able to expand rapidly by exploiting horses and the new invention of the cart, and they left behind big, rich burial sites.Īrchaeologists have long known that some of the technologies used by the Yamnaya later spread to Europe, but the revelation from the ancient DNA was that the people moved too - all the way to the Atlantic coast of Europe in the west to Mongolia in the east and India in the south. 'This new study reveals how the wave rolled west.'Īnother associated study, also published in Nature, found that local-hunter gatherer people who originally lived on the steppes of Central Asia, north of the Black and Caspian seas, were replaced by nomadic herders, called the Yamnaya. 'In 2015, we and others showed that around 4,500 years ago there was a minimum 70 per cent replacement of the population of north-central Europe by massive migrations of groups from the eastern European steppe. Right: 'All-Over-Cord' Beaker pot from Bathgate, West Lothian, Scotland ![]() Left: A Beaker pot housed at the National Museum of Scotland. The Beaker culture spread to other places carried by large-scale human migration, says co-senior author of Wolfgang Haak, a geneticist from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Following the Beaker spread, there was a population in Britain that for the first time had ancestry and skin and eye pigmentation similar to the majority of Britons today.' 'Over several hundred years, at least 90 per cent of the ancestry of ancient British populations was replaced by a group from the continent. Professor Ian Barnes, a co-senior author of the study from the Natural History Museum, said: 'We found that the skeletal remains of individuals from Britain who lived shortly after the first Beaker pottery appears have a very different DNA profile to those who came before. Beaker associated DNA (circled in red) can be seen across Europe B shows the approximate time ranges for samples with new genetic data. The map labelled A shows the distribution of new genetic samples used in this study. While exactly how Stonehenge was made remains a puzzle, the new study at least sheds light on who its creators were.Ī team of archaeologists led by Harvard University and London's Natural History Museum found we only share only 10 per cent of our DNA with its engineers, and 90 per cent with the Beaker people - named after the pottery drinking tumblers they made.ĭr Tom Booth, an archaeologist from the Natural History Museum, said: 'This spectacular transformation of Britain, with such a large number of Beaker people coming here is the opposite of what experts have thought for the last 10 to 20 years. Its 82 bluestones, each weighing up to four tons, are believed to have been rolled, sledged and rafted from Wales to their final destination. Stonehenge, thought at various times to have been a temple of healing, a calendar or even a royal cemetery, attracts more than a million tourists to Wiltshire each year. 'We now realise these people had totally disappeared from the British population within 1,000 years.' ![]() DNA from people from Beaker people (illustration shown) reveal that they descended from nomadic herdersĭr Mike Parker Pearson, co-author of the study and professor of British later prehistory at University College London, said: 'Most of us have thought the people who built Stonehenge were our direct ancestors, but actually this study shows that they are only distantly related to us, if at all.
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