A photograph of the skeleton of one of the four individuals who we think are likely to have participated in the migration into southern Britain and to have displaced half the local population. The site of Cliffs End Farm in Kent contains a skeleton. Credit: Wessex Archaeology
New research showing a major migration to the island of Great Britain offers new insights into the languages spoken at the time, the ancestry of present-day England and Wales, and even ancient habits of dairy consumption.
The findings are described in Nature by a team of more than 200 international researchers. The existence of the 3,000-year-old migration was discovered by a Harvard undergrad.
Nature published two studies of ancient Britain's DNA data on Tuesday. Both show technological advances in large-scale genomics and open new windows into the lives of ancient people.
Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said that this shows the power of large-scale genetic data in concert with archaeological and other data to get rich information about our past from a time before writing. The studies are important for Great Britain, where we now have far more ancient DNA data than in any other region, and also because of what they show about the promise of similar studies elsewhere in the world.
The researchers analyzed the genomes of 793 people who had not been reported before. A large-scale migration from somewhere in France to the southern part of Great Britain, or modern-day England and Wales, replaced about 50 percent of the island's ancestry during the Late Bronze Age.
The study supports the theory that Celtic languages came to Britain from France. The languages arrived hundreds of years later in the Iron Age or 1,500 years earlier in the Bronze Age.
Language changes in pre-state societies were often accompanied by large-scale movement. The Reich team believes that the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain would be better served by this migration event.
The material culture associated with people who lived at the time of the migration could be seen in the image of bronze age tools from the National Museums of Scotland. The National Museums of Scotland have Bronze Age tools.
Reich said that using genetic data to document times when large-scale movements of people into a region can be used to identify plausible times for a language shift. The Celtic languages are too similar to their ancestors to have descended from a common ancestor 4,500 years ago. If you're a serious scholar, the genetic data should make you rethink your beliefs about Celtic language coming in the Iron Age and the Late Bronze Age.
The ability to digest cow's milk in Britain increased from 1200 to 200 B.C., which is about a millennium earlier than it did in central Europe. The findings show that dairy consumption in Britain is different from the rest of mainland Europe. The researchers said more study is needed to define that role. Increased milk tolerance would have provided a big advantage to the children of people who have this genetic adaptation.
The ancestry change happened more than a millennium and a half before the Saxon period. The team was aware of a migration into England at some point during the gap because of research published in 2016 The study showed that English people have more of the same genes as early European farmers than they did 4,000 years ago. The team set out to collect samples from later periods.
The discontinuity, a point in time when the percentage of farmer ancestry in English genomes changed, was first noticed in the summer of 2019. After his first year in Reich's lab, he was able to increase the statistical power of the group's ancestry tests. He discovered the migration when he noticed some outliers in the data from 3000 years ago.
"It's an extraordinary outcome and I'm very happy that I was able to get through it," said Isakov, who will graduate in May.
35 individuals who lived about 5,700 years ago and were buried in a tomb at Hazleton North in England were examined in the second paper. The researchers found a family of 27 people, three times larger than the second- largest documented ancient family. The team created a family tree with examples of polygyny, polyandry, adoption, and a key role for both patrilineal and matrilineal descent.
The lab's research shows the interdisciplinary collaborations that are required to tell the richest stories of the ancient past.
We have geneticists, we have statisticians, we have archaeologists, and even chemical analysis coming together. I think that the fact that we're able to combine all of these fields and have an insight that's culturally important is a great example of interdisciplinary science.
Large-Scale migration into Britain during the Middle to Late Bronze Age, Nature is more information. There is a DOI titled " 10.1038/s41586-021-04287-4".
Nature journal information.
The new research on ancient Britain contains insights on language, ancestry, kinship, milk.
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