full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Ian Barnes: What archaeology and DNA can teach us about prehistoric migration


Unscramble the Blue Letters


Hello everyone. So, I'm going to talk today about migration and movement, and particularly people moving into the British ielss in the past. And if we think about past migrations into Britain, we probably first off might have some ideas about the 20th cernuty, people coming from the Caribbean, from east Africa, or from India, or Pakistan, or places like that. And if we have to go back a bit further in time, of course we've got people like the Normans, Romans or the Vikings. But despite the fact that we've noticed quite a lot of people who have moevd into Britain at different tiems, I don't think we really think of ourselves as a migrant nation. We think of ourselves more outside as an ialsnd ntiaon. But what about if we go back really a long way, we really go back far in time beyond the time when there is any notion of a Britain or an England, beyond any kind of elingsh language, in fact beyond written history at all. In fact, we can go so far back in time that Britain is actually not even an island at all. It's still joined to the continent, still part of the Eurasian landmass. So that's what I want to talk to you about toady, about Britain in prehistory, and the prehistory of migration here. So we're going to take a big jump back in time, but I can't do that with you all in one go. So we are going to take little jumps first. We are going to jump back to the late Victorian prioed, and we're going to start off here. Here, we start in sesmoert at Cheddar ggore. It is here during the last decades of the 19th century, that this guy, rahicrd Cox Gough, discovered and excavated and blasted out a series of caves that he made into a major tuisrot attraction or a showcase. But it's actually a year after Richard died that the really big discovery was made, the one we're actually interested in. So that discovery was made in December, 1903, and it was made by Richard's son, Arthur, who was digging a darngiae dtich to try to combat the snosaeal filnoodg that they had in the caves. They tedend to make all their big discoveries in the wntier because that's when there weren't any tourists around. So workmen who were working on the cave actually blasted out and uncovered the skeleton of an adult male. And rather quickly, this skeleton made big news. Experts of the day said that perhaps it was the body of the first Englishman, and that he was of ermtexe importance, that he was at least 40,000 yeras old and perhaps as much as 80,000 years old. Well, that's not entirely true. What we actually know today is that "Cheddar Man," as he became known, Is actually about 10,000 years old, but he is still certainly very important. He's eetmlexry important for a number of rneaoss. ftisrly because he is the only near-complete skeleton that we have from that kind of time period. He is also important because he's the only one where we have a ctlpoeme skull or near-complete skull. And here is the skull, in this rather post-setting with the two brothers, William and Arthur, strinag at it. They seem to be enjoying themselves which is what I really like about this picture. (Laughter) So what else do we know about Cheddar Man? Well, he's definitely a man. And that has been the subject of a little bit debate over the years because he has a rather gracile and slender skeleton. He was probably in his early tienwtes when he died; he was buried dibleeeralty, it seems, and he was buried on his own. Today, he looks something like this. This guy has been better assembled, and you can see him at the Natural History Museum. He is on display a couple of galleries away from where my office is. So, we've worked on Cheddar Man and a number of other individuals over the years and built together quite a large complex project epiolxrng the history of the British Isles. And one of the things that came up as the result of that project was the opportunity to take part in a channel 4 documentary where we were going to explore Cheddar Man and his history to build up more of a story about him. So that was good because we already had quite a lengthy prjcoet working on the history of the British Isles, but what the plepoe who put the documentary together wnaetd to know about was something a little bit more complicated, more detailed, and that was about his appearance, about his skin coolr, hair color and eye color. And what we were able to do for them was to supply that imafronotin. We passed it on to the people who made the reosouticntcrn. Well, they came back with this, an individual with a rather small face compared to the overall size of his head, with blue eyes, dark curly hair, and obviously with dark skin. And that was a surprise for some people, for most of the people I talked to actually. And most of them actually seem to think that this was rather cool. People who saw the show generally quite enjoyed it. We weren't particularly surprised by this because similar information had already been geeaetrnd by a group, a couple of year previously, looking at different skeletons around Europe of a similar kind of age. They had already identified that dark skin was practically normal for people about 10,000 years ago. But what we've been able to do was better quantify exactly how dark that was. And we've done that using a tool borrowed from forensic sciences. Some people didn't think that this was very cool. Some people I think were expecting to see something a little bit more like this, which is the rulests of the previous reconstruction. Both rctinonurotescs are obviously quite different, but they do sahre one feature at least which is this rather wspiy fcaail hair. And I'm surprised about that because there's really no evidences either way, from the archeological genetic data, that would tend to actually suggest that. But that is perhaps their only shared feature actually. So those people, who didn't think it was very cool, were a bit spuersird, and they made their sriupsre known on social media, as you might expect. And actually things got rather heated there, and you can look at that. Right now I don't really want to go into too much detail about it. But here's one of the sort of slightly odd events that happened there, one of my childhood hreoes indirectly ... (Laughter) ... indirectly congratulating me on having upset some people. So that was a little bit wired actually. And that went on for a while. So, what became clear to us was something rather disappointing. As I've already said to you, we had spent quite a bit of time getting a pretty good understanding of what the population history of bsiirth Isles actually looks like. So how do you get from someone like this to people in the audience today? I mean Cheddar Man obviously not Billy Bragg! So that's what I'm going to go through now, what we're going to have a look at. Okay, but before we can do that we have to work out how exactly we're going to look at that information. We really have a lot of data here. The human gnoeme has 3.2 billion base paris and I can't just keep flashing that up because we'd run out of time quite quickly. So what we need to do is find a way of crunching those data down and just pulling out the most important and interesting ptras of it. And the method that we often use just to get a handle on the data initially is called the "principal components analysis," and that's what I'm going to show you here. So these are genome data that has been squashed down onto something that looks a bit like a gaprh or a plot. And so individuals who are close together are genetically similar to each other, regardless of where they might happen to come from. So let's strat here with Cheddar Man. But all alone, like he was in Gough's cave, he's not actually doing much for us, he's not telling us very much. So let's put on the other five individuals from Britain, from which we have very small amounts of genome sequenced data, and see what happens. What happens then is that they all plot together quite neatly. Despite the fact that we have individuals here from Scotland, Wales and shtuwesot England, they actually all look quite siialmr to each other. Let's expand the search a bit more across the rest of Europe. What we have here are some more individuals. The ones in blue are older individuals, slightly oledr ones from slightly elaierr time pderois. The ones in that kind of dark red color are of a similar age. And these are samples that have been taken from Spain, Hungary, Germany, sewedn, Luxembourg, all sorts of pcleas including btriain. And what you see is that the British ones kind of bridge the gap between the earlier and later ones. But there's still not much of a picture here. Where we do get a bit of a surprise is if we jump forward in time a bit more. Okay, so what we have here, about 4000 years after Cheddar Man died, is that something quite surprising happened in Britain, and that's the origins of farming. So the first farmers had arrived in Europe several thousands years earlier. They had arrived in grecee. They are the red folks on that plot. They'd made they way across Europe over several millennia and eventually arrived in Britain where we have the grey individuals on the plot. What you can see there about those grey people is that we have two important things to get out of this. They are genetically extremely different to the hunter-gatherers that were in Britain at that time. And they entirely replaced them, a complete replacement of the population. Now it's always tempting at these points to think of some kind of vast horde arriving and coinimtmtg some kind of genocidal act on the people, the peaceful hunter-gatherer people. We don't have any evidnece for that at all. So what we think in fact is quite plausible is that there were actually remarkably few people in the British Isles at this time. [Farmers] arirve and just take over. And they can easily take over the crtunoy. What is even more surprising is that a very similar thing happens about 1300 years later. A second genetically very distinct gruop arrives in the British Isles. These are the so-called "Beaker people" who are called that because of the distinctive ceramic vessels that they're often buerid with. These Beaker people were also genetically very different and seem to completely replace the Neolithic people there, the frmeras that were there before. And this, it seems, is the last major population replacement that we can detect at the roeiostlun that we can work with at the moment, with ancient DNA data. So if we bring up now the modern piotloaupn across Europe, you can see that those Beaker people sit pretty much on top of current British Isles pinuatlopos and, in fact, the populations of northwestern Europe continents in a bit of smear across there as well. Okay, so what can we draw from this? What do we really have to conclude here? One of the things that I realized some time after we've done this work and the dnmatroeucy show was that for some people who are upset by the way we had reconstructed cedahdr Man, the issue was one of population cnuititnoy. We had challenged that notion that they had that there was a long-term population continuity in Britain. And that's very much not what the data seem to be saying. The history and the prehistory of Britain is one where populations are under a series of replacements. The other thing that you can also draw from this data is about migration and our modern day conrcnes about mass miorgtain and how it affects society. What you can see here is that the scale of migration today, despite the advent of giatblzloaion and mass transportation, is nothing like the kind of migrations that we must have had in the past that have led to these very large-scale replacements. Thanks very much. (apupslae)

Open Cloze


Hello everyone. So, I'm going to talk today about migration and movement, and particularly people moving into the British _____ in the past. And if we think about past migrations into Britain, we probably first off might have some ideas about the 20th _______, people coming from the Caribbean, from east Africa, or from India, or Pakistan, or places like that. And if we have to go back a bit further in time, of course we've got people like the Normans, Romans or the Vikings. But despite the fact that we've noticed quite a lot of people who have _____ into Britain at different _____, I don't think we really think of ourselves as a migrant nation. We think of ourselves more outside as an ______ ______. But what about if we go back really a long way, we really go back far in time beyond the time when there is any notion of a Britain or an England, beyond any kind of _______ language, in fact beyond written history at all. In fact, we can go so far back in time that Britain is actually not even an island at all. It's still joined to the continent, still part of the Eurasian landmass. So that's what I want to talk to you about _____, about Britain in prehistory, and the prehistory of migration here. So we're going to take a big jump back in time, but I can't do that with you all in one go. So we are going to take little jumps first. We are going to jump back to the late Victorian ______, and we're going to start off here. Here, we start in ________ at Cheddar _____. It is here during the last decades of the 19th century, that this guy, _______ Cox Gough, discovered and excavated and blasted out a series of caves that he made into a major _______ attraction or a showcase. But it's actually a year after Richard died that the really big discovery was made, the one we're actually interested in. So that discovery was made in December, 1903, and it was made by Richard's son, Arthur, who was digging a ________ _____ to try to combat the ________ ________ that they had in the caves. They ______ to make all their big discoveries in the ______ because that's when there weren't any tourists around. So workmen who were working on the cave actually blasted out and uncovered the skeleton of an adult male. And rather quickly, this skeleton made big news. Experts of the day said that perhaps it was the body of the first Englishman, and that he was of _______ importance, that he was at least 40,000 _____ old and perhaps as much as 80,000 years old. Well, that's not entirely true. What we actually know today is that "Cheddar Man," as he became known, Is actually about 10,000 years old, but he is still certainly very important. He's _________ important for a number of _______. _______ because he is the only near-complete skeleton that we have from that kind of time period. He is also important because he's the only one where we have a ________ skull or near-complete skull. And here is the skull, in this rather post-setting with the two brothers, William and Arthur, _______ at it. They seem to be enjoying themselves which is what I really like about this picture. (Laughter) So what else do we know about Cheddar Man? Well, he's definitely a man. And that has been the subject of a little bit debate over the years because he has a rather gracile and slender skeleton. He was probably in his early ________ when he died; he was buried ____________, it seems, and he was buried on his own. Today, he looks something like this. This guy has been better assembled, and you can see him at the Natural History Museum. He is on display a couple of galleries away from where my office is. So, we've worked on Cheddar Man and a number of other individuals over the years and built together quite a large complex project _________ the history of the British Isles. And one of the things that came up as the result of that project was the opportunity to take part in a channel 4 documentary where we were going to explore Cheddar Man and his history to build up more of a story about him. So that was good because we already had quite a lengthy _______ working on the history of the British Isles, but what the ______ who put the documentary together ______ to know about was something a little bit more complicated, more detailed, and that was about his appearance, about his skin _____, hair color and eye color. And what we were able to do for them was to supply that ___________. We passed it on to the people who made the ______________. Well, they came back with this, an individual with a rather small face compared to the overall size of his head, with blue eyes, dark curly hair, and obviously with dark skin. And that was a surprise for some people, for most of the people I talked to actually. And most of them actually seem to think that this was rather cool. People who saw the show generally quite enjoyed it. We weren't particularly surprised by this because similar information had already been _________ by a group, a couple of year previously, looking at different skeletons around Europe of a similar kind of age. They had already identified that dark skin was practically normal for people about 10,000 years ago. But what we've been able to do was better quantify exactly how dark that was. And we've done that using a tool borrowed from forensic sciences. Some people didn't think that this was very cool. Some people I think were expecting to see something a little bit more like this, which is the _______ of the previous reconstruction. Both _______________ are obviously quite different, but they do _____ one feature at least which is this rather _____ ______ hair. And I'm surprised about that because there's really no evidences either way, from the archeological genetic data, that would tend to actually suggest that. But that is perhaps their only shared feature actually. So those people, who didn't think it was very cool, were a bit _________, and they made their ________ known on social media, as you might expect. And actually things got rather heated there, and you can look at that. Right now I don't really want to go into too much detail about it. But here's one of the sort of slightly odd events that happened there, one of my childhood ______ indirectly ... (Laughter) ... indirectly congratulating me on having upset some people. So that was a little bit _____ actually. And that went on for a while. So, what became clear to us was something rather disappointing. As I've already said to you, we had spent quite a bit of time getting a pretty good understanding of what the population history of _______ Isles actually looks like. So how do you get from someone like this to people in the audience today? I mean Cheddar Man obviously not Billy Bragg! So that's what I'm going to go through now, what we're going to have a look at. Okay, but before we can do that we have to work out how exactly we're going to look at that information. We really have a lot of data here. The human ______ has 3.2 billion base _____ and I can't just keep flashing that up because we'd run out of time quite quickly. So what we need to do is find a way of crunching those data down and just pulling out the most important and interesting _____ of it. And the method that we often use just to get a handle on the data initially is called the "principal components analysis," and that's what I'm going to show you here. So these are genome data that has been squashed down onto something that looks a bit like a _____ or a plot. And so individuals who are close together are genetically similar to each other, regardless of where they might happen to come from. So let's _____ here with Cheddar Man. But all alone, like he was in Gough's cave, he's not actually doing much for us, he's not telling us very much. So let's put on the other five individuals from Britain, from which we have very small amounts of genome sequenced data, and see what happens. What happens then is that they all plot together quite neatly. Despite the fact that we have individuals here from Scotland, Wales and _________ England, they actually all look quite _______ to each other. Let's expand the search a bit more across the rest of Europe. What we have here are some more individuals. The ones in blue are older individuals, slightly _____ ones from slightly _______ time _______. The ones in that kind of dark red color are of a similar age. And these are samples that have been taken from Spain, Hungary, Germany, ______, Luxembourg, all sorts of ______ including _______. And what you see is that the British ones kind of bridge the gap between the earlier and later ones. But there's still not much of a picture here. Where we do get a bit of a surprise is if we jump forward in time a bit more. Okay, so what we have here, about 4000 years after Cheddar Man died, is that something quite surprising happened in Britain, and that's the origins of farming. So the first farmers had arrived in Europe several thousands years earlier. They had arrived in ______. They are the red folks on that plot. They'd made they way across Europe over several millennia and eventually arrived in Britain where we have the grey individuals on the plot. What you can see there about those grey people is that we have two important things to get out of this. They are genetically extremely different to the hunter-gatherers that were in Britain at that time. And they entirely replaced them, a complete replacement of the population. Now it's always tempting at these points to think of some kind of vast horde arriving and __________ some kind of genocidal act on the people, the peaceful hunter-gatherer people. We don't have any ________ for that at all. So what we think in fact is quite plausible is that there were actually remarkably few people in the British Isles at this time. [Farmers] ______ and just take over. And they can easily take over the _______. What is even more surprising is that a very similar thing happens about 1300 years later. A second genetically very distinct _____ arrives in the British Isles. These are the so-called "Beaker people" who are called that because of the distinctive ceramic vessels that they're often ______ with. These Beaker people were also genetically very different and seem to completely replace the Neolithic people there, the _______ that were there before. And this, it seems, is the last major population replacement that we can detect at the __________ that we can work with at the moment, with ancient DNA data. So if we bring up now the modern __________ across Europe, you can see that those Beaker people sit pretty much on top of current British Isles ___________ and, in fact, the populations of northwestern Europe continents in a bit of smear across there as well. Okay, so what can we draw from this? What do we really have to conclude here? One of the things that I realized some time after we've done this work and the ___________ show was that for some people who are upset by the way we had reconstructed _______ Man, the issue was one of population __________. We had challenged that notion that they had that there was a long-term population continuity in Britain. And that's very much not what the data seem to be saying. The history and the prehistory of Britain is one where populations are under a series of replacements. The other thing that you can also draw from this data is about migration and our modern day ________ about mass _________ and how it affects society. What you can see here is that the scale of migration today, despite the advent of _____________ and mass transportation, is nothing like the kind of migrations that we must have had in the past that have led to these very large-scale replacements. Thanks very much. (________)

Solution


  1. century
  2. migration
  3. tourist
  4. years
  5. wispy
  6. somerset
  7. seasonal
  8. twenties
  9. reconstruction
  10. information
  11. periods
  12. farmers
  13. pairs
  14. today
  15. population
  16. weird
  17. richard
  18. reconstructions
  19. continuity
  20. staring
  21. reasons
  22. generated
  23. results
  24. earlier
  25. isles
  26. period
  27. britain
  28. extreme
  29. moved
  30. nation
  31. island
  32. ditch
  33. greece
  34. surprised
  35. parts
  36. genome
  37. exploring
  38. older
  39. sweden
  40. extremely
  41. drainage
  42. project
  43. committing
  44. people
  45. populations
  46. english
  47. graph
  48. share
  49. group
  50. deliberately
  51. wanted
  52. flooding
  53. british
  54. southwest
  55. resolution
  56. facial
  57. similar
  58. winter
  59. documentary
  60. start
  61. heroes
  62. globalization
  63. arrive
  64. country
  65. applause
  66. places
  67. complete
  68. cheddar
  69. color
  70. concerns
  71. gorge
  72. evidence
  73. buried
  74. firstly
  75. tended
  76. times
  77. surprise

Original Text


Hello everyone. So, I'm going to talk today about migration and movement, and particularly people moving into the British Isles in the past. And if we think about past migrations into Britain, we probably first off might have some ideas about the 20th century, people coming from the Caribbean, from east Africa, or from India, or Pakistan, or places like that. And if we have to go back a bit further in time, of course we've got people like the Normans, Romans or the Vikings. But despite the fact that we've noticed quite a lot of people who have moved into Britain at different times, I don't think we really think of ourselves as a migrant nation. We think of ourselves more outside as an island nation. But what about if we go back really a long way, we really go back far in time beyond the time when there is any notion of a Britain or an England, beyond any kind of english language, in fact beyond written history at all. In fact, we can go so far back in time that Britain is actually not even an island at all. It's still joined to the continent, still part of the Eurasian landmass. So that's what I want to talk to you about today, about Britain in prehistory, and the prehistory of migration here. So we're going to take a big jump back in time, but I can't do that with you all in one go. So we are going to take little jumps first. We are going to jump back to the late Victorian period, and we're going to start off here. Here, we start in Somerset at Cheddar Gorge. It is here during the last decades of the 19th century, that this guy, Richard Cox Gough, discovered and excavated and blasted out a series of caves that he made into a major tourist attraction or a showcase. But it's actually a year after Richard died that the really big discovery was made, the one we're actually interested in. So that discovery was made in December, 1903, and it was made by Richard's son, Arthur, who was digging a drainage ditch to try to combat the seasonal flooding that they had in the caves. They tended to make all their big discoveries in the winter because that's when there weren't any tourists around. So workmen who were working on the cave actually blasted out and uncovered the skeleton of an adult male. And rather quickly, this skeleton made big news. Experts of the day said that perhaps it was the body of the first Englishman, and that he was of extreme importance, that he was at least 40,000 years old and perhaps as much as 80,000 years old. Well, that's not entirely true. What we actually know today is that "Cheddar Man," as he became known, Is actually about 10,000 years old, but he is still certainly very important. He's extremely important for a number of reasons. Firstly because he is the only near-complete skeleton that we have from that kind of time period. He is also important because he's the only one where we have a complete skull or near-complete skull. And here is the skull, in this rather post-setting with the two brothers, William and Arthur, staring at it. They seem to be enjoying themselves which is what I really like about this picture. (Laughter) So what else do we know about Cheddar Man? Well, he's definitely a man. And that has been the subject of a little bit debate over the years because he has a rather gracile and slender skeleton. He was probably in his early twenties when he died; he was buried deliberately, it seems, and he was buried on his own. Today, he looks something like this. This guy has been better assembled, and you can see him at the Natural History Museum. He is on display a couple of galleries away from where my office is. So, we've worked on Cheddar Man and a number of other individuals over the years and built together quite a large complex project exploring the history of the British Isles. And one of the things that came up as the result of that project was the opportunity to take part in a channel 4 documentary where we were going to explore Cheddar Man and his history to build up more of a story about him. So that was good because we already had quite a lengthy project working on the history of the British Isles, but what the people who put the documentary together wanted to know about was something a little bit more complicated, more detailed, and that was about his appearance, about his skin color, hair color and eye color. And what we were able to do for them was to supply that information. We passed it on to the people who made the reconstruction. Well, they came back with this, an individual with a rather small face compared to the overall size of his head, with blue eyes, dark curly hair, and obviously with dark skin. And that was a surprise for some people, for most of the people I talked to actually. And most of them actually seem to think that this was rather cool. People who saw the show generally quite enjoyed it. We weren't particularly surprised by this because similar information had already been generated by a group, a couple of year previously, looking at different skeletons around Europe of a similar kind of age. They had already identified that dark skin was practically normal for people about 10,000 years ago. But what we've been able to do was better quantify exactly how dark that was. And we've done that using a tool borrowed from forensic sciences. Some people didn't think that this was very cool. Some people I think were expecting to see something a little bit more like this, which is the results of the previous reconstruction. Both reconstructions are obviously quite different, but they do share one feature at least which is this rather wispy facial hair. And I'm surprised about that because there's really no evidences either way, from the archeological genetic data, that would tend to actually suggest that. But that is perhaps their only shared feature actually. So those people, who didn't think it was very cool, were a bit surprised, and they made their surprise known on social media, as you might expect. And actually things got rather heated there, and you can look at that. Right now I don't really want to go into too much detail about it. But here's one of the sort of slightly odd events that happened there, one of my childhood heroes indirectly ... (Laughter) ... indirectly congratulating me on having upset some people. So that was a little bit weird actually. And that went on for a while. So, what became clear to us was something rather disappointing. As I've already said to you, we had spent quite a bit of time getting a pretty good understanding of what the population history of British Isles actually looks like. So how do you get from someone like this to people in the audience today? I mean Cheddar Man obviously not Billy Bragg! So that's what I'm going to go through now, what we're going to have a look at. Okay, but before we can do that we have to work out how exactly we're going to look at that information. We really have a lot of data here. The human genome has 3.2 billion base pairs and I can't just keep flashing that up because we'd run out of time quite quickly. So what we need to do is find a way of crunching those data down and just pulling out the most important and interesting parts of it. And the method that we often use just to get a handle on the data initially is called the "principal components analysis," and that's what I'm going to show you here. So these are genome data that has been squashed down onto something that looks a bit like a graph or a plot. And so individuals who are close together are genetically similar to each other, regardless of where they might happen to come from. So let's start here with Cheddar Man. But all alone, like he was in Gough's cave, he's not actually doing much for us, he's not telling us very much. So let's put on the other five individuals from Britain, from which we have very small amounts of genome sequenced data, and see what happens. What happens then is that they all plot together quite neatly. Despite the fact that we have individuals here from Scotland, Wales and southwest England, they actually all look quite similar to each other. Let's expand the search a bit more across the rest of Europe. What we have here are some more individuals. The ones in blue are older individuals, slightly older ones from slightly earlier time periods. The ones in that kind of dark red color are of a similar age. And these are samples that have been taken from Spain, Hungary, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, all sorts of places including Britain. And what you see is that the British ones kind of bridge the gap between the earlier and later ones. But there's still not much of a picture here. Where we do get a bit of a surprise is if we jump forward in time a bit more. Okay, so what we have here, about 4000 years after Cheddar Man died, is that something quite surprising happened in Britain, and that's the origins of farming. So the first farmers had arrived in Europe several thousands years earlier. They had arrived in Greece. They are the red folks on that plot. They'd made they way across Europe over several millennia and eventually arrived in Britain where we have the grey individuals on the plot. What you can see there about those grey people is that we have two important things to get out of this. They are genetically extremely different to the hunter-gatherers that were in Britain at that time. And they entirely replaced them, a complete replacement of the population. Now it's always tempting at these points to think of some kind of vast horde arriving and committing some kind of genocidal act on the people, the peaceful hunter-gatherer people. We don't have any evidence for that at all. So what we think in fact is quite plausible is that there were actually remarkably few people in the British Isles at this time. [Farmers] arrive and just take over. And they can easily take over the country. What is even more surprising is that a very similar thing happens about 1300 years later. A second genetically very distinct group arrives in the British Isles. These are the so-called "Beaker people" who are called that because of the distinctive ceramic vessels that they're often buried with. These Beaker people were also genetically very different and seem to completely replace the Neolithic people there, the farmers that were there before. And this, it seems, is the last major population replacement that we can detect at the resolution that we can work with at the moment, with ancient DNA data. So if we bring up now the modern population across Europe, you can see that those Beaker people sit pretty much on top of current British Isles populations and, in fact, the populations of northwestern Europe continents in a bit of smear across there as well. Okay, so what can we draw from this? What do we really have to conclude here? One of the things that I realized some time after we've done this work and the documentary show was that for some people who are upset by the way we had reconstructed Cheddar Man, the issue was one of population continuity. We had challenged that notion that they had that there was a long-term population continuity in Britain. And that's very much not what the data seem to be saying. The history and the prehistory of Britain is one where populations are under a series of replacements. The other thing that you can also draw from this data is about migration and our modern day concerns about mass migration and how it affects society. What you can see here is that the scale of migration today, despite the advent of globalization and mass transportation, is nothing like the kind of migrations that we must have had in the past that have led to these very large-scale replacements. Thanks very much. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
british isles 6
cheddar man 5
dark skin 2
beaker people 2
population continuity 2



Important Words


  1. act
  2. adult
  3. advent
  4. affects
  5. africa
  6. age
  7. amounts
  8. analysis
  9. ancient
  10. appearance
  11. applause
  12. archeological
  13. arrive
  14. arrived
  15. arrives
  16. arriving
  17. arthur
  18. assembled
  19. attraction
  20. audience
  21. base
  22. beaker
  23. big
  24. billion
  25. billy
  26. bit
  27. blasted
  28. blue
  29. body
  30. borrowed
  31. bridge
  32. bring
  33. britain
  34. british
  35. brothers
  36. build
  37. built
  38. buried
  39. called
  40. caribbean
  41. cave
  42. caves
  43. century
  44. ceramic
  45. challenged
  46. channel
  47. cheddar
  48. childhood
  49. clear
  50. close
  51. color
  52. combat
  53. coming
  54. committing
  55. compared
  56. complete
  57. completely
  58. complex
  59. complicated
  60. components
  61. concerns
  62. conclude
  63. congratulating
  64. continent
  65. continents
  66. continuity
  67. cool
  68. country
  69. couple
  70. cox
  71. crunching
  72. curly
  73. current
  74. dark
  75. data
  76. day
  77. debate
  78. decades
  79. december
  80. deliberately
  81. detail
  82. detailed
  83. detect
  84. died
  85. digging
  86. disappointing
  87. discovered
  88. discoveries
  89. discovery
  90. display
  91. distinct
  92. distinctive
  93. ditch
  94. dna
  95. documentary
  96. drainage
  97. draw
  98. earlier
  99. early
  100. easily
  101. east
  102. england
  103. english
  104. englishman
  105. enjoyed
  106. enjoying
  107. eurasian
  108. europe
  109. events
  110. eventually
  111. evidence
  112. evidences
  113. excavated
  114. expand
  115. expect
  116. expecting
  117. experts
  118. explore
  119. exploring
  120. extreme
  121. extremely
  122. eye
  123. eyes
  124. face
  125. facial
  126. fact
  127. farmers
  128. farming
  129. feature
  130. find
  131. firstly
  132. flashing
  133. flooding
  134. folks
  135. forensic
  136. galleries
  137. gap
  138. generally
  139. generated
  140. genetic
  141. genetically
  142. genocidal
  143. genome
  144. germany
  145. globalization
  146. good
  147. gorge
  148. gough
  149. gracile
  150. graph
  151. greece
  152. grey
  153. group
  154. guy
  155. hair
  156. handle
  157. happen
  158. happened
  159. head
  160. heated
  161. heroes
  162. history
  163. horde
  164. human
  165. hungary
  166. ideas
  167. identified
  168. importance
  169. important
  170. including
  171. india
  172. indirectly
  173. individual
  174. individuals
  175. information
  176. initially
  177. interested
  178. interesting
  179. island
  180. isles
  181. issue
  182. joined
  183. jump
  184. jumps
  185. kind
  186. landmass
  187. language
  188. large
  189. late
  190. laughter
  191. led
  192. lengthy
  193. long
  194. lot
  195. luxembourg
  196. major
  197. male
  198. man
  199. mass
  200. media
  201. method
  202. migrant
  203. migration
  204. migrations
  205. millennia
  206. modern
  207. moment
  208. moved
  209. movement
  210. moving
  211. museum
  212. nation
  213. natural
  214. neatly
  215. neolithic
  216. news
  217. normal
  218. normans
  219. northwestern
  220. noticed
  221. notion
  222. number
  223. odd
  224. office
  225. older
  226. opportunity
  227. origins
  228. pairs
  229. pakistan
  230. part
  231. parts
  232. passed
  233. peaceful
  234. people
  235. period
  236. periods
  237. picture
  238. places
  239. plausible
  240. plot
  241. points
  242. population
  243. populations
  244. practically
  245. prehistory
  246. pretty
  247. previous
  248. previously
  249. project
  250. pulling
  251. put
  252. quantify
  253. quickly
  254. realized
  255. reasons
  256. reconstructed
  257. reconstruction
  258. reconstructions
  259. red
  260. remarkably
  261. replace
  262. replaced
  263. replacement
  264. replacements
  265. resolution
  266. rest
  267. result
  268. results
  269. richard
  270. romans
  271. run
  272. samples
  273. scale
  274. sciences
  275. scotland
  276. search
  277. seasonal
  278. sequenced
  279. series
  280. share
  281. shared
  282. show
  283. showcase
  284. similar
  285. sit
  286. size
  287. skeleton
  288. skeletons
  289. skin
  290. skull
  291. slender
  292. slightly
  293. small
  294. smear
  295. social
  296. society
  297. somerset
  298. son
  299. sort
  300. sorts
  301. southwest
  302. spain
  303. spent
  304. squashed
  305. staring
  306. start
  307. story
  308. subject
  309. suggest
  310. supply
  311. surprise
  312. surprised
  313. surprising
  314. sweden
  315. talk
  316. talked
  317. telling
  318. tempting
  319. tend
  320. tended
  321. thousands
  322. time
  323. times
  324. today
  325. tool
  326. top
  327. tourist
  328. tourists
  329. transportation
  330. true
  331. twenties
  332. uncovered
  333. understanding
  334. upset
  335. vast
  336. vessels
  337. victorian
  338. vikings
  339. wales
  340. wanted
  341. weird
  342. william
  343. winter
  344. wispy
  345. work
  346. worked
  347. working
  348. workmen
  349. written
  350. year
  351. years