One of joys of having your own blog is that it prompts you to write. So far, I’ve blogged on profession-related issues but I thought I’d strike out in a different direction just for the sheer joy of it.
Archaeology was my first love, and despite not being plucky enough to opt for a career in it, I retain a keen interest in the subject – it combines with other interests, walking in the countryside, nature, and just observing the landscape, so I am most interested in what is easily observable, UK and European archaeology, from the stone age onwards.
If I think back to my first steps in journalism, we used to cast off copy, count letters in headlines and stick galleys of text onto layout sheets … and I’m not that old. The profession is unrecognisable today with all the digital innovations, even if the underlying skills needed are the same.
The same applies to archaeology. It has moved on at an amazing rate. Experts in the minutiae of the discipline exchange information across the subject, the globe and across boundaries into science.
The aspect I find particularly interesting is the crossover between archaeology, genetics and linguistics.
Genetics has revolutionised archaeology. This ‘young’ science promises to expand our knowledge of prehistory and move the mystery to new areas of the human journey. Linguistics has been feeding into the big picture on human societies for a long time, providing clues on the movements of cultures across continents.
Archaeology is still king, however. If we were to look at a modern Brazilian man in the same way that we analyse prehistory, a geneticist may confirm his African roots, a linguist his Portuguese tongue, but it would be the archaeologist that would dig to uncover the remnants of the slave trade that would explain his presence on the South American continent.
One of the most interesting revelations of the new genetics in recent weeks has been ‘Cheddar Man’, a 10,000-year-old man found in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset in 1903. Scientists have managed to extract enough DNA to map his whole genome.
Apart from revealing that he is related to some of the modern inhabitants of our island, scientists were able to build a model of him based on genetic information, showing he had blue eyes, black hair and, probably, dark to black skin.
The great surprise to scientists was that the development of paler skin to absorb more vitamin D from the sun in northern climes only happened within the last 300 generations.
The tracing of maternal, or mitochondrial, DNA has provided strong evidence that today’s humans have descended from a population in Africa some 70,000 years ago, or some 2,100 generations, who then migrated around the world. The first Australians claim a continuous culture of 60,000 years. The European branch left Africa via the Near East some 55,000 years ago.
However, what makes the picture much clearer and less confusing for the UK is the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago. We know there were ‘old stone age’ people here before that time, but all of them were pushed south by the ice. Cheddar man was one a wave of people to come as the ice receded.
He had genetic cousins in Spain, Hungary and Luxembourg, the DNA evidence reveals. These ‘middle stone age’ or Mesolithic people spread across continental Europe and over the land bridge to the UK before further ice melts formed the modern coastline of the British Isles.
That is not to say that the little matter of the English Channel stopped migration, it didn’t. People travelled up from Iberia in the west, the continent in the east and Scandinavia in the north.
However according to genetic research from Stephen Oppenheimer [1] some 90% of the genes present in the UK population today were present as far back as the Bronze age or around 4,300 -3,000 years ago. Given the migration of recent years, this 90% figure would seem to cast doubt on massive migrations in the intervening years – Saxons, Vikings etc.
Male Saxon genes account for only 4% of the modern UK gene pool. Some archaeologists also agree that the schoolbook historical record is wrong, mass invasions of Anglo-Saxons left little mark on the landscape, with farming carrying on as before [2].
Linguistically, we know the closest relative of English is Frisian, brought by the Anglo-Saxons, but who can say what language, apart from Latin, was previously spoken in eastern Britain by the cousins of those later to become Saxons? The linguistic evidence is much harder to date.
If we go back to Cheddar Man and his cousins, we have had an inkling of his story from the linguistic record. Caution must be used when using languages to assess the movements of people, as people change their languages according to external factors, as the Brazilian example above shows, or more locally, the fact that French was introduced to Britain by the Normans (or Northmen) who were in fact Vikings who had settled in Normandy and learnt French.
However, Indo-European languages have been grouped thus because their similarities indicate that they have roots in an ancient language, Proto-Indo-European, and that people moved out a homeland in, most likely, either the Steppes of central Asia or Eastern Turkey, eastwards to northern India and westwards as far as Ireland and Portugal.
This is why the Welsh 1,2,3 ‘un, dau, tri’ is not a million miles from the Punjabi ‘ikk, do, tinn’ or the French, from Latin, ‘un, deux, trois’. This does not prove that the people moved, or when, but the language did, evolving along the way into a plethora of modern tongues. And they were not the only people, but their language came to dominate.
The new genetics, together with archaeology and linguistics, may not only illuminate who the different peoples were that came live in the UK along with Cheddar Man, but it may one day shine a light on how all peoples of the world arrived where they are and trace their paths back through time to our shared ancestral home in Africa.
[1] Stephen Oppenheimer: The origins of the British
[2] Francis Pryor: Britain AD