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The Builders of Stonehenge Trace Their Ancestry Directly to Continental 'Immigrants'

17 APR 2019







While this latest study concerns itself specifically with the shift to farming, rather than the origins of UK's most famous monolith, the team's work could shed light on the possible ancestors of its builders.



Where ancient Britain was concerned, there's been extensive debate on which scenario best describes the archaeological findings around the place.

"Because continental farmer populations had mixed to some extent with local hunter-gatherers as they expanded along both the Mediterranean and Rhine-Danube corridors, as well as later, we expected to see some mixing in Britain as well," says Ian Barnes, an ancient DNA expert at Britain's Natural History Museum.

British history is no stranger to the impact of migration. Rewind the clock and you'll quickly pass through waves of French and Scandinavian conquest imposing their language and introducing their strange new cuisines.

Keep going another ten millennia, and eventually you'll find the signs of occupation in the form of a group of humans who settled the region soon after the end of the last major Ice Age.


'Cheddar Man', as he's called, provides us with a glimpse of what these ancient people might have been like. His dark curly hair and pale eyes are seen as rather typical of Mesolithic humans in that corner of the globe.

While humans had already been on British soil for tens of thousands of years, Cheddar Man's family provides a convenient landmark for comparing prehistoric culture in Britain with the revolutionary shifts that set the foundations for the modern world.



"It looks like the development of farming and these Neolithic cultures was mainly driven by the migration of people from mainland Europe," says Natural History Museum anthropologist Tom Booth.


Strangely, they didn't seem to make their way into Britain directly across the channel as might be assumed, but more than likely through a more circuitous route through the Atlantic, settling down on Britain's western shores.

Where there are usually signs of a generous mixing of genes – and culture – between established populations and migrants, there's little sign of this melding of blood lines in this case.

Any genes introduced by Cheddar Man's kindred were swamped by the DNA of incoming populations, who the researchers believe had slightly lighter skin and darker eyes.

"It is difficult to say why this is, but it may be that those last British hunter-gatherers were relatively few in number," says evolutionary geneticist Mark G. Thomas from University College London.



It wouldn't have taken long for Cheddar Man's people to have faded from history as European farmers spread throughout their new home.


Some researchers argue all of Europe's megaliths can be traced at least back to cultures that developed in northwestern France just prior to Britain's jump into the farming craze.

Whatever happened, we can be fairly confident Cheddar Man's descendants would have been less than impressed at the slow 'Brentry' of European farmers.

This research was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.