The first black Englishman
What the DNA of the Cheddar man and other ancient Britons told about
Alexander Sokolov, XX2 century
More than a year ago, a new reconstruction of the Cheddar Man was loudly discussed in Britain: how is it, the first Englishman and a black man? Not without politically incorrect jokes. Scientists claimed that they were based on ancient DNA, which was extracted from the remains of a man who lived in England more than 9 thousand years ago. Finally, the results of this study have now been published, in which, in addition to the Cheddar man, the genomes of many dozens of ancient Britons were analyzed. Skin color is a small and not the most important part of the study. First of all, scientists wanted to understand what happened to the population of the British Isles from 10 to 4 thousand years ago. A long time ago, in the Mesolithic, only wandering groups of hunters, gatherers and fishermen roamed the territory of Britain. But 6 thousand years ago, the Neolithic broke out, and with it – agriculture and cattle breeding, another culture, another way of life. This revolutionary transition in England took place quite abruptly, at least 1000 years later than on the mainland, and the details are unknown. What played the main role – the cultural rise of the local population or migration from continental Europe? And how did the migrants interact with the aborigines?
Thanks to paleogenetics, scientists have already found out that in most of Europe, the Neolithic spread together with agricultural groups that came mainly from the Aegean coast. Migrants settled by two main routes – along the Mediterranean and through Central and Northern Europe. As a result, both streams mixed with local hunter-gatherers, laying the foundation of the modern population.
But did these migrating farmers reach Britain? It's a long way from the Aegean Sea. The relationship of the British aborigines with other Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe is also unclear, which geneticists have divided into two groups – Western European and Scandinavian. Maybe the British hunters descend from one of these groups, or maybe from much older ones who crossed to the islands in the Paleolithic 15 thousand years ago?
All this was a fortune-teller until the ancient British genomes fell into the hands of scientists. Now it's another matter! An article published in Nature Ecology & Evolution (Brace et al., Ancient genomes indicate population replacement in Early Neolithic Britain) sums up a large-scale study of paleogenetics: six genomes of hunter-gatherers from Britain (approximately 8500-4000 years BC), as well as DNA of 16 representatives of the British Neolithic (3800-2400 years before To this, the researchers added many previously decoded genomes of ancient people from the British Isles and other parts of Eurasia to find out who is related to whom.
What did the study show? Firstly, all British hunter-gatherers turned out to be related to their Scandinavian and especially Western European Mesolithic counterparts. The closest relative of the Cheddar man was an ancient hunter from Luxembourg (Loshbur).
The British Neolithic, on the contrary, is close to the Neolithic population of the Iberian Peninsula and Central Europe and ultimately goes back to the same migrants from the Aegean region (the contribution of the Aegeans to the Neolithic gene pool of Britain is 74%). Definitely, agriculture was brought to Britain by migrants, and there were a lot of them. Of the modern populations, the ancient British farmers were close to the French and Spaniards.
Archaeological sites of Britain, where DNA samples were taken from. Green – Mesolithic, black – Neolithic.
Okay, so innovations on British soil appeared together with foreigners. But, at least, did the newcomers get along with the local dense population, intermarried with it and lived happily ever after? Alas, genetics paints a different picture – rather than mixing, but the displacement of local alien groups. The admixture of British hunter-gatherers among the Neolithic population of Britain is very small, and its distribution forms a wedge: the lowest level of admixture is in the west of England, in Wales, and the highest in the southeast and in Scotland. Geneticists tried to figure out when this admixture "got mixed up". Only the early farmers from Scotland mixed with hunter-gatherers less than 10 generations ago – that is, probably already in Britain. The rest of the admixture turned out to be older and, probably, was acquired by their ancestors back on the continent. Based on genetics and radiocarbon dating, researchers believe that migrants first appeared in the west of England (interestingly, not from the mainland!), and then quickly – within maybe one or two centuries – settled throughout Britain.
What about the pigmentation of the ancient British? The researchers evaluated it using the HIrisPlex-S system developed for criminologists (among the co-authors of the article is the main developer of this algorithm, Susan Welsh).
The Cheddar man really turned out to have very dark skin, dark brown hair and blue or green eyes. The image of an ancient European, black and light-eyed, which in the light of accumulated data is no longer surprising.
And what did the representative of the British "new formation" look like – an Early Neolithic man from Carsington Pasture 1 (6800 years ago), whose genome was read most qualitatively? The new owner of the British land has brown eyes, dark hair and skin of an intermediate type. He probably wasn't dark, but he was well tanned.
So, what's the total? In the Mesolithic, the British Isles were inhabited by people very similar to the hunter-gatherers of mainland Europe, who inhabited the entire continent about 12 thousand years ago. This way of life lasted in Britain until 6 thousand years ago, when there is a sharp change in population and culture: domestic animals and agriculture, apparently, come to the islands together with new people from the mainland, whose ancestors came a long way from the southeast. These migrants enter Britain from the west, and then settle to the north and east, only occasionally mixing with local dark-skinned "barbarians". On the west coast of the island, settlers created megalithic monuments. However, there is another scenario: perhaps different groups of migrants have come to different parts of Britain. This model is consistent with the fact that the archaeological sites of Britain belonging to the Neolithic are similar to the cultures of different parts of Europe.
What a contrast to what was happening on the mainland! Why did the colonialist farmers willingly mix with the population of the developed lands on the Mainland? Perhaps such unity was preceded by a long–lasting – for two thousand years - coexistence, during which different cultures got used to each other. In Britain, before the arrival of farmers, the population density was low, the lifestyle was specific, often tied to the resources of the sea. After the collision, representatives of the Mesolithic and Neolithic lived side by side for a maximum of several centuries, and then the "remnants of the past" disappeared forever.
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