showcasefoki.blogg.se - Beaker people

“In some places, hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers seem to have mixed very quickly,” says first author Iain Mathieson, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, “but mostly the two groups remained isolated, at least for the first few hundred years. This study is the first to provide a rich genetic characterization of this process by showing how the indigenous population interacted with incoming Asian immigrants at this extraordinary moment in the past,” says Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg, a consulting anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, who identified and sampled many of the skeletons. “Southeastern Europe was the beachhead in the spread of farming from Anatolia into Europe. This study reports data from the genomes of 225 ancient people who lived both before and after this transition, and documents the interaction and mixing of these two genetically different groups of people. Starting around 8,500 years ago, agriculture spread into Europe from the southeast, accompanied by a movement of people from Anatolia. This should have said that he was buried in around 2300 BC.© Museo Arqueológico Nacional, CC BY-SA 4.0 The original said that the Amesbury Archer was buried about 2,300 years ago.

This article was amended on 22 February 2018.

But we certainly now have the evidence that they were replaced – and they never came back.” We could be looking at climate change, or even an epidemic of imported disease to which they had no resistance. “There is some evidence of a declining population and increased growth of forests, suggesting that agriculture was in decline. “It’s not necessarily a story of violent conquest,” Armit said. In Britain the puzzle remains of what happened to the pre-Beaker population: people who had no metal tools but were capable of stupendous communal projects such as the construction of Stonehenge and the giant artificial hill of Silbury. Geneticist David Reich, of the Harvard Medical School, said: “This is the first clear example from ancient DNA that pots do not always go hand-in-hand with people.” The earliest carbon-14-dated beakers come from the Iberian peninsula, but the study showed that DNA from burials there did not match the central European samples. Many questions remain, including where the Beaker culture originated.

Photograph: Dave Webb, Cambridge Archaeological Unit The study included remains of 155 individuals who lived in Britain between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago. It turns out the Amesbury Archer, as with the teenagers, was a Beaker man from central Europe. The scientists’ success in extracting ancient DNA has now pushed the evidence for ancestry generations further back. The isotopes in his teeth proved that he grew up near modern Switzerland, but that technique can only give evidence for the individual’s own life, not their ancestry. He was buried with no fewer than five beakers, gold hair ornaments, an archery wrist guard – another object found in many Beaker burials – and a dagger.

His grave is the richest ever found in Britain from the period. There was no obvious cause of death, but the study proved they were cousins.Īnother was the famous Amesbury Archer, described by Armit as “the poster boy for the Beaker people”, buried near Stonehenge in around 2300BC and rediscovered on the site of a new housing estate in 2002. The individuals studied included an enigmatic double burial from Trumpington in Cambridge – a teenage boy and girl, each with a beaker. The study included remains of 155 individuals who lived in Britain between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago, with many samples taken from skeletons which have been in museums since the 19th century. In the centuries after the Beaker burials the DNA shows that the earlier Britons did not just come slipping back out of the woods.” The people buried with the beakers did not have the same DNA as those from an earlier period, and the effect endured. “The picture is more confused on the continent, where we have not been able to match DNA closely to the Beaker burials in all cases, but in Britain the effects were dramatic.