Credit: Trustees of the Natural History Museum
Last glaciation in Europe, ~70,000-20,000 year BP
Credit: Wikimedia Commons user Ulamm
At the end of the last ice age, what is now the Island of Great Britain was still joined to continental Europe by an area of land, 'Dogger Land', now submerged beneath the North Sea, which stretched across from East Anglia to Holland.
During the glacial maximum, the northern two-thirds of the island and most of Northern Europe was glaciated and so it was repopulated when the ice retreated.
Traditionally, the first anatomically modern humans in Britain were assumed to be hunter-gatherer migrants from Northern Europe who became isolated when sea-level changes inundated Dogger Land and broke through the chalk downs at Dover creating the island of Great Britain, from which Ireland had been separated for hundreds of years. Humans along with the flora and fauna of the island reflects this repopulation over a land bridge from newly-repopulated North-Western Europe, in the immediate post-glacial period when sea-levels were still low enough to allow Dogger Land to be populated.
Fig. 1: Location, genetic ancestry and AMS date of individuals discussed within the text.
As the UCL news release explains:
The study, which involved radiocarbon dating and analysis as well as DNA extraction and sequencing, shows that it is possible to obtain useful genetic information from some of the oldest human skeletal material in the country.
The authors say that these genome sequences now represent the earliest chapter of the genetic history of Britain, but ancient DNA and proteins promise to take us back even further into human history.
The researchers found that the DNA from the individual from Gough’s Cave, who died about 15,000 years ago, indicates that her ancestors were part of an initial migration into northwest Europe around 16,000 years ago. However, the individual from Kendrick’s Cave is from a later period, around 13,500 years ago, with his ancestry from a western hunter-gatherer group. This group’s ancestral origins are thought to be from the near East, migrating to Britain around 14,000 years ago.
The authors note that these migrations occurred after the last ice age when approximately two-thirds of Britain was covered by glaciers. As the climate warmed and the glaciers melted, drastic ecological and environmental changes took place and humans began to move back into northern Europe.Finding the two ancestries so close in time in Britain, only a millennium or so apart, is adding to the emerging picture of Palaeolithic Europe, which is one of a changing and dynamic population.
Dr Mateja Hajdinjak, co-author
Ancient Genomics Laboratory
The Francis Crick Institute, London, UK
As well as genetically, the two groups were found to be culturally distinct, with differences in what they ate and how they buried their dead.The period we were interested in, from 20-10,000 years ago, is part of the Palaeolithic – the Old Stone Age. This is an important time period for the environment in Britain, as there would have been significant climate warming, increases in the amount of forest, and changes in the type of animals available to hunt.
Dr Sophy Charlton, co-author
The Natural History Museum, London, UK (at time of study)
Now PalaeoBARN
School of Archaeology
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
The researchers discovered that the mortuary practices of the two groups also differed. Although there were animal bones found at Kendrick’s Cave, these included portable art items, such as a decorated horse jawbone. No animal bones were found that showed evidence of being eaten by humans, and the scientists say that this indicates the cave was used as a burial site by its occupiers.Chemical analyses of the bones showed that the individuals from Kendrick’s Cave ate a lot of marine and freshwater foods, including large marine mammals. Humans at Gough’s Cave, however, showed no evidence of eating marine and freshwater foods, and primarily ate terrestrial herbivores such as red deer, bovids (such as wild cattle called aurochs) and horses.
Dr Rhiannon E. Stevens, co-author
Institute of Archaeology
UCL, London, UK
In contrast, animal and human bones found in Gough’s Cave showed significant human modification, including human skulls modified into ‘skull-cups’, which the researchers believe to be evidence for ritualistic cannibalism. Individuals from this earlier population seem to be the same people who created the Magdalenian stone tools, a culture known also for iconic cave art and bone artefacts.We really wanted to find out more about who these early populations in Britain might have been. We knew from our previous work, including the study of Cheddar Man, that western hunter-gatherers were in Britain by around 10,500 years BP, but we didn’t know when they first arrived in Britain, and whether this was the only population that was present.
Dr Selina Brace, co-author
Natural History Museum, London, UK
Gough’s Cave is also the site where Britain’s famous Cheddar Man was discovered in 1903, dated to 10,564-9,915 years BP. In this study, Cheddar Man was found to have a mixture of ancestries, mostly (85%) western hunter-gatherer and some (15%) of the older type from the initial migration.
The researchers summarise their findings in the abstract to their open access paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution:
AbstractOf course, all this happened several thousand years before Creationists believe Earth existed, by which time the flora and fauna of North-Western Europe was substantially as it is today, showing no signs of having survived a mass extinction by drowning just a few thousand years ago, with the inevitable genetic bottleneck that would follow such an event. As with almost every aspect of Creationism, the facts differ completely from the mythology, and yet there are still a substantial number of otherwise normal people able to live independent lives who still believe the myths.
Genetic investigations of Upper Palaeolithic Europe have revealed a complex and transformative history of human population movements and ancestries, with evidence of several instances of genetic change across the European continent in the period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Concurrent with these genetic shifts, the post-LGM period is characterized by a series of significant climatic changes, population expansions and cultural diversification. Britain lies at the extreme northwest corner of post-LGM expansion and its earliest Late Glacial human occupation remains unclear. Here we present genetic data from Palaeolithic human individuals in the United Kingdom and the oldest human DNA thus far obtained from Britain or Ireland. We determine that a Late Upper Palaeolithic individual from Gough's Cave probably traced all its ancestry to Magdalenian-associated individuals closely related to those from sites such as El Mirón Cave, Spain, and Troisième Caverne in Goyet, Belgium. However, an individual from Kendrick's Cave shows no evidence of having ancestry related to the Gough’s Cave individual. Instead, the Kendrick’s Cave individual traces its ancestry to groups who expanded across Europe during the Late Glacial and are represented at sites such as Villabruna, Italy. Furthermore, the individuals differ not only in their genetic ancestry profiles but also in their mortuary practices and their diets and ecologies, as evidenced through stable isotope analyses. This finding mirrors patterns of dual genetic ancestry and admixture previously detected in Iberia but may suggest a more drastic genetic turnover in northwestern Europe than in the southwest.
Charlton, S., Brace, S., Hajdinjak, M. et al.
Dual ancestries and ecologies of the Late Glacial Palaeolithic in Britain.
Nat Ecol Evol (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01883-z
Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
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