Merdeka.com – About 27,000 years ago, a huge ice sheet covered two-thirds of the British Isles, making the area less suitable for human settlement.
But as warm weather changes the landscape, people flock to find new homes on its fertile land. Archaeologists have reconstructed the stories of those early migrants, discovering that the region has truly become a melting pot of cultures.
The oldest human genome from fossils found in England or Ireland suggests at least two different origin histories. A single fossil from Gough’s cave in Somerset had a genome more closely related to the ancestor found at sites in Spain and Belgium. While other fossils from the Kendrick Cave in Wales have genetic links to ancestors found at sites in Italy.
Radiocarbon dating shows that the two humans lived in England more than 13,500 years ago, just a few thousand years after the region’s huge ice sheet retreated to the Arctic.
Gough’s cave bones are the oldest. They died about 15,000 years ago, meaning their ancestors likely joined the migratory waves from northwestern Europe at least a thousand years before their life.
Individuals from Kendrick’s Cave lived several thousand years later and their ancestors likely migrated from the Near East to England about 14,000 years ago.
“Finding two ancestors in England only a millennium apart adds to the emerging picture of Paleolithic Europe, which was that of a changing and dynamic population,” explains evolutionary anthropologist Mateja Hajdinjak of the Francis Crick Institute in the UK. / 11).
About 16,000 years ago, the Anglo-Irish ice sheet almost disappeared. Fossils from this period are rare, and other human fossils found only date back to around 15,500 years ago, a few centuries before the British climate began to warm rapidly.
Who these people were and where they came from is still a question.
In 2018, archaeologists revealed that human fossils also found in Gough’s Cave date back to around 10,500 years ago. Known as “Cheddar Man”, this fossil was, at the time, the oldest human being in the UK whose entire genome was sequenced.
The results show that early humans had dark skin and blue eyes, a sign that the population had not adapted to higher and colder latitudes. Cheddar Man’s ancestors were a mixture of Western European hunter-gatherers and members of previous migrations to England.
Many of the same researchers involved in earlier investigations are involved in this latest analysis, hoping to see what other ancestral relationships can be discovered.
“We really wanted to know more about who this early population was in England,” said biologist Selina Brace of the British Museum of Natural History, who worked on both papers.
“We know from our previous work, including studies on Cheddar Man, that western hunter-gatherers were in England around 10,500 years before the present), but we don’t know when they first arrived in England and if this is the only one. present population “.
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“Cheddar man”
New results show that post-glacial settlers in England aren’t just genetically different. They also seem culturally different.
The burial practices at Gough Cave and Kendrick Cave look very different, as does their diet. Gough’s cave shows signs of animal and human bones. Cup-shaped human skulls have also been found, possibly for cannibalistic purposes.
Humans from Kendrick’s Cave, meanwhile, show chemical traces in their bones from consuming marine and freshwater fish and mammals. However, unlike Gough Cave, there are no signs of deer, aurochs, or horses that have been eaten by humans.
“This evidence supports the interpretation that at least two distinct human groups, with different genetic affinities and dietary and cultural behaviors, were present in England during the Late Ice Age (Ice Age),” the authors write.
One lineage is linked to an ancestor found at the Villabruna sites in Italy, while the other appears to be a combination of Goyet ancestry associated with sites in Belgium and El Miron ancestors from Spain.
“Cheddar Man” could be a blend of all three ancestors.
“This provides a snapshot of the dynamic and varied Late Ice Age in England, with late Upper Paleolithic changes in diet, burial behavior, technology and genetic affinity at a time of rapid environmental and ecological change,” concludes the authors.
“By adding our data to existing knowledge of early prehistoric genetics in the UK, the emerging scenario is one of several population genetic turnover events in the UK.”
The results of this study were published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
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