The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (27 page)

By contrast, the highest frequency of Ian in Northern Europe centres around Denmark and Oslo in southern Scandinavia (
Figure 4.11a
). Relevant genetic dates are younger than for Ingert,
⁷⁵
suggesting that both his migration into and expansions within Britain occurred during the Early Neolithic and onwards, after the Scandinavian coastline opened up in the south. With Ian’s Neolithic age, he could have combined with Ruisko to provide the input for the western Danish Neolithic entry into Norway, and ultimately Sweden, while Rostov was the East
European Mesolithic/Neolithic founder, coming in the other way down through northern Scandinavia as explained above.

The overall British contribution of Ian and Ingert during the Mesolithic was only 3%, of which Ingert was the greatest component.
⁷⁶
So, what real relevance does this Scandinavian and German Mesolithic digression have to the peopling of the British Isles? Well, it may help us to disentangle the various northern Continental inputs to the British Isles throughout the Mesolithic and also Neolithic. But perhaps more importantly for our immediate historical perspective, it will help us later in the book logically to sort, separate and assess the size of more recent putative Anglo-Saxon and Viking male elite invasions, which are thought by some historians and geneticists to have been very large.

How do we do this? From the maternal side, there is little direct evidence for any significant intrusion of mtDNA lines from north-west Europe into the British Isles before the Neolithic. For the Mesolithic, this partly results from the general lack of sufficient geographic differentiation of these markers in Western Europe as compared with the Y chromosome. But there is also the uniformly conservative south-west refuge character of the Atlantic coast maternal genetic types, most of which arrived before the Neolithic (
Figures 3.5
and
4.4
).
⁷⁷

The Y chromosome gives us quite a different view of migrations to the British Isles from north-west Europe. It is easier to differentiate north-west European male intrusions from shared
Franco-Spanish Ruisko lines, simply because 50–75% of the German, Frisian and Scandinavian male lines, including those we have just discussed, are not Ruisko and do not derive from the Iberian refuge (discussed in more detail later). Not only that, but the male groups that characterize north-west Europe and Scandinavia, such as Ingert, Ian and Rostov,
did
overflow into Britain from, respectively, the Mesolithic and the Neolithic onwards, as we shall see.
⁷⁸
Luckily the pattern of spread to Britain is different for each of the three gene groups, and it is therefore possible to discern different events.

Ingert had already arrived in Britain during the pre-YD era, and more Ingert males were arriving during the Mesolithic, even as the gene line was diversifying further. Rostov and Ian were poised for intrusion respectively from northern and southern Scandinavia by the end of the Mesolithic.
⁷⁹

What could we predict if we ignored the Neolithic/Mesolithic date labels on Ian and Ingert in Britain? Well, if, in the simplistic solution of recent invasions from the Continent, the Danish Vikings had brought Ian to the British Isles while the Frisians and Anglo-Saxons carried Ingert, each gene group would have followed historical raid sites and shown a similar patchy distribution to the Norwegian Rostov – which they do not, being more evenly spread. On the other hand, if both of these derived Ivan groups had entered eastern Britain from the Continent mainly
earlier
, during the Mesolithic – when there was a landbridge – or during the Neolithic, they would show the same broader frequency patterns I have just described.

It is possible to put these ‘early’ and ‘late’ alternatives to a further test by comparing exact Y gene type matches, which I have been able to do using the large database I have collated.
⁸⁰
The results of gene type matching are presented and discussed further in
Chapters 11
and
12
. Three points can be noted here, which are consistent with a deeper timescale. First, exact gene type matches between Trondheim and British Isles locations (
Figure 12.4
) correlate in frequency with those shown overall for the Rostov group distribution (
Figure 4.10
), which is consistent with a mainly Norwegian source for Rostov,
but
the gene type matches show a stronger and more widespread Norwegian influence on Britain than would be the case had Rostov simply been carried across by the Viking raids.

Second, when we look at exact matches between other putative Continental sources such as Denmark, the Anglo-Saxon homeland and Frisia, the pattern breaks up in a revealing way (Figure 11.5). Exact Danish matches correspond closely to locations visited by Danish Vikings, such as York and around the Wash, but at much lower overall frequencies and in fewer places than is predicted by the distribution of the Ian group. So while the Danish gene type matches correspond closely to historical Danish Viking raids, the Ian gene group as a whole had a greater and more widespread influence on Britain. Third, there is a real Anglo-Saxon contribution in England, but it is much smaller and less even than has previously been argued (see
Chapter 11
, especially Figure 11.5).
⁸¹
And finally, in spite of its geographical proximity and the Dark Age stories of Frisian mercenaries in England, there are virtually no specific Frisian matches.

In summary, we have fairly clear maternal evidence for Norway and northern Scandinavia that the first settlers there were Mesolithic and came predominantly from Iberian Atlanticcoastal stock rather than farther east in Europe. The Y-chromosomal evidence suggests a common Balkan refuge source of the
‘Ivan’ group, and Britain may have shared in the spread of Ingert during the Mesolithic.

However, it is a little more complicated to distinguish what proportion of the British and Irish hunter-gatherer ancestral male gene lines arrived after the Younger Dryas, during the Mesolithic. If we take overall ancestral contribution, the figure would be around 47%,
⁸²
of which by far the largest component (96%) came from the south-western refuge. As we shall see in the next chapter, the general figure would be much lower if the true apportionment was made to the Neolithic, since the same lines were to re-expand then. Whichever figure is used, my estimate for male Mesolithic gene flow is considerably higher than the 11% derived from studying maternal Helina lines.

Before leaving the Mesolithic, it is worth mentioning that there are several possible reasons for the high degree of genetic carry-over from this period into the Neolithic along the Atlantic fringe. Because of the British Isles’ position at the far west of the huge European ‘peninsula’ and increasing geographic separation due to sea level rise, and the rich marine resources available, the hunter-gatherer Mesolithic lifestyle lasted rather longer than in Central and Eastern Europe. This persistence of the Mesolithic is best seen in Ireland.
⁸³

The introduction of agriculture, and possibly the language that went with it, to Ireland and other places, could have resulted as much in an expansion of pre-existing Mesolithic lineages as of new introduced Neolithic ones.
⁸⁴
This does indeed seem to be the case, as we shall see in discussion of the Neolithic in the next chapter.

The Neolithic (literally the ‘new stone age’) was a package of cultural innovations including systematic domestication of plants and animals. Large parts of the world, such as South-east Asia, still practise some form of labour-intensive agriculture, many elements of which would be familiar to their Neolithic ancestors, apart from the change to rather more effective metal implements such as iron ploughshares and iron hand-held rice-cropping knives. The Neolithic is therefore rightly seen as a culturally more dramatic threshold than our more recent Agricultural Revolution (immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution), although the size of its effect on population growth
in Europe was controversially less than previously thought.
¹
The Agricultural Age, as the Neolithic is sometimes called, is certainly the most researched period of European prehistory.

The Neolithic Revolution in the western part of Eurasia started at least 10,000 years ago, but did not impinge on Britain and Ireland until 6,500–5,500 years ago.
²
Not only were the British Isles at the very end of the long trail of agricultural influence that began in the Near East, but they seem to have received their Neolithic inputs, agricultural and otherwise, via two completely different routes: north and south through and round Europe from the Balkans and the Near East. One of these routes to Britain was from the nearby regions of north-west Europe to the east, while the other was up the Atlantic coast via Iberia, thus again following previous patterns of influence.

Following some forest clearance around 6,500 years ago, the earliest clear evidence for a Neolithic agricultural lifestyle was in eastern Britain, at Shippey Hill in Cambridge and at Broome Hill in Norfolk, about 6,300 and 6,200 years ago, respectively.
³
The cultural trend rapidly spread north over the next two to three hundred years, reaching Cross Mere in Shropshire, then Northumberland and Grampian, and right up to Orkney, where today we have the remarkable treasure of the intact Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae, first uncovered in a storm in 1850 (Plate 5).

It is logical to suppose, from the sequence of events, that the impetus for these changes in eastern Britain came into East Anglia from north-west Europe across the Channel and the North Sea. However, at the same time, things were happening
and ideas were moving up on the Atlantic side, which were likely to have been introduced via seaways from farther south down the French coast. An isolated group of hunter-gatherers on the Dingle Peninsula in south-west Ireland had acquired polished Neolithic stone axes and cattle by 6,100 years ago.
⁴
Neolithic sites appear in Ireland in Ballynagilly and Carrowmore just over 6,000 years ago. In connection with Carrowmore, Barry Cunliffe suggests that the tradition of building large stone monuments may have actually moved from Brittany to Ireland earlier, as part of an established maritime cultural relationship, long before the Neolithic agricultural package itself arrived. This is a surprise, since passage graves in Ireland, such as those at Carrowmore, are generally associated with the full Neolithic:

It has been claimed, on the basis of radiocarbon dates, that some of the tombs in the cemetery of Carrowmore, Co. Sligo, date back to the early fifth millennium [
BC
, i.e. nearly 7,000 years ago]. If so they would be broadly contemporary with the earliest Breton passage graves and would predate by more than 500 years the appearance of the Earliest Neolithic in Ireland.
⁵

These anachronisms of Neolithic axes, cattle-ranching and stone graves arriving before agriculture, far from depicting the Atlantic-coast Mesolithic Irish as backward and ripe for colonization, paints them as sophisticated traders with long-term, longdistance connections and an eclectic choosiness for the Neolithic fashions hailing from Brittany. As we shall see, this fits with the overall undiluted genetic antiquity, or conservatism as it seems to me, of Irish male and female markers. As I mentioned, my analysis shows that the most important Irish R1b-14 founder arrived in Britain and Ireland long before the Neolithic. R1b-14
then re-expanded as three clusters dating from the Mesolithic into the Irish Early Neolithic period.
⁶

Elements of the ‘Neolithic package’ did not necessarily travel together through Europe, from their homelands in the Near East, at the same time. This is one of the many reasons for wondering how much of the movement was of culture passing through a network, or being copied by example, and how much was a real movement of people.

The ability of most domesticated plants and animals (domesticates) to move great distances without riding on the back of great migrations was already apparent at this early stage of European farming. Not all the early European domesticates came from the Near East. Broomcorn millet (
Panicum miliaceum
) appears early in the Neolithic of south-east Hungary, yet it was apparently first domesticated in China or Central Asia, rather than the Near East.
⁷

One of the elements of the package, which can be traced most specifically, was pottery. Pottery styles are a distinctive marker of cultural spread, and fragments of pottery are sufficiently durable to survive in most sites.