Museum of London since 2015From the end of Roman occupation through the Anglo-Saxons and Viking invasions – researchers say a new method of examining DNA in ancient bones could force a rethink of key moments in Britain’s early history.
Scientists can already trace major changes in DNA over thousands or millions of years, helping us learn, for example, how humans evolved from ape-like creatures.
Now researchers can identify subtle changes over just hundreds of years, providing clues as to how people migrated and interacted with natives.
They are using new methods to analyze human remains found in Britain, including the time when the Romans were replaced by Anglo-Saxon aristocracy from Europe.
Professor Peter Heather, from King’s College London, who is working on the project with the developers of the new DNA technique at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said the new technique could be “revolutionary”.
While the project will analyze the DNA of more than 1,000 ancient human remains from people who lived in Britain over the past 4,500 years, researchers have come to regard the Romans as a particularly interesting period to study. Have gone home in time.
What happened during this period, more than 1,500 years ago, is unclear from the written and archaeological records. Historians are divided in their views on the scale and nature of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, whether it was large or small, hostile or cooperative.
According to Professor Heather, “It is one of the most contested and therefore one of the most interesting things to work on in the whole of British history.”
“[The new method] “That will allow us to see what kind of relationships there are with the indigenous population,” he said, “are they cooperative, are they genocidal, are the indigenous people working their way into the elite.” able to make?”
They are optimistic about the success of the technique, called Twigstats, after testing it on human remains found in mainland Europe between AD 1 and 1,000.
Much of what they gleaned from DNA about the Vikings’ spread into Scandinavia was combined with the historical record.
This result is published. In the journal Natureconfirmed that the method works while showing how powerful it can be in shedding new light on accepted facts when the results don’t match what’s written in the history books.
“That was the moment we got really excited,” said Dr. Leo Spedel, who developed the technique with his group leader, Dr. Pontus Skoglund. “We can see that this could really change how much we can learn about human history.”
The problem the researchers were trying to overcome is that the human genetic code is extremely long – consisting of 3 billion distinct chemical units.
Detecting small genetic changes in this code that occur over a few generations, for example, as a result of newcomers interfering with native populations, is like finding a needle in a haystack.
The researchers solved the problem, as it were, by removing the haystack and leaving the needle in plain sight—a technique they used to identify old genetic changes, ignore them, and see only recent changes. Find a way.
They collected genetic data from thousands of human remains from online scientific databases, then estimated how closely they were related to each other, which pieces of DNA were inherited from which group and when.
He created a family tree in which older changes appear in earlier branches, and more recent changes in newer ‘twigs’, hence the name Twigstats.
Francis Crick InstituteDr. Skoglund said that each of the people whose remains will be studied has a story to tell, and soon scientists and historians will be able to hear their stories.
“We want to understand the many different periods of European and British history, from the Roman period, when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, through the Viking Age and see how that shapes the ancestry and diversity of this part of the world. “, he said.
In addition to showing interbreeding with different populations embedded in ancient DNA, there are important details about how people coped with major historical moments, such as epidemics, dietary changes, urbanization and industrialization.
This technique could potentially be applied to any part of the world that has a large collection of well-preserved human remains.
Professor Heather wants to use it to research what she describes as one of the great mysteries of European history: why, 1,500 years ago, Central and Eastern Europe changed from German-speaking to Slovak-speaking. Changed.
“Historical sources tell us what was the case first and what was the case later, but nothing about what happened in between,” he said.
Follow up to Pulb blue sky And x
The new series of Digging for Britain, featuring Poulton Farm, one of the Anglo-Saxon burial sites, will be available to watch on BBC iPlayer from 7 January 2025.