![]() In the past, they were never sure whether it was due to the actual migration of the people who made these pots, or whether they were simply exchanging ideas with the people around them.īell beakers eventually reached Stonehenge, and the data show they got there because the people who made them (mostly descendants of the Steppe people who lived in present-day Netherlands and Germany) migrated to the area - and then proceeded to replace about 90 percent of the population. In the study, the researchers at first focused on figuring out what drove the spread of so-called “Bell Beaker culture” - the creation of bell-shaped pots that probably started with early Iberians - throughout ancient Europe. That seemed to be true of the Neolithic people, hailing from the steppes of Central Asia north of the Black and Caspian seas, who ended up “replacing” the people in the area around Stonehenge. “There was a view that migration is a very rare process in human evolution,” said Reich, pointing out that the new findings upend that assumption: “the orthodoxy - the assumption that present-day people are directly descended from the people who always lived in that same area - is wrong almost everywhere.”ĭNA from people from the Bell Beaker culture reveal that they descended from nomadic herders who migrated from the steppes of Central Asia. In 2014, they had only the genomes of 10 ancient Europeans and a bunch of dusty artifacts to work with the new data, showing how those genes were passed on in both chronological and geological terms, presents a much more accurate - and often surprising - picture.īroadly speaking, what they found is that prehistoric Europeans moved around - a lot. The researchers had originally set out to figure out how and when people in prehistoric Europe - Stonehenge’s creators included - moved around, using their new wealth of genetic data extracted from the bones of 1,336 individuals. Genetic data show that the people who built Stonehenge seemed to vanish from the area around 4,500 years ago. “There was a sudden change in the population of Britain,” said David Reich, Ph.D., a lead author of one of the papers and a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School, in a statement on Wednesday. In the genes from bones around Stonehenge and neighboring areas, they observed something strange: around 4,500 years ago, the people who lived at Stonehenge seemed to vanish. ![]() In the two papers, published Wednesday, the researchers mapped out the migration of different groups of humans across Europe, using DNA extracted from several hundred samples of ancient human bones as their guide. Whoever it was that built it some 5,000 years ago, we now know one thing is true, thanks to a groundbreaking pair of studies on early European migration published in Nature: They disappeared soon after it was built. Nobody is sure who built Stonehenge, the iconic ring of giant stones in the southwest of Britain: Some hypotheses peg its construction to the ancient Celtic high priests known as Druids, while others involve the Saxons, Danes, Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians. ![]()
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