Farmers Went a-Wooing

The British: A Genetic Journey
by Alistair Moffat
Birlinn, 2013, 288 pages, $39.99

The Scots: A Genetic Journey
by Alistair Moffat & James F. Wilson
Birlinn, 2012, 256 pages, $29.99

History, or more often pre-history, starts to seem more like astronomy or merchant banking when you get into the thousands of years.

These two racily written books are a progress report on British—and occasionally Irish—pre-history and the dawn of written history, when documentation was still very scarce. They go back many thousands of years to the earliest human habitation there and take it through to Norman times a mere one thousand years ago, after which there was more—though still inadequate—recording.

Acting like over-burden cut from an underground coal seam, DNA testing and archaeology, with help from linguistic analysis, have in the past generation uncovered a vast amount of information about these distant times. Presumably much more will be found as the work continues.

As often with mining, the early work uncovered rich seams and Alistair Moffat’s books mainly add detail to the research reported around the beginning of this century. Two of his important points are that the arrival of farming in Britain about 6000 years ago involved a wave of immigrants from the European continent; and the male newcomers made a grossly disproportionate contribution to the population—because conquering men helped themselves to the local women.

The earliest Britons were hunter-gatherers, like the pre-contact Australian Aborigines. Early writers on the pre-historic past usually assumed, without much evidence, that a new wave, probably quite large, of invaders introduced the islands to agriculture, which had begun in the Middle East perhaps 5000 years previously.

More recent work based on DNA and archaeology has questioned this assumption, because the mitochondrial DNA based on genetic inheritance through the female line showed a very large proportion of the population to be descended from the hunter-gatherers. Researchers wondered whether farming techniques had come through one society copying from neighbours or from more vague osmosis.

Moffat, working as well with Y-chromosome DNA recording the male line, suggests the explanation is that the farming immigrants were mostly young single men, who set about wooing or otherwise match-making with the local women. He reports a male DNA marker representing a genetic stream that appears to have originated in what is now Iraq, the likely birthplace of agriculture. The carriers of this marker appear to have moved westwards over thousands of years, taking the techniques with them but diluting their lineage through the women.

He describes as “gene surfing” the process of a new wave of men spreading their DNA far into the existing population. The all-time star human breeder is regarded as Genghis Khan, who today has an estimated 16 million descendants, but tradition names some startlingly fecund Celtic heroes too.

Agriculture also brought a very rapid increase in populations. This is because babies born into a predominantly meat-eating culture had to be breast-fed for several years until their teeth were strong enough to eat with the adults. Breast-feeding mothers are usually unable to conceive. The arrival of animal milk and grain, however, meant the arrival of mush or porridge and thus radically earlier weaning and in turn much larger families. The generally better diet also meant longer lives for both mothers and babies. A population “explosion” followed, Moffat says.

These limitations of hunter-gatherer life also explain the slow growth of the population of Australia, which was still less than a million in 1788 after something like 60,000 years in this country. There is also similarity where a new, more modern culture that used the land more intensively arrived, with faster expansion of the mixed race than the original people. Genetic blending in early colonial Australia was a mixture of customary, voluntary and violent. History cannot easily untangle the proportions, though the indigenous Australian custom of lending women to newcomers in return for gifts was important.

Moffat sees, much like here, some violent conflict but also a lot of apparently peaceful settlement and integration between the cultures. After thousands of years in Britain the hunter-gatherers were roaming less and occupying fixed areas of land by custom, much like our indigenous people.

Moffat sees Homo sapiens (modern humans) setting foot in Britain, in south-western England, as early as 40,000 years ago, soon after Homo sapiens first entered Europe. Neanderthal people were probably there 20,000 years before that. Both were in very small numbers,.

The most severe part of the Ice Age then drove people out again. Homo sapiens did not return until about 14,500 years ago, when the Ice Age began to lift. Numbers remained tiny and the climate unstable, but when weather more like modern weather arrived perhaps 10,000 years ago the main forebears of the British flowed in.

First came the hardy souls who had sheltered during the high Ice Age in caves in the Pyrenees, in southern France and adjoining Spain. They followed their reindeer prey north as the ice gave way to a vast grassy plain.

More people then followed from wider areas of France and Spain and from Doggerland, the sub-continent that the North Sea submerged as fast-melting ice sent sea levels rising. Today it is better known as the fish-rich Dogger Bank. Knowledge of ancient Doggerland has increased enormously over the past eighty years.

When the Roman conquerors arrived 2000 years ago—5000 years after the waves covered Doggerland—a fairly continuous culture stretched from about the future Paris to around Rotterdam and across to Bristol. The continental section was what the Romans called northern Gaul or Belgica. They classed the English tribes as Belgae; some apparently were recently-arrived boat people.

The inhabitants were, as they still are on both sides of the Channel, a French-German genetic mix, to put it very simply. Moffat says the slender evidence points to them speaking a Celtic language. Other historians think Frisian more likely. Still spoken in the far north of the Netherlands and adjoining Germany, Frisian is the language nearest our own.

In those distant days when sea communications were easier than on land, south-western England and Wales were culturally closer to Atlantic France, particularly Brittany but also Spain and Portugal. Ancient Ireland had similar, but more distant links there. The treacherous waters of the Bay of Biscay were a factor, Moffat says. He sees the earliest arrivals from the Pyrenean caves speaking a distinctive Basque language, akin to that still spoken there. The farmers brought the Welsh and Irish versions of Gaelic.

The Angles, Saxons and similar tribes from Germany, who invaded around 1700 years ago, mostly after the Romans departed, established their dominance much as earlier invaders had done—mostly single young men in moderate numbers mating fruitfully with British women. The same went for the Vikings, two or three hundred years later.

In The Scots: A Genetic Journey, Moffat covers much similar ground but more specifically directed at Scotland. Briefly, he says the Scots were less genetically different from the English than people at a Burns night would like to think, other than for the more distinctively Irish admixture in the west.