Evolution & Human Origins

A new ancient-DNA study suggests the Bronze Age people who transformed Britain around 2400 BC didn’t arrive from Iberia, as older narratives of the “Bell Beaker” story sometimes implied. Instead, their deepest roots appear to lie just across the North Sea, in the river-delta wetlands of what is now the Netherlands and Belgium - communities that held onto unusually high levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry long after farming spread across Europe. The work helps explain a long-standing archaeological puzzle: how a cultural package (Bell Beaker pottery and associated burial customs) could spread widely, yet have dramatically different “people-movement” signatures in different regions. In Britain, previous genetics work found the change was not subtle, models suggested at least ~90% of earlier ancestry