About these pages
What is a building historian doing delving into the days before buildings or history? Incurable curiosity is my only excuse. Though I have been interested in the human journey all my life, there has been little time to pursue this passion into the far past. Over the last quarter-century I have been too busy researching buildings and settlements from Saxon to modern.
Happily a convalescence coincided with an exciting time
for lovers of prehistory, which I would have been sorry to miss. The winds of
change are blowing through our vistas of the past. One source is the whirlwind
of activity by population geneticists. New studies appear constantly. Most
enlightening are those pushing hard at the boundaries of the possible in
retrieving DNA from ancient bones and teeth. Scientists now can find not only
the modern relatives of someone from prehistory, but his or her eye and hair
colour too. Reconstructions by artists from ancient skulls will be able to rely
more on science and less on imagination. This artist's impression of a
4000-year-old man of the Saqqaq Culture is based on sequencing 80% of his
genome from tufts of hair rescued from the permafrost in Greenland. The
scientific team named him Inuk. They could tell that he probably had brown eyes
and thick, dark hair. His skin was probably not the light colour found in
modern day Europeans. He was cold-adapted and prone to baldness.1M. Rasmussen et ak., Ancient human genome sequence of an
extinct Palaeo-Eskimo, Nature, vol. 463 (11 February 2010), pp.
757-762. See also M.T.P. Gilbert et al., Paleo-Eskimo mtDNA genome reveals
matrilineal discontinuity in Greenland, Science, vol. 320, no.
5884 (27 June 2008), pp. 1787-1789.
Meanwhile a paradigm change is spreading through archaeology. The idea of migration in prehistory, so long out of favour, has come bouncing back.
Since it helps me to distill what I have learned if I pull it into a narrative, this collection of articles found themselves being written on the fly. The advantage of putting material on the Web is that others can comment on it. Then it can easily be revised and updated. There has been a constant process of revision since I began.
All my writing specifically for the Internet is aimed at the general reader. Yet much of this material is so new that it demands references. The end result is a strange hybrid of popular and scholarly writing. My aim is to bring together recent findings from archaeology, population genetics and linguistics to shed light on the migrations of mankind. My initial focus was Europe, since that is my home. But strands of the European past lead back to the Near East or deeper into Asia. So my attention has wandered. How far it wanders depends on how much time I have.
Acknowledgments
These pages would have been impossible without the very active, polyglot online communities following the progress of population genetics and participating in it. My thanks go to them.
Notes
If you are using a browser with up-to-date support for W3C standards e.g. Firefox, Google Chrome, IE 8 or Opera, hover over the superscript numbers to see footnotes online. If you are using another browser, select the note, then right-click, then on the menu click View Selection Source. If you print the article out, or look at print preview online, the footnotes will appear here.
- M. Rasmussen et ak., Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo, Nature, vol. 463 (11 February 2010), pp. 757-762. See also M.T.P. Gilbert et al., Paleo-Eskimo mtDNA genome reveals matrilineal discontinuity in Greenland, Science, vol. 320, no. 5884 (27 June 2008), pp. 1787-1789.