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 color
found in modern day Europeans. He was cold-adapted and prone to baldness.
Meanwhile a paradigm change is
spreading through archaeology. The idea of migration in prehistory, so long out of favour, has
come bouncing back. This is partly a consequence of the welter of scientific
techniques that have become available to archaeologists, who once relied on the
trusty trowel and notebook. Isotope studies hold out hope of being able to tell
how far an ancient person moved in his or her lifetime. (The skull shown here
is that of a Goth from
south-east Europe, who was buried in Roman Gloucester.) Radiocarbon dates
on sites of the same culture can show how it spread from place to place.
Palaeobotany can shed light on past environments. Archaeology has lost its
monopoly on probing prehistory. Study of the distant past is becoming an
increasingly multi-disciplinary affair. Some archaeologists are also
co-operating with linguists and population geneticists to build up a picture of
ancient human migrations.
Since it helps me to recall what I have learned if I write it down, 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. You can keep in touch with new additions and revisions at my weblog Distant Past.
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.