New DNA study reveals two ancestral streams into Britain, but only one survived. Let's break down a story of skull cups, ice age hunters and the emergence of the British Mesolithic.
This new study samples two major prehistoric sites from Britain - Gough's Cave and Kendrick's Cave. I've covered the famous 'cannibal skull cups' from Gough's Cave before:
The DNA from these two caves reveals two distinct, unrelated groups: the people of Gough's Cave are best represented by Magdalenian ancestry from El Miron in Spain / Goyet in Belgium. Kendrick's Cave is best modelled by ancestors from Villabruna in Italy. What does this mean?
I've covered the emergence and disappearance of the Magdalenians before, those ice age hunters who mastered the reindeer.
These two clusters - El Miron/Goyet and Villabruna - are the two crucial populations who survived the extremes of the ice age glaciation and then expanded into northern Europe as the temperature increased.
Trying to understand how the Western Hunter-Gatherers developed in northern Europe has been confusing, and Britain even more so since we have lacked early genetic evidence, until now.
Flints from Kendrick's Cave has been previously been classified as Federmesser, while Gough's Cave has both late Magdalenian and early Federmesser
Now the DNA evidence is in, and there is a clear distinction between the sites. MtDNA shows the Gough's Cave individual as haplogroup U8a and Kendrick's Cave as U5a2.
U8a is a new find for British prehistory, until now British Mesolithic individuals have carried U5.
Modelling known British Mesolithic individuals against this data, we see that all carry Villabruna WHG ancestry. Except for Cheddar Man, who is instead best modelled as having 84.6% Villabruna-related ancestry and 15.4% Goyet related ancestry.
The British Mesolithic can be modelled as having a single source of ancestry, the Villabruna group, but two-way models show a minor contribution from the Goyet group.
Isotopically the diets at the two caves are v distinct. Kendrick's Cave people reveal a diet dominated by marine and freshwater fish and marine mammals, while at Gough's Cave the diet was red deer, bovids and horses.
Overall the paper concludes that the peopling of northern Europe involved a substantial genetic turnover or replacement. Both Goyet and Villabruna ancestry exist in southern Europe, but the Villabruna dominate in the north, esp in Britain.
This disappearance of the Goyet Magdalenians makes one wonder if their cannibalistic rituals were a product of cultural stress or hunger, were they marginalised by the more dominant Villabruna or did they just fade away?
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