Britain became populated by people with a Neolithic culture by around 4000BC. The island's entire culture changed, incorporating new pottery, tools and funerary practices.
But where did this new practice of farming come from, and what happened to the hunter-gatherers already living in Britain? DNA sequencing at the British Museum has been providing some answers. (You can check out their excellent website here from which some of the following information has been taken).
The culture of farming arrived in Britain some 6,000 years ago (around 4000BC), marking the beginning of the Neolithic period. Previously, in the Mesolithic period (Middle Stone Age) Britain had been home to a population of hunter-fisher-gatherers. This transition to farming marked a huge shift in cultural life in the region. For a long time it wasn't known whether the arrival of Neolithic farming cultures represented a change of practice by the native Britons, taking up these new farming techniques and culture, or if the change revealed the arrival of migrant farmers from continental Europe.
To answer this, Dr Tom Booth of the British Museum and his colleagues looked at the genetics of ancient Britons. Their results published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution revealed that as soon as the Neolithic cultures started to arrive, there was a big change in the ancestry of the British population. So the development of farming and these Neolithic cultures seems to have been mainly driven by the migration of people from mainland Europe.
The route to Britain
When the original Neolithic farmers left the Aegean and began spreading out across Europe, the population very quickly split into two rough groups that developed slightly different cultures. One group went north along the river Danube and mixed with the hunter-gatherer populations of Central Europe (blue arrows below). A second group took a more southerly route (red arrows) along the Mediterranean before reaching Iberia (Spain and Portugal).
The map above shows the likely route of the spread of farming practice from Anatolia (modern day Turkey) through Europe, arriving in Britain around 4000BC (adapted from Bogucki, The Spread of Early Farming in Europe, 1996).
The earlier Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Britain had ties with those from Scandinavia, but the Neolithic culture shows a mix of both the Central European and Mediterranean traditions - i.e. both the northern and southern groups. As such it is difficult to fully understand where the British Neolithic farmers came from! Especially because although they share parts of both cultures, genetically the Britons seem to be more closely related to the Southern/Iberian group. It is possible that some of the southern group moved up from southern France and maybe Iberia to northern France, where they then mixed slightly with the central European population, before moving into Britain.
Thus we see that the British Neolithic population had significant ancestry from the earliest farming communities in Anatolia (modern day Turkey), and this suggests that a major migration accompanied this spread of farming. Farming itself with its associated Neolithic culture is thought to have originated in the Near East, making its way to the Aegean coast in Turkey and Greece. From there, farming and the specific culture that came with it (such as new funerary rites and pottery) spread across much of Western Europe and eventually to Britain. As the Greek Reporter news site reported these findings, Ancient Greeks Were Britain's First Farmers. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but with an element of truth in it.
Where did the Original Britons go?
But what about the original hunter-gatherer Britons? It seems that they were not completely displaced. As with many such migrations, DNA evidence shows that as these new farmers were moving through the unfamiliar forests and grasslands of Europe, they were also mixing with the local hunter-gatherers who had already made a living there.
'As this Neolithic population moved west, we can track cumulatively increasing levels of the local hunter-gatherer signatures in the genetics,' says Dr Tom Booth. 'So this wasn't just one population wiping the other out. Instead, they were mixing.'
But the Aegean ancestry nearly always dominates, and this is because farming, with its settled lifestyle and more predictable food sources, allowed people to maintain much larger population sizes.
'This means that even though they were mixing continuously, the hunter-gatherers were always a more minor component in the overall genetics.'
As the farmers moved east to west, by the time they reached Iberia (Spain and Portugal) about 40% of their ancestry could be traced back to the original European hunter-gatherer populations that they mixed with as they moved across the continent.
