Ancestors

The era of ancient genomics, though, suddenly provides us with the opportunity to explore these questions of hierarchy and kinship in a very detailed way that has simply not been possible before: tomb by tomb, hill by hill, valley by valley.

weird human-beast mash-ups like the Lion Man of Ulm (which may actually be a rearing bear) dating to around 40,000 years ago

The deep-sea cores and ice cores have revealed that climate change could indeed be incredibly rapid – just as Russell Coope had predicted – with big swings happening in just decades. As we look deep into the past, over vast stretches of time, the apparent stability of geography and climate that we perceive as individuals melts away, and we see inst

But the picture is too neat, too reassuring. Because we have those names, we feel that we have a sense of understanding, which the history does not in fact give us. What does ‘Dumnonii’ actually mean? Does it just refer principally to a geographic area? Or an ethnic group? Or simply a political grouping? (And we cannot escape the fact that such pol

There was still huge popular opposition to cremation up to the First World War. The war and the dreaded flu outbreak that followed may have been instrumental in forcing a more pragmatic approach to the disposal of dead bodies. In 1944, William Temple became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to be cremated, signalling an acceptance of the method by

In the eighteenth century, Hungarian foot soldiers were recorded as adding a feather to their caps every time they dispatched an enemy. During the seventeenth century – perhaps influenced by images of Native Americans – soldiers from the Scottish Highlands began to decorate their knitted bonnets with ostrich feathers; those fluffy feather bonnets a

The results from the Neolithic individuals were fascinating – there clearly had been some mixing with local hunter-gatherers as the first farmers arrived, but a whopping 75 per cent of their ancestry was derived ultimately from Anatolian Neolithic farmers. This was the same pattern that had already been demonstrated in early Neolithic populations i

They had discovered that the Scandinavian hunter-gatherers they sampled shared a majority of genetic variants with northern Europeans today, whereas the farmer possessed more variants found in the eastern Mediterranean, in Greece and Cyprus. It seemed there really had been a migration – and that farmers and hunter-gatherers had stayed largely separ

But against that background picture of health and disease was unequivocal evidence of violent injury around the time of death. Skulls had been smashed in with blunt weapons – probably adzes; legs had been hacked at, fracturing fibulae and tibiae. That focus on the legs suggests the attackers were not only interested in dealing fatal blows to their