Ancestors

Some of the clues to our past, our ancestry, lie buried deep underground. They may never be discovered. They may already have disintegrated, merging with the soil, dissolving into groundwater, rendered into fragments of molecules, before anyone ever had the chance to catch them. Others have been prised out of the earth, though. The bones of ordinar

By the end of the ’60s the resolution had improved, and researchers were talking about rapid changes happening within a century.

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

Rather too often, perhaps, we think of Britain ‘beginning’ with the arrival of the Romans. But that is a historical artefact – it’s with the Romans that we start to have written records. That’s when British history – in the sense of that documentary evidence of the past – begins. But archaeology allows us to push back into the unwritten past, into

While some biblical literalists were concerned that the Bible didn’t mention extinctions, and recorded instead that Noah had managed to rescue a pair of every kind, Buckland had a more pragmatic explanation. Accommodating both the fossil record of clearly extinct animals and the biblical story, he reasoned that, with limited space and fodder on boa

There are lots of connections in those Arras graves with traditions on the near continent – from the broad style of the graves, to the goods placed in them with the body. The foods are interesting – in northern France, there was a longstanding custom of placing meat in the grave, and it tended to be gendered: beef for women and pork for men. In Yor

So, highly virulent, bubonic plague was rife as early as the first millennium BCE. There seems to be a biblical record that fits the picture – in 1 Samuel – describing a disease outbreak among the Philistines, after they capture the Ark of the Lord from the Israelites: ‘Soon after receiving the Ark, rats appeared in the land and death and destructi

The Bible is an unreliable witness when it comes to ancient history, having been written by so many authors and revised so much over time. Many scholars believe the stories in the Old Testament to have been written down in the late Iron Age – drawing on earlier oral histories, of course, but with a healthy dose of legend mixed in.

‘Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.’ Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, 2019