Sublime

If we want to understand how our genomes today have been shaped by diseases in the past, anything before the British Bronze Age is largely irrelevant. This is because other studies have already suggested that there was a huge upheaval in Britain at this time, with a significant turnover of ancestry – a widespread population replacement. ‘The people

The suggestion that we are looking at the documentation of an early fourteenth-century BC voyage from Egypt to the Aegean, rather than a record of Mycenaeans and Minoans coming to Egypt, seems plausible for the following fascinating reason. There are a number of objects with the cartouche (royal name) of either Amenhotep III or his wife Queen Tiyi

The evidence, then, is fragmentary, but when all of it is considered—texts from the ancient Near East, the Bible, and archaeological data—it does, generally, fit together. An analogy is a large jigsaw puzzle that is missing many of its pieces—but enough of them fit so that the reconstruction is probable, if not certain. This applies to chronology,

Around the middle of the eighth century, c. 750, a Swedish maritime expedition came to violent grief on or near the island of Saaremaa off the coast of Estonia. We know this because of the chance discoveries from 2008 to 2012 of two boats full of dead warriors, buried by the seashore in what is now the village of Salme. They had been set up paralle

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.

They are Iron Age people – their story spans most of the first millennium BC, from the end of the Bronze Age to the arrival of Romans in Celtic lands. They left virtually no written records, but they made stunning art, knew the secrets of metallurgy and had their own myths and religion.