Blood of the Isles Read Free

samples from all over the world. Over the years we have had bits of Neanderthals; Oetzi, the famous Iceman from the Alps; various claimants to being Anastasia, the last of the Romanovs; a selection of dead poets and statesmen; not to mention the odd piece of Yeti skin. To put the DNA resultsfrom this eclectic collection into some form of context, I began a programme of collecting DNA samples from living people. For instance, although it was wonderful to be able to get DNA from the 5,000-year-old Iceman, and that became a story in itself, it only became really interesting when his DNA could be compared, and indeed matched, with someone living today. The whereabouts of his modern descendants told us something about the movement of people throughout Europe during the five millennia since his death.
    Sometimes the DNA from modern people can solve long-standing riddles that had proved to be intractable by any other means. The outstanding example of this was the research on the origin of the Polynesians. These are the people who live on the far-flung islands of the Pacific. All the islands, from Hawaii in the north to Easter Island in the east and New Zealand in the far south, had been settled by Polynesians well before the time Europeans began to explore the Pacific Ocean in the early part of the sixteenth century. But where had the Polynesians come from? Was it from Asia, as the bulk of the evidence from language, domestic animals and crops suggested? Or had they arrived in the other direction from America, as the legendary Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl believed? Like many schoolboys, I had been captivated by Heyerdahl’s adventures on the balsa raft
Kon-Tiki
, on which he drifted from Peru to the Tuamotu islands, not far from Tahiti, to prove his point. So it was with a tinge of regret that, in 1995, I published the genetic data which proved conclusively that Heyerdahl was wrong. The Polynesians hadcome from Asia, not America. This slight regret at having disproved a boyhood hero was more than compensated by the proof that the Polynesians must have explored the Pacific intentionally, driving their canoes into wind and current eastwards across the vast ocean, rather than lazily drifting with the prevailing elements from South America. The ancestors of today’s Polynesians were without doubt the greatest maritime explorers the world has ever known.
    The proof of their true origins came from the DNA of modern Polynesians that I had collected from dozens of Pacific islands. From the detailed genetic fingerprints of the islanders I was able to trace the route that their resolute ancestors had taken through the island chains of South-east Asia and out into the vast Pacific Ocean. In ways that I will explain later, I could follow the genetic threads that had percolated through the generations and reconstruct the 3,000-year-old journeys of these astonishing navigators.
    It was because I was attempting to reproduce this first success in the much more difficult arena of Europe that I found myself drilling into the Cheddar tooth. My colleagues and I had followed the same procedure that had yielded such compelling results in Polynesia. We had collected almost 1,000 DNA samples from all over Europe and, again in ways I will later explain, come to a conclusion about the origin of modern Europeans. That conclusion was, in a nutshell, that the ancestors of most native Europeans were hunter-gatherers and not, as was commonly believed at the time, farmers who had spread into Europe from the Middle East about 8,500 years ago. To say that our conclusion caused a stir is an understatement.There followed several years of fierce debate between ourselves and the proponents of the agricultural-ancestry theory, and the experiment with the Cheddar tooth was one of our efforts to prove our case. The idea behind it was that, if we could show that a very old human fossil, a genuine hunter-gatherer who lived well before farming arrived, had pretty