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Welcome to another quiet evening together. Tonight, we begin a long, slow journey backward through time into the deep past of the British Isles in search of an answer to a quiet biological mystery that flows through the veins of
Explore why Britain has a high prevalence of Rh negative blood, tracing its ancient origins and scientific discovery.
Key Takeaways
- Rh negative blood is notably common in Britain and Ireland compared to most of the world.
- The Rh factor was discovered through early 20th-century blood research involving rhesus monkeys.
- Rh negative blood is characterized by the absence of the RHD antigen on red blood cells.
- Pregnancy complications can arise when an Rh negative mother carries an Rh positive baby, but modern medicine has largely mitigated this risk.
- The distribution of Rh negative blood is linked to ancient human migrations and populations, including those in the Basque country.
What the video covers
- The video investigates the high concentration of Rh negative blood in Britain and Ireland, a genetic trait rare elsewhere.
- It traces the history of British ancestry from the last Ice Age through medieval times, exploring ancient migrations and populations.
- The scientific discovery of blood types by Carl Landsteiner in 1900 and the later identification of the Rh factor are explained.
- Rh negative blood lacks the RHD antigen on red blood cells, which can cause complications during pregnancy if the mother is Rh negative and the baby Rh positive.
- The video discusses the biology of blood and the significance of the Rh factor in medical history and prenatal care.
- It explores the genetic and historical puzzle of why Rh negative blood is concentrated along the Atlantic edge of Europe, including the Basque region.
- Ancient human populations, migrations, and cultural changes in Britain are examined to understand the distribution of Rh negative blood.
- The video emphasizes the slow, patient unraveling of this biological mystery through history, genetics, and anthropology.
- It highlights the continuity of this blood trait despite many historical upheavals and population movements.
- The narrative style is calm and reflective, inviting viewers to contemplate the deep past and its connection to modern biology.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to the Rh Negative Blood Mystery
- 08:07Scientific Discovery of Blood Types and Rh Factor
- 15:58Geographical Distribution of Rh Negative Blood
- 23:50Ancient Human Populations in Britain
- 32:01Lifestyle and Physical Traits of Early Britons
- 39:41Population Size and Cultural Practices
- 47:34Environmental Changes and Human Adaptation
- 55:45Genetic Evidence of Ancient Migrations
- 63:36Basque Population and Rh Negative Blood
- 71:28Medieval and Viking Influences on British Genetics
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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millions of people and that has been flowing there undisturbed and almost unremarked for many thousands of years.
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It is the kind of mystery that does not announce itself. It does not appear in newspaper headlines. It does not change daily life. And yet, hidden in the blood of roughly one in six people across Britain and Ireland, there is a
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small genetic difference that connects them to a story so old, so layered, so wrapped in the migrations and meetings and partings of ancient peoples that to follow it properly is to walk all the way back to the close of the last ice
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age, and perhaps even a little further still. The mystery is this. Britain, together with Ireland and a small handful of other places along the Atlantic edge of Europe, has one of the highest concentrations of a particular kind of blood found anywhere on Earth.
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That blood is called Rh negative. And the question of why it should be so common in this one quiet corner of the world when across most of the rest of humanity it is rare or even almost entirely absent is a question that has
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occupied scientists, geneticists, historians, and quiet thinkers for the better part of a century. Tonight, we will explore that question together slowly and without hurry. We will trace the long roots of British ancestry all the way back through the medieval,
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the Roman, the Iron Age, and the Bronze Age. We will meet the first farmers to step ashore on these green islands. We will walk among the hunters who crossed the lost landbridge of Dogland in the days before the rising seas swallowed
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it. We will cross the water to the misted hills of the Basque country in northern Spain where this same blood is even more common still. And we will sit gently and patiently with the modern science of what Rh negative blood
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actually is and what it might tell us about the very old and very tangled family tree of the people who live on these islands today. There is no rush.
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There is nothing to solve tonight. There is only the slow unspooling of an old, old story. So settle in, make yourself comfortable. Allow your shoulders to soften and your breath to slow and your eyes, if they wish, to close.
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The story is patient. It has waited many thousands of years already, and it will wait a little longer for you to find your ease. Before we begin properly, a small and very quiet word. If you find comfort in these long, gentle journeys
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through forgotten corners of history, please consider subscribing to the channel. It costs nothing, and it helps these slow, softly told stories find others who are looking for something to carry them peacefully through the night.
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You may tap the bell if you wish to be told when a new story is ready. But there is no obligation, no pressure, no need to do anything at all. You may simply rest. The next chapter will always be here waiting for you whenever
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you choose to return. Now let us begin properly. To understand why so many people in Britain carry Rh negative blood, we must first understand what Rh-negative blood actually is. And to understand that, we must travel only a
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little way back in time to the year 1900 when an Austrian doctor named Carl Landsteiner sat in a quiet laboratory in Vienna and began to mix together small samples of blood from his colleagues simply to see what would happen. What he
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discovered changed medicine forever. He saw that some samples mixed together calmly with no reaction at all, while others clumped and curdled as though the blood itself were rejecting the meeting.
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He realized in time that human blood was not one single substance, but came in different and distinct types, and that the safety of any transfusion depended upon matching those types correctly. He named the first four of them A, B, AB,
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and O. And for this gentle, careful, deeply important work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. But the story did not end there. Forty years later, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Landsteiner and a younger colleague named Alexander Wiener noticed something else.
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When they injected the blood of rhesus monkeys into rabbits, the rabbits produced antibodies. And when those antibodies were then mixed with human blood, most human blood reacted to them, but a small minority did not. The blood that reacted, they called Rh positive.
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The blood that did not react. The blood that lacked this particular protein on the surface of its red cells, they called Rh negative. The letters Rh come from the word rhesus after the monkeys whose blood first revealed the
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difference. And so the name has stuck all the way down to the present day.
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When you go to give blood or when you have a routine medical test and the result tells you that you are A positive or O negative or AB positive, the second part of that label is referring to this
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very same discovery made by these two quiet, careful men in their laboratories more than 80 years ago. The protein in question is called the RHD antigen. It is one of many small molecules that sit on the outer surface of your red blood
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cells. If you have the RHD antigen, you are Rh positive. If you do not have it, if your red cells are entirely smooth and free of that particular small marker, then you are Rh negative. That is the whole of it. There is no other
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meaningful difference between the two. Rh negative blood carries oxygen just as well, fights infection just as well, lives and dies in your body just as quietly as Rh positive blood. It is in almost every way indistinguishable.
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And yet in one situation, the difference becomes very important indeed. That situation is pregnancy. If an Rh-negative woman is carrying an Rh-positive baby, her immune system, having never before encountered the RHD antigen, may sometimes treat the baby's
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blood as foreign and may begin to produce antibodies against it. With a first pregnancy, this is usually not a serious problem. But with later pregnancies, those antibodies can cross the placenta and cause real harm to the baby in a condition once known as
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hemolytic disease of the newborn or in earlier centuries simply by the older and sadder names that midwives and mothers used among themselves. For most of human history, no one knew why some babies were born yellow with jaundice or
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stillborn after several healthy siblings, or quietly lost in ways that could not be explained. It was simply one of the many griefs of birth, accepted as something beyond understanding. Only in the middle of the 20th century did the picture become
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clear. And only then could doctors begin gently and carefully to treat it, to test for it, and eventually with the development of a remarkable injection called anti-D immunoglobulin to prevent it almost entirely. Today in countries with good prenatal care, the
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old tragedy is very rare. But the underlying biology, the simple fact that some people carry the RHD antigen and others do not, remains exactly as it always has been. So we know what Rh negative blood is. It is blood whose red
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cells lack one particular small protein. We know how it was discovered. We know why it sometimes matters. But none of that yet tells us why it should be so much more common in some parts of the world than in others. And it is here
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that the real puzzle begins. Before we move on to that puzzle, let us pause for a moment and simply think about blood itself. Blood is one of the oldest and most quietly miraculous parts of the human body. An adult person
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carries somewhere between 4 and 6 liters of it, flowing day and night through a network of vessels that if laid end to end would stretch for around 100,000 km.
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That is more than twice the distance around the Earth. All of that delicate plumbing, all of those tiny capillaries finer than a single human hair, all of those great muscular arteries pulsing softly with each beat of the
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of it is at work inside you right now as you listen. Carrying oxygen to your cells and carrying waste away from them, regulating your temperature, defending you against invisible threats, all without any conscious effort on your part. You do not have to remember to do
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it. You do not have to think about it at all. It simply happens quietly while you live your life. Each drop of blood is full of life. It contains red cells which carry oxygen. It contains white cells of many different kinds which
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patrol the body looking for invaders and threats. It contains platelets which gather at the sight of any small injury to begin the slow work of healing. It contains plasma, the pale yellow liquid in which everything else is suspended,
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full of proteins and minerals and signaling molecules of every kind. A single drop of blood, no larger than a teardrop, contains more individual cells than there are people in many countries of the world. Each of those cells is
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doing its quiet work day and night, year after year for as long as you live. The red cells, the cells that carry the oxygen, are remarkable in their own right. They are made deep inside the marrow of your large bones in a slow
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constant factory that produces about 2 million new red cells every second. They are released into the bloodstream where they live for about 120 days. During that brief working life, a single red cell will travel around your body more
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than 100,000 times, carrying oxygen from your lungs to your distant tissues, picking up carbon dioxide on the return journey, never resting, never pausing until at last, worn out, it is broken down in the spleen and its parts are
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recycled into new cells. This goes on inside you ceaselessly from the moment of your birth to the moment of your death. It is on the surface of these red cells that the various blood group markers sit. The A and B antigens of the
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first blood group system, the various antigens of the Rh system, including the RHD antigen we have been discussing.
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There are in fact many more blood group systems than these. Scientists have identified more than 30 different systems, each with its own particular set of markers. The A, B, O, and RH systems are simply the most important for medical purposes because they cause
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the most significant reactions during transfusion and pregnancy. But the others are there too, quietly varying from person to person. Each one a small genetic signature. each one telling a small part of the story of where that person's ancestors came from. When you
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give blood in any country in the modern world, your blood is typed for these systems before it is used. The bag of blood is labeled with its A B O type and with its RH type. Other markers are
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checked as well to make sure that the recipient will not have any unexpected reaction. The system is now so well-developed, so quietly efficient that blood transfusion is one of the safest medical procedures in the world.
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Even though it is the literal transfer of living cells from one body into another, it is a small everyday miracle made possible by the careful work of Carl Lsteiner and Alexander Viner and many thousands of other quiet scientists
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over the past century. But of all the blood group systems, the one that has captured the most popular attention, the one that has gathered around itself the most curiosity and speculation is the Rh system and within it the simple
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distinction between Rh positive and Rh negative. Perhaps this is because of the strange geographic pattern of Rh negative blood.
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Perhaps it is because of the importance of RH compatibility in pregnancy which gives the trait a certain personal urgency for many people. Perhaps it is because the name itself with its echo of the Reesus monkey and its faintly
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mysterious sound lends itself to imagination. Whatever the reason, Rh negative blood has fascinated people for many decades.
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And the question of why it should be so concentrated in one particular corner of the world has been one of the most enduring puzzles of human genetics.
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Around the world, the distribution of Rh negative blood is not even. It is not random. It does not appear in roughly equal proportions wherever humans live.
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Instead, it shows a striking and very particular pattern, one that has fascinated geneticists for decades, and that points like a slow finger across the map toward the western edge of Europe, and most especially toward a small and very ancient region on the
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border of Spain and France. In most of East Asia, Rh negative blood is exceedingly rare. Among the population of China, for example, it appears in less than one in a 100 people. Among the population of Japan, it is similarly
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uncommon. In Korea, in much of Southeast Asia, in the indigenous peoples of the Americas before European contact, Rh negative blood is so rare that for most practical purposes, it might be considered almost absent. A person from one of these populations who happens to
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be Rh- negative is in the truest sense a rarity. A quiet exception in a sea of Rh positive blood. In subsahara and Africa the rates are somewhat higher but still modest. Across most of the continent between three and eight people in every
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100 carry Rh negative blood. In the Middle East, the rates rise gently, somewhere between 5 and 10 in every hundred. In Southern Europe, in countries like Italy and Greece, you begin to find rates closer to 12 in every hundred. And then as you travel
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north and west, across France, across Belgium and the Netherlands, across Germany and Scandinavia, the numbers continue to climb. By the time you reach Britain, the rate is somewhere between 15 and 17 in every hundred. In Ireland, it is similar, perhaps even a little
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higher. In Wales, in Cornwall, in the western highlands of Scotland, the rate climbs again, sometimes touching 17 or 18 in every hundred. And then if you cross the water to northern Spain and southern France to the green and misted
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region known as the Basque country, you find the highest concentration of Rh negative blood found anywhere on Earth.
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Among the Basque people, nearly 30 in every hundred carry it. In some isolated valleys, the rate rises even higher.
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This is the pattern. This is the riddle. The Atlantic edge of Europe from the Basque country in the south through Britany and Cormal and Wales and Ireland and Scotland forms a kind of long curving band where Rh negative blood
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appears in greater concentrations than anywhere else in the world. The further inland you go, the rarer it becomes. The further east you travel, the rarer it becomes. The further south into Africa or east across Asia, the rarer it
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becomes. But here along this one quiet coastline, this one weatherbeaten edge of the European continent, it has settled and remained generation after generation, century after century, millennium after millennium. Why? That is the question that has occupied so many minds for so long. And the answer,
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in so far as we can piece it together, leads us back into the very deepest layers of European prehistory. to a time before written records, before farming, before villages and metal tools, to a time when small bands of hunters and
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gatherers moved across the cold landscape of postglacial Europe, following the herds and the seasons, leaving little behind them but flint tools and the scattered bones of their meals. To get there, we will need to walk backward through British history,
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one slow age at a time. We will pass through the kings and queens and battles you may already know, and through the slow, grinding centuries of medieval life, and through the Norman conquest and the Viking raids and the Anglo-Saxon
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settlements and the long Roman occupation. We will keep walking past the Iron Age Druids and the Bronze Age burial mounds.
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past the great stone circles and the long barrerows of the Neolithic, all the way back to the time when Britain itself was not yet an island. When a great Greenland bridge connected what is now East Anglia to what is now Holland and
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Denmark, and the people of these northern lands could walk freely between them, hunting reindeer and salmon under a wide and changing sky. This is the journey we will take tonight. It will be long. It will be slow. There will be
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names you have never heard and places that no longer exist and entire peoples whose languages and stories have been lost beneath the soil for so long that we know them only by the patterns of their pottery and the shapes of their
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bones. But there is no need to remember any of it. The names will drift past like clouds. The dates will move gently by like water. You are not being tested.
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You are simply being carried along on the long quiet current of a very old story. So let us begin here in the present and walk slowly backward into the deepening dark. Today the population of Britain is around 67 million people.
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They live in cities and towns and villages spread across an island that is in geological terms very young. The island itself is shaped a little like a kneeling figure with Cornwall reaching one knee out into the Atlantic and
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Scotland leaning its head up toward the Arctic. To the west lies Ireland, a smaller island separated by a stretch of cold and often turbulent sea. To the east lies the great body of mainland Europe, separated by the narrow strip of
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the English Channel, which at its narrowest is only about 30 km across. On a clear day, from the white cliffs of Dover, you can stand and see the coast of France quite plainly, a soft line of gray across the water. The people who
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live on these islands today are in their genetic ancestry a deep and layered mixture. There is the very old layer going back to those first post ice age hunters. There is the layer left by the Neolithic farmers who arrived around
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6,000 years ago. There is the layer left by the Bronze Age newcomers who arrived around 4 and a half thousand years ago.
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There is the layer left by the Iron Age Celtic cultures. There is the Roman layer, small and surprisingly thin.
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There is the Anglo-Saxon layer, especially heavy in the east and south of England. There is the Norse layer, especially heavy in the north and east of England and in the islands and coasts of Scotland. There is the Norman layer,
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small but socially important. And there are all of the layers that have been added since by the slow movement of people from Ireland, from France, from the Netherlands, from the Caribbean, from South Asia, from Africa, from everywhere in the wide and connected
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world. And yet, despite all these many comingings and goings, despite all these many waves of new arrivals, despite all these many centuries of mixing and intermarriage and settlement and conquest, the underlying genetic profile of the British and Irish population
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remains remarkably stable in some respects. In particular, the high frequency of Rh negative blood has remained essentially unchanged across thousands of years. Whatever its origin, it has proved persistent. It has been carried quietly through every conquest and every famine and every plague,
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through every shift of language and law and religion, all the way down to the present day, where it sits still and unobtrusive in the veins of one British or Irish person in every six. How can this be? How does a small genetic trait,
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one that confers no particular advantage, persist for so long in one population while remaining so rare in others? The answer, as we will see, lies partly in the strange way that human populations move and settle and mix, and
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partly in the very specific history of the British Isles, and partly in the deep accident of who arrived first, and when, and how completely they were or were not replaced by those who came after. Let us begin then by going back
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to the very beginning. Not to the beginning of Britain as a place, for that is a story written in rock and ice that stretches back hundreds of millions of years, but to the beginning of Britain as a place inhabited by people
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whose blood, in some quiet sense, has flowed forward into the people who live here now. For most of the last million years or so, the climate of Northern Europe has swung back and forth between long cold glacial periods and shorter,
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warmer interglacial periods. During the cold periods, vast sheets of ice covered much of Britain, sometimes more than a kilometer thick, scouring the land bare and pushing all living things far to the south. During the warmer periods, the ice retreated, the land greened again,
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and animals and plants and sometimes people returned. There were many such cycles, and in many of them, early humans and their close relatives lived in what is now Britain.
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The earliest known evidence of human presence on these islands dates to nearly 900,000 years ago.
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At a place called Hapisburg on the coast of Norfolk, a series of footprints was discovered in ancient sediment, preserved by chance for hundreds of thousands of years before being briefly exposed by the eroding sea. They are the oldest known human footprints found
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anywhere outside of Africa. They were made by a small group, perhaps a family, walking along the muddy edge of an ancient river, in a landscape that was at the time more like Scandinavia than southern England. The people who made
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them were not modern humans. They belonged to an older, now extinct branch of the human family. They came, they walked, they left their prince, and then in time the ice returned and pushed them away. This pattern repeated again
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and again over hundreds of thousands of years. Different human species came to Britain at different times. H Highidleberg humans came. Neanderthalss came more than once, leaving their flint tools at sites like Lynford in Norfolk and Pontvid in Wales. Each time the ice
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eventually returned, and each time the human presence faded away. Britain was for very long stretches of time an empty land at the edge of an empty continent, scoured by wind and locked in ice.
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Modern humans, our own species, first arrived in Britain around 40,000 years ago during one of the warmer phases of the last great ice age. They were the descendants of small bands who had walked out of Africa tens of thousands
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of years before, spreading slowly across Asia and Europe. They left a small handful of traces in caves in what is now southern Wales and southwestern England. One of them, a young man buried at Pavlin Cave on the Ga Peninsula, was
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sprinkled with red ochre and laid to rest with carved ivory ornaments around 33,000 years ago. He is one of the oldest known modern human burials in Europe. He was once called the Red Lady of Pavland on the mistaken assumption
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that the bones belonged to a woman. He is now understood to have been a young man, perhaps a hunter, perhaps a person of some standing in his community. We will never know his name. We will never know the language he spoke. But he is,
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in a quiet sense, one of the first modern people to lie down to rest in the earth of what is now Britain. Not long after his time, the climate began to worsen again. The ice sheets advanced once more. By around 26,000 years ago,
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almost all of Britain was again covered in ice or in cold tundra, uninhabitable by any human group. The people who had lived here either died or retreated southward, joining other groups in the warmer refuges of southern France, northern Spain, and the Balkans.
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For thousands of years, Britain was once again empty of frozen and silent land. It is in those southern refues during those long cold millennia, that something very important for our story may have happened. The peoples who sheltered there, cut off from the rest
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of Europe by ice and cold, lived for many generations in relative isolation. Their populations were small. Their genes mixed and remixed within tight bands. And in conditions like these, small genetic changes can spread and become common in ways that they cannot
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in larger, more open populations. It is possible, though not certain, that the genetic change that produces Rh- negative blood first became common during this period in one or more of these small sheltered groups of post ice age hunters. From these groups, in time,
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the trait would spread again across Western Europe as the ice retreated and the land became habitable once more.
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This is one of the leading scientific theories about the origin of Rh negative blood. It traces the trait back to a small ancestral population somewhere in the southern refuges of ice age Europe perhaps in the very region that would
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later become the Basque country or perhaps somewhere nearby in southwestern France or northern Iberia.
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From there, as the ice melted and the people moved north again, the trait traveled with them slowly and quietly across the lengthening summers into the lands that were becoming green and habitable again. We will return to this theory in time, but first let us follow
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the actual movement of those people as they began the long slow journey back into northern Europe and eventually into what would become Britain. The last glacial maximum, the coldest and most extreme point of the last ice age, peaked around 20,000 years ago. After
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that, the climate began very slowly to warm. The great ice sheets which had covered Britain, Scandinavia, and much of Northern Europe began to melt.
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Centimeter by centimeter, year by year, century by century, they retreated northward, leaving behind them a raw, scoured landscape of bare rock, glacial debris, and slowly returning vegetation.
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Plants came first, lickens and mosses, grasses and dwarf willows, birch trees, hardy and patient. Then in time, the great migrating herds, reindeer in their thousands, wild horses, oroxs, the huge wild cattle that once roamed all of Europe, elk and red deer, and behind
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them, following the herds northward as the seasons stretched, came the hunters. These people are now known to archaeologists as the Western European hunter gatherers. They were in their physical appearance quite different from the people who live in Britain today. We
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know this because we have their bones and we have in some cases recovered enough of their ancient DNA to reconstruct a reasonable picture of what they looked like. They were tall and lean. Their hair was dark, often very
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dark. Their skin was likely a medium to dark brown, not yet adapted to the weak northern sunlight in the way that later European populations would be. and their eyes, surprisingly to many people, when they first hear it, were often pale,
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frequently a clear, striking blue. This combination, dark skin and blue eyes, is rare in the modern world, but it was apparently common among the messolithic hunters of post ice age Europe. We know it most famously from a single skeleton
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recovered from a cave in the Cheddar Gorge in Somerset in what is now southwestern England. He is known as Cheddar Man. He lived around 10,000 years ago in the early Mesolithic period, not long after the ice had finally retreated from these latitudes.
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His skeleton was found in 1903. For most of the 20th century, he was simply one of the oldest nearcomplete skeletons found in Britain, a curiosity of bone in a museum case. But in recent decades, with the advance of ancient DNA
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analysis, he has been transformed into a kind of quiet ambassador from the deep past, a face from a forgotten time, reaching forward across 10,000 years to remind us that the people who lived on these islands long ago did not look
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quite like the people who live here today. Cheddaman was probably about 5' 5 in tall. He was slender but powerfully built with strong arms and shoulders suggesting a life spent rowing, paddling, throwing spears and pulling himself across difficult ground. He had
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a strong jaw and a heavy brow. He had, as we have said, dark skin and blue eyes and dark, possibly curly hair. He died in his early 20ies, perhaps from an infection, perhaps from injury. His body was placed deliberately and with some
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care in the cave at Cheddar where it remained undisturbed for 10 millennia. Try for a moment to picture his world.
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Picture the Britain of 10,000 years ago. The great ice sheets are long gone, but their memory is everywhere. The land is still settling, still rising in some places where the weight of the ice has been removed, still sinking in others.
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The rivers are wide and slow and untamed, full of fish, often shifting their course from year to year as the sediments build up and the channels move. The valleys are thick with forest, mostly birch and pine in the colder
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regions, oak and elm and hazel and lime in the warmer ones. The trees are old and tall and undisturbed by any axe. The forest floor is deep with fallen leaves and ferns, with mushrooms in autumn and blue bells in spring.
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There are no fields. There are no roads. There are no villages of any kind. The only signs of human presence are small temporary camps, fire pits, scatters of flint chips where someone has worked a tool, perhaps a small clearing where a
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band has stayed for a few weeks before moving on. And in the forests there is life. Red deer move in great herds through the open glades, browsing on the young leaves of trees.
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Wild boar root in the earth for acorns and roots. Orox, the huge wild cattle now extinct, stand in the clearings, larger than any cow that lives today.
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Their horns wide and sharp. Brown bears live in the deeper woods. Wolves move in packs along the river valleys. Links slip silently between the trees. Beavers dam the smaller streams, creating wide marshy ponds where what if waterfall gather in great numbers. Salmon run up
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the larger rivers in autumn in such numbers that you could almost walk across the water on their backs. Eels coil through the muddy backwaters. Trout flash silver in the pools. The people who live in this world know it
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intimately. They have lived in it for many generations. They have inherited the knowledge of their parents and grandparents who in turn inherited it from theirs all the way back in an unbroken chain of teaching and learning to the first
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hunters who walked into this land after the ice retreated. They know the names of every plant and animal. They know which mushrooms are good to eat and which will kill you.
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They know which berries ripen in which month. They know how to set snares for hair and how to spear fish from the bank of a stream. They know how to make fire from a bow drill and dry tinder. They
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know how to flake a flint nodule into the perfect shape for cutting or scraping or piercing. They know how to tan a deer hide into soft, warm leather.
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They know how to read the weather from the shape of the clouds and the behavior of the birds. They live in small groups, perhaps 20 or 30 people. three or four families together. They are not strangers to one another. They have
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known each other all their lives. The children grow up together. The elders are remembered and honored. The dead are buried in places that the living return to. Several such groups will be loosely connected into a wider network, perhaps
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100 or 200 people in total, who meet at certain times of year, perhaps in autumn when the hazelnuts are ready. Perhaps in spring when the salmon are running, to exchange news, to find marriage partners, to share stories, to perform
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whatever rituals matter to them, they have music. We know this because we have found bone flutes from this period.
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Simple instruments made from the wing bones of birds drilled with small holes for the fingers. We do not know what songs they played, but we can imagine the sound, soft and breathy, drifting out from a small camp at dusk, mingling
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with the calls of the nightbirds and the distant howl of a wolf. They have art.
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We have found small carvings from this period, often of animals, sometimes of human figures. We have found rock paintings from contemporary peoples elsewhere in Europe, including the famous painted caves of Spain and France, which give us a sense of what
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these people may have been capable of artistically. The paintings are extraordinary. They show bison and horses and oroxs in lively flowing lines drawn with extraordinary skill, full of movement and personality.
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The artists who made them were not primitives. They were people with the same brains and the same capacities and the same need for beauty as anyone living today. They simply lived in a different world with different materials and different concerns and they made
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their art accordingly. They have almost certainly religion or something like it. They bury their dead with care. They include grave goods, small offerings. Sometimes ornaments of bone or shell or amber. They use red ochre, the same pigment that the painter
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of Pavland used so many thousands of years before to mark important burials. They appear to rever certain animals, certain places, certain natural features. We cannot reconstruct their specific beliefs, but we can be reasonably sure that they had them, that
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the world was full of meaning for them, that the rivers and the forests and the sky and the dead were all part of a larger story that they told themselves to make sense of their lives. And in their blood, as we have said almost
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certainly, was the trait that we are tracking tonight. He is not the only such person we have found. Across Britain, across Ireland, across Western Europe, we have recovered the bones of dozens, sometimes hundreds of these messylithic hunter gatherers. Their
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genetics are by now well understood. They were a single broadly related population descended from those small ice age refuge groups in the south of Europe who had moved north again as the climate warmed.
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They had spread slowly and patiently across the entire continent. They lived in small mobile bands. They hunted with bows and arrows and spears. They fished from the rivers and the coasts. They gathered nuts and berries and roots in
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season. They made fine flint tools, sometimes very small, sometimes set into wooden or bone hafts in clever and elegant ways.
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They buried their dead and sometimes they made art. How many of them lived in what is now Britain? We cannot say exactly. The population was certainly small, perhaps only a few thousand people across the entire island. Perhaps a few tens of thousands at the highest.
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They moved with the seasons, following the herds, returning to favored camping places year after year. They knew the land in a way that we today can scarcely imagine. They knew which valleys flooded in spring. They knew where the salmon
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came up the rivers in autumn. They knew which berries were ripe in which month, and which roots could be dug in which weather. The land was their library, their pantry, their cathedral, their map, and their memory all at once. and
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among them in their veins ran the blood that we are tracking tonight. We cannot know for certain of course what proportion of these messylithic hunters were Rh negative. The recovery of detailed blood type information from ancient DNA is technically challenging
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and the samples we have are still relatively few. But the strong suspicion based on the genetic continuity between these people and certain modern western European populations is that the Rh negative trait was already quite common among them. It was perhaps one of the
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silent markers that already distinguished them even then from other human populations elsewhere on the planet. These were the people who around 12,000 years ago began to walk back into what would become Britain. They did not, of course, see themselves as walking
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into a future country. They simply followed the land and the herds and the seasons into new territories that had only recently become hospitable. They did not need boats. They did not need to cross the sea because at that time there
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was no sea to cross. Britain was not yet an island. It was simply the northwestern peninsula of a great European mainland, joined to what is now the Netherlands and Denmark and Germany by a vast low-lying plane of wetlands,
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rivers, lakes, and gentle hills. That plane has a name now given to it by modern scholars. It is called Dogand.
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Dogand is one of the most haunting and quietly beautiful places in all of human prehistory.
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It was not a small bridge or a narrow strip of land. It was a country in its own right. At its greatest extent, in the centuries just after the ice age ended, it covered an area larger than modern Britain itself. It stretched from
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what is now the east coast of England all the way across to the coast of Denmark and reached northward as far as the Shetland Islands and southward into what is now the English Channel. It was a flat or gently rolling landscape
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dotted with broad rivers that had once been the upper courses of what are now the tempames, the rine and the elba.
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There were lakes, there were marshes, there were forests of oak and pine and hazel. There were esties teeming with fish and wildfoul. And there were people, many people probably. Dogland was rich land, wellwatered, full of game and fish and edible plants. For the
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Mesolithic hunters of the time, it would have been some of the most attractive territory in all of Northern Europe. The bands who lived there moved through its landscapes as their ancestors had moved through other lands, hunting elk and
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orox along its river valleys, fishing from its lakes and coasts, gathering hazelnuts in autumn, building light shelters of bent saplings and skins. Imagine for a moment what it would have been like to stand on a low hill in central dogand perhaps 8 or 9
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thousand years ago looking out across that vanished country. Below you a broad slow river winds toward the distant sea lined with reeds and willow trees. Smoke rises from a small camp on the bend of the river where a band is curing meat
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over a low fire. A flight of geese passes overhead. Their calls drifting down through the still air. In the distance, beyond the river, you can see the dark line of an oak forest and beyond that the long horizon of the
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plain stretching away as far as the eye can see. There are no hills of any great size. There are no mountains. There is only this vast gentle well-watered country full of life, full of birds, full of fish, full of the small, steady
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human work of making a living from the land. The people who lived there had no idea, of course, that they were living in what would one day be called Dogland.
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They had no idea that their country would in a few generations be entirely beneath the sea. They simply lived their lives day by day, season by season. They watched the geese come and go. They watched their children grow. They buried
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their dead in small low mounds along the rivers. They made tools and ornaments and small carvings. They were not different in any meaningful way from the people who lived on what is now the British or Dutch mainland. They were
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simply living in a place that in the long perspective of geological time was about to be lost. We know they lived there because even today, more than 8,000 years after the last of their land, vanished beneath the waves,
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fishermen working in the North Sea sometimes drag up evidence of their presence. Flint tools come up in nets.
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Bone harpoons carved antler tools. Occasionally, even the bones of the people themselves, washed up on the beaches of East Anglia and the Netherlands after winter storms.
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Each of these finds is a small whisper from a lost world. Each of them tells us that before the sea came in, this was someone's home. In recent decades, marine archaeologists have begun to study Dogland more systematically, mapping its lost rivers and lakes and
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coastlines through sonar surveys of the seabed. They have built up slowly and patiently a picture of the country as it once was. They have identified the old course of the tempames, running far out beyond what is now the English coast,
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joining with the Rine somewhere in the middle of what is now the North Sea, before continuing as a single great river toward the ancient coastline far to the north. They have identified the locations of old lakes, of old reedi
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eststeries, of old hills that are now sunken banks. The map of Dogland that emerges is detailed and strangely moving. It is a map of a country that has been forgotten, that has slipped beneath the waves and beneath the surface of human
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memory, but that with patient work can be partly recovered, at least in outline. But the sea did come in. As the great ice sheets continued to melt all across the northern hemisphere, the level of the world's oceans began very
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slowly to rise. By around 8,000 years ago, the rising water had begun seriously to threaten Dogland. The coasts were retreating. The marshes were spreading inland. The rivers were widening into eststeries.
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Year by year, generation by generation, the people who lived there must have noticed. The old fishing camp on the spit of land was now underwater.
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The reed bed, where they had always cut shafts for arrows, was now a saltwater lagoon. The path that had led from the winter camp to the summer camp, was now blocked by an arm of the sea. They will
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have adapted, as people always adapt. They will have moved their camps. They will have learned new fishing techniques for the changing waters. They will have in many cases simply moved away to higher ground to the inland forests or
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westward into what was becoming Britain or eastward into what was becoming the Netherlands. And then around 8,200 years ago, something sudden and terrible happened. Off the coast of what is now Norway, an enormous underwater landslide collapsed into the deep north sea. It is
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known to geologists as the Stoga slide. It was one of the largest known landslides in the geological record. A great section of the continental shelf, weakened by the long pressure of glacial melt and saturated by ancient deposits of gas, broke loose and slid down into
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the deeper ocean in a single catastrophic event. The volume of material that moved is almost beyond imagination. It was enough to bury the country of Scotland to a depth of many meters, and it produced a tsunami of vast and devastating size. The wave
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swept across what remained of Dogland. It rolled inland for many kilometers, in some places climbing 20 or 30 m above the normal coastline, in others reaching even higher. It overwhelmed the low coasts and the wetlands, and whatever camps and people lay in its path. It
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struck the eastern coast of Scotland with terrible force, leaving a layer of sand and marine sediments that can still be found today in archaeological excavations along the coast, often several kilome inland from the modern shore. It struck the coasts of Norway
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and Iceland and the pharaohs. It is even thought to have reached as far as Greenland in slightly diminished form.
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How many of the people of Dogland survived the wave? We do not know. Some certainly must have died. Whole communities camped along the low coasts would have been wiped out in a matter of minutes. Others on higher ground further
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inland would have lived through it, but would have found their world transformed, their fishing grounds destroyed, their old routes blocked by new arms of the sea. By the time the water receded, much of Dogland had been irreparably damaged, and in the
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centuries that followed, the rising seas finished what the wave had begun. By around 6,000 years ago, the land was gone. Britain was, for the first time in its history, an island. The people who survived on either side of the New Sea
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continued their lives as best they could. Those on the British side became in effect the founding population of post island Britain. They were a small group isolated now from the wider mealithic world of continental Europe.
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They lived on in their forests and along their coasts for another thousand years or more, hunting and fishing and gathering in much the way their ancestors had done. The world had narrowed for them. But it had not ended.
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It is from these people, the survivors of the drowning of Dogland, that the very oldest layer of British and Irish ancestry comes. Their bones lie in caves and mounds across the islands. Their genes are still detectable in the modern
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population, though much diluted by everything that came after. And among the small markers they carried in their blood almost certainly was a high frequency of the Rh negative trait. The trait that had perhaps first arisen or first become common in the small refuge.
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Populations of southwestern Europe during the depths of the ice age had now traveled with these people all the way to the western edge of the world to a quiet green island that had only just become an island. and there it would
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settle and remain. But the story of British ancestry was very far from finished. While these messylithic hunters lived on in their forests and along their coasts, fishing and hunting and remembering the old ways, a great change was already coming. It would not
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arrive for another thousand years or so. But when it arrived, it would transform the islands utterly. It would bring fields and cattle and pottery and stone monuments. It would bring a way of life so different from what had gone before
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that in time almost nothing of the old messylithic world would remain visible above the soil. It would bring the farmers. The farmers did not originate in Britain. They did not originate in Europe at all. They came ultimately from
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a region we now call the fertile cresant, a band of land stretching from the eastern Mediterranean through what is now Syria, Iraq, and Iran. It was there around 11 or 12,000 years ago in the warm valleys at the foot of the
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mountains that human beings first began deliberately to plant and tend wild grasses, encouraging some kinds and removing others until over many generations those grasses became the first domesticated wheat and barley. It was there too that wild sheep and goats
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and pigs were first brought into close human company, fed and protected and selectively bred until they became the gentle herd animals we know today. It was there that the first villages of mudbrick and stone were built. It was
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there that the first pottery was fired. It was there that the world we now recognize as the world of farmers and villages and grain began to be made.
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From that distant cradle, the new way of life spread very slowly across the centuries and the millennia in two great branches. One branch moved eastward into Iran and on Runwood into India. The other branch moved westward and northward into Anatolia, then across the
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islands of the Aian into Greece, then up through the Balkans, then in two further subbranches across central Europe and along the Mediterranean coast. By around 6,000 years ago, the western branch had reached the coast of what is now France.
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And around the same time, perhaps a little later, it crossed the narrow seas and arrived in Britain.
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These first farmers were not in their genetic ancestry the same people as the messylithic hunters who already lived in Britain. They were broadly speaking descendants of those very early Anatolian farmers who had carried their genes along with their wheat seeds and
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their cattle and their pottery all the way across Europe over the course of many generations. They looked different from the Mesolithic hunters. They had paler skin, suited to the lower light levels of the north, and well adapted to
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the new staple foods of grain. Their eyes were more often brown than blue. Their hair was dark. Their bodies were perhaps a little shorter and stockier than those of the live messylithic hunters. They arrived in Britain around 6,000 years ago in the early Neolithic
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period. We do not know exactly how they arrived. Perhaps they came in small family groups in skinboats or simple wooden craft fingms themselves and their cattle and their maident seed grain across the channel in calm summer weather. Perhaps they came over the
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course of several centuries in many small waves. What is clear is that they came and what is also clear is that fairly quickly in the centuries that followed they came to dominate the island. The genetic evidence is by now
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reasonably clear on this point. The arrival of the Neolithic farmers in Britain was not a simple matter of a new way of life being adopted by the existing Mesolithic population. It was in addition a substantial movement of new people. Within a few centuries of
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the Neolithic farmers arrival, the population of Britain was overwhelmingly of Anatolian farmer ancestry with only a small contribution remaining from the original Mesolithic hunters. The hunters had not been violently exterminated in all likelihood. Probably some had simply died out, unable to compete with the
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larger and more settled farming populations. Probably others had been absorbed into the farming communities by marriage and assimilation, their distinct identity slowly fading over the generations.
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By around 5,000 years ago, the descendants of Cheddaman and his people lived on only as a trace, a small percentage of ancestry in a population that was now overwhelmingly a population of farmers. It is in this Neolithic period that some of the most famous
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monuments of ancient Britain were built. The long barrerows, those low elongated mounds of earth and stone, often containing the bones of dozens of people, the dead of whole communities laid together over many generations, were built in the early Neolithic. The
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great causeway enclosures, those mysterious circular sites ringed by interrupted ditches, were built in the middle Neolithic.
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The henes, those circular banks and ditches surrounding ceremonial spaces were built in the late Neolithic.
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And the stone circles, those most evocative of all ancient British monuments, including the great circle at Stonehenge and the even larger circle at Avery, were begun in the late Neolithic, and continued to be built and modified for many centuries.
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Think for a moment of Stonehenge as it was when it was new. Not as the worn and broken ring of stones that visitors see today, photographed against gray English skies, fenced off and roped about with paths and warnings. Think of it as it
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was around 4 and a half thousand years ago when the great central trilithans had just been raised. When the outer ring of Sarsen stones still stood complete, when the smaller blue stones brought all the way from the Presley
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Hills in West Wales had recently been arranged in their inner formation. The stones, freshly worked, would have been a warmer color than they appear today.
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The lychans and centuries of weather not yet having dulled them. The land around them would have been gently rolling, chalk downland, open and grassy, with scattered groves of trees and broad views in every direction. We do not know
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exactly how the great stones were raised. They are enormous. The largest of the Sassen stones at Stonehenge weighs around 30 tons. They were dragged almost certainly from the Malborra Downs, more than 30 km to the north using rollers and ropes and the patient
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labor of large numbers of people. The blue stones, smaller but still substantial, were brought somehow from the mountains of West Wales, more than 200 km away. Whether they were had dragged overland on sledges or floated on rafts along the coast and up the
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rivers or moved by some combination of methods has been debated for many years. We do not know. We do know that it was done. And we know that the doing of it must have required the cooperation of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people
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working together over many seasons, organizing their labor and their food supplies in a way that suggests a much more developed and ambitious society than we sometimes imagine the Neolithic to have been. What was the purpose of Stonehenge? That too is debated. It is
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aligned with the rising sun on the summer solstice and the setting sun on the winter solstice which suggests that it had something to do with the marking of the year and the worship or observation of the sun. There are many
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burials at and near the site which suggests that it had something to do with the dead.
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There are isotope studies of the people buried at and near Stonehenge that show that many of them came from far away, sometimes from as far as central or western Europe, suggesting that the place drew visitors from a very wide
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region. It was in some sense a sacred site of more than local importance. But the specific beliefs that gave it meaning, the specific rituals that were performed there, the specific words and songs that were spoken in its great
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central space are entirely lost to us. They have not survived in any form. We can only stand at the site today in our own time and wonder. There were many other monuments, of course, all across the islands. There was Avery in
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Wiltshire, a stone circle so large that the modern village sits inside its bank. There was Silbury Hill, the largest artificial mound in prehistoric Europe, built nearby for purposes we do not understand.
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There were the great chambered tombs of the Boone Valley in Ireland, including New Graange, with its astonishing winter solstice alignment, where on a single morning each year, the rising sun shines through a small narrow opening above the entrance and illuminates the deep inner
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chamber for a brief few minutes before the light fades, and the chamber returns to darkness for another year.
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There were the stone circles of the Hebdes, including the Kalanish stones on the aisle of Lewis. There were the chambered cans of Maisho in Ornne, where again the setting sun on the winter solstice shines into a sealed inner
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room. There were countless smaller circles, smaller mounds, smaller standing stones scattered across the landscape of the islands. All of these were the work of the same broad Neolithic population. All of them required the cooperation of substantial numbers of people. All of them spoke of
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beliefs and ambitions and a sense of the sacred that we can only partly reconstruct. The Neolithic was not a primitive age. It was the age in which much of what we still call the British landscape was first shaped by human
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hands. In which the great cleared fields and the long sightelines and the marked sacred places first appeared. In which the people of these islands first began to leave a lasting mark upon their land.
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We owe them more than we often realize. We do not know what these people called themselves. We do not know what language or languages they spoke. We do not know what they believed about the world, about the heavens, about death and the
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afterlife. We only know what they left behind. The stones, the bones, the long barrerows, the flint tools, the shards of pottery, smooth and round bottomed, decorated sometimes with simple impressed patterns. The post holes where their houses once stood. the midens of shells
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and bones where they once ate. From these scattered traces, we try to piece together a picture of their lives. But much, most, almost everything is lost.
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We do know that they lived for the most part in small farming communities. They built rectangular houses of timber and thatch, sometimes quite large with central hearths and storage areas. In some places, particularly in the windswept islands of the north, they
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built houses of stone because there was little wood. The most famous of these stone villages is Scarabra on the west coast of the Orcne mainland where a small Neolithic settlement was preserved beneath layers of sand and is now one of
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the best preserved Neolithic villages in all of Europe. At Scarabra, you can still see the stone walls, the stone beds, the stone shelves, the stone hears, all built into the curve of small connected houses, as they were left when
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the village was finally abandoned around 5,000 years ago. You can see in the stone hears the very places where the families of Scarabra kept their fires burning evening after evening for hundreds of years. You can see in the
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stone beds where they laid down to sleep. It is one of the closest connections we can make anywhere in Britain with the lives of the neolithic people. And in their blood almost certainly the trait we have been discussing tonight was already present,
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already common, already passing from parent to child as it had been for many thousands of years before. For about a thousand years, this Neolithic population lived on the British Isles.
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They farmed, they built, they worshiped, presumably, though we know nothing certain of their gods. They buried their dead. They tended their cattle and their sheep. They cleared the forests in small patches at first, then in larger ones, opening up the land for fields and
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pastures. The island that had been one great wood broken only by rivers and marshes and the bare moores of the high places slowly began to become a more open more pastoral land. The footprint of human work began to be visible upon
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it. But these people were not the end of the story either. Around 4 and a half thousand years ago another great change began to arrive. This change is associated with a particular kind of pottery. a beautifully shaped bell-mouthed drinking vessel which
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archaeologists call the Beaker. The people who brought it are known somewhat plainly as the Beaker people and their arrival in Britain marks one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in the entire genetic history of these islands.
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The Beaker people did not originate in Britain either. They came from the continent. Their immediate point of origin was somewhere in central or western Europe. Perhaps the lower Rine, perhaps somewhere nearby, but their deeper ancestry is now known to have
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come from much further east, all the way from the great grasslands of what is now Ukraine and southern Russia. There on the wide western step, a pastoral people we now call the Yamaa had domesticated the horse, had invented the wheeled
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wagon, had developed a way of life based on cattle and sheep and the open grass.
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From the step beginning around 5,000 years ago, groups of Yamna descended. People had spread outward, both eastward into central Asia and westward into Europe. As they spread west, they mixed with the existing Neolithic farming populations of central Europe. The
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result, after several centuries of mixing and movement, was the Beaker culture. When the Beaker people arrived in Britain sometime around 4 and a half thousand years ago, the same kind of dramatic genetic turnover happened again. Within a few centuries of their
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arrival, the genetic profile of the British population had shifted profoundly. Recent studies, including a very important paper published in 2018 by a team of geneticists based partly at Harvard and partly in Europe, have shown that around 90% of the genetic ancestry
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of the British Neolithic population was replaced within a relatively short time after the beaker arrival. That is an enormous shift. It is one of the largest genetic turnovers known to have happened anywhere in Europe in prehistoric times.
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It means that if you are a person of long British ancestry today, the vast bulk of your genetic inheritance does not come from the people who built Stonehenge. It comes from the people who arrived shortly after Stonehenge was
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built and who in some sense inherited the land from those who came before. What happened exactly in those centuries, we do not know. The change is too large and too quick to be explained by simple intermarriage and assimilation.
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There must have been something something more, some combination of factors. There may have been epidemic disease brought by the newcomers against which the existing Neolithic population had no resistance.
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There may have been conflict with newcomers taking land and resources at the expense of those already there.
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There may have been a long demographic decline of the Neolithic population already underway when the Beaker people arrived, perhaps due to climate change or soil exhaustion or other internal pressures. Most likely all of these things played some part. What we know
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for certain is that by the early Bronze Age, the population of Britain was overwhelmingly of Beaker descent. The genes of the Stonehenge builders had not vanished entirely, but they had been pushed deeply into the background. And it is here in this great Bronze Age
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transformation that another important piece of the RH negative puzzle may sit. The Beaker people in their genetics carried significant ancestry from the western messylithic hunters of post ice age Europe through their mixed central European ancestors. They also carried of
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course the more recent step ancestry from the east. But within the broad genetic profile they brought with them to Britain, the old Western European hunter gatherer signal, the signal that traces back to those small ice age refuge populations in southwestern
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Europe was carried along as part of the mix. When they came to Britain, they brought it with them and they reeded it in greater concentrations perhaps than had existed even among the previous Neolithic farmers. The RH negative trait
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by this telling was carried into Britain in waves. A first wave with the original Mesolithic hunters after the ice age. A second wave much later with the Beaker people who carried the trait again as part of their mixed ancestry. And these
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two waves combined in this small island at the western edge of the world to produce an unusually high concentration of the trait, a concentration that has remained more or less ever since. This is of course only one piece of the
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puzzle. The trait did not arrive only in Britain. It also arrived in Ireland by similar paths. It arrived in northwestern France. It arrived in northern Spain. It was carried in various concentrations all along the Atlantic edge of Europe and in some
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places, especially in the small isolated communities of the western Pyrenees where the population remained relatively undisturbed for many centuries afterward. It became even more concentrated still. This is in the simplest sense the origin of the high basque rate of Rh negative blood. The
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Basques are not, as has sometimes been popularly suggested, a kind of pure, unbroken remnant of the original Ice Age population.
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They are, like everyone else in modern Europe, a mixed population with ancestry from many sources. But within that mix, the genetic signal of the very old western European hunter gatherers is unusually strong, and that in turn is reflected in their unusually high
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frequency of the RH negative trait. The British and Irish are in this sense distant cousins of the Basques, sharing a deep layer of ancestry that runs back to the same Ice Age refuge populations.
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They are not the closest cousins. They are not in any sense the same people, but the shared deep ancestry is real and it is reflected among other things in this small detail of their blood. Let us return now to the slow walk forward
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through British history and see how this old old blood survived everything that came afterward.
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After the beaker arrival, the British Isles entered what we now call the Bronze Age. It lasted for around 1500 years from roughly 4,000 years ago to about 2,700 years ago. It was a long, slow period of cultural development. The
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new people built round houses of timber and thatch, often within enclosed farmsteads. They cleared more of the forest, extended their fields, raised more cattle and sheep, and farmed the land in ways that began to leave a permanent mark upon it.
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They built large funeral mounds called round barrerows, often placed on prominent ridges where they could be seen from far across the land. They built field systems, some of which are still visible today as low banks running across Mland in places like Dartmore and
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the Yorkshire Dales. They worked bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, into tools and weapons and ornaments.
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They traded across long distances, sending tin from Cormal to the continent in return for copper, amber, and other valued goods. They lived and worked and built and buried their dead for many generations in conditions that were not dramatically different from those of
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farming communities elsewhere in temperate Europe. Then, around 2,700 years ago, the use of iron began to spread through the islands. Iron was harder to work than bronze, but it was once mastered a far more useful metal.
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It made better tools and better weapons. It made farming easier and warfare more dangerous. And it ushered in what we now call the Iron Age. The Iron Age in Britain is the period we associate, often loosely and with some inaccuracy,
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with the word Celtic. It is the period in which the people of the British Isles built great hill forts, ringed earthworks crowning the tops of high hills across the south and west places like Maiden Castle in Dorset and Danbury
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in Hampshire. It is the period in which they developed or adopted from contact with continental peoples.
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the great Latina style of art, all flowing curves and stylized animals and intricate spiral patterns. It is the period in which they spoke languages that were the direct ancestors of modern Welsh Cornish Breton Irish and Scottish Gaelic. It is the period in
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which they were ruled by tribal kings and queens, advised by Druids, and lived in extended family groups with strong networks of kinship and obligation. How did the Iron Age population get to Britain? Did they arrive in a great wave
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from the continent, displacing the Bronze Age population in the same way that the Beaker people had displaced the Neolithic?
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For a long time, this was assumed. Older writers spoke confidently of Celtic invasions, of waves of warriors crossing the channel and overwhelming the previous inhabitants. But the modern genetic evidence does not support this.
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By the Iron Age, the British population had been broadly stable for over a thousand years since the Beaker turnover. The Iron Age peoples of Britain were in their genetics essentially the descendants of the Bronze Age Beaker people. They had
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adopted new technologies, new artistic styles, new languages perhaps through contact and influence with their neighbors across the channel. But they were not in any large sense new people.
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They were the same people living a new chapter of their long long inhabitation. And so through the Iron Age, the high frequency of Rh negative blood that had settled into the British population during the Bronze Age was simply passed
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quietly along. It did not need to be carried in by new arrivals. It was already there. It moved from grandparents to parents to children, generation after generation, in the same fields and round houses and small kingdoms that the Beaker people had
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established more than a thousand years before. Try for a moment to imagine an Iron Age village in southern Britain, perhaps 2,500 years ago. The village sits in a sheltered valley ringed by a low earthwork bank and a wooden
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palisade. Inside there are perhaps a dozen round houses, each one a circle of upright timber posts. The walls woven with hazel wattles and dorbed with clay.
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The roofs thatched thickly with straw or reed rising into a tall conicle point. From each roof, a thin column of smoke drifts upward where the central hearth burns inside. Around the houses are smaller structures, granaries raised on stlestones to keep the rats out, sheds
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for animals, workshops for the smith and the potter and the weaver. Beyond the palisade lie the fields divided into long narrow strips, each one belonging to a particular family.
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There are pastures for the cattle and sheep, woodland for timber and panage, perhaps a small spring or well where the village draws its water. Inside one of the houses, a family is gathered around the central hearth. The father is
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mending a leather strap. The mother is grinding grain on a small stone quir, moving the upper stone in a slow patient circle. An older child is spinning wool using a spindle and whirl drawing the thread out from a mass of carded fibers.
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A younger child is asleep in a corner wrapped in a sheepkin. A grandmother sits a little back from the fire telling a quiet story to anyone who will listen. The kind of story that has been told in this house on this
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hearth for many generations. The dog is asleep at her feet. A pot of stew bubbles slowly over the embers.
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This is a scene that could have been repeated with small variations in many thousands of villages across the British Isles during the Iron Age. The lives of the people were not easy. They worked hard from before dawn until after dark.
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Throughout the seasons of the year, they suffered when the harvest failed. They feared the raids of neighboring tribes.
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They worried about the health of their children, which was often poor by modern standards. They lived shorter lives on average than we do today. But they also had family and food and a place in the world and a sense of belonging to a
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particular community with its own customs and stories and gods. And in their blood, as they sat by their fires in the long evenings, the old genetic inheritance flowed on, quietly, unnoticed, exactly as it had for many ages before, and would for many ages to
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come. The Iron Age tribes of Britain are known to us by various names, though most of those names come from later Roman writers, and may not be the names that the tribes used for themselves.
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There were the Trinovantes in what is now Essex and Suffukk. There were the Katuani in the Tempame's Valley. There were the Iseni in East Anglia whose queen Buudaca would lead a great uprising against Roman rule in the year
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60 AD. There were the Brigantes in northern England ruled in the first century AD by a queen named Cartimand.
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There were the Caledonians in what is now Scotland. There were the Sur in South Wales. There were the Cornovi in what's now Cornwall and parts of the West Country. There were many smaller tribes with their own kings and queens,
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their own territories, their own alliances and feuds. They traded with each other and sometimes fought with each other. They traded with the wider Celtic world across the channel. And through that network they were connected in a loose and indirect way with the
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cultures of continental Europe and even the Mediterranean. Then came the Romans. The Romans first set foot on the shores of Britain in the year 55 BC when Julius Caesar led a small expeditionary force across the channel. It was more of a
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reconnaissance than a true invasion and it did not result in any lasting Roman presence. A second, larger expedition the following year achieved a little more, but again did not establish a permanent foothold. It was not until almost a century later in the year 43 AD
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under the emperor Cludius that the Romans returned in earnest with a full invasion force and began the long process of bringing the southern and central parts of the island under imperial rule. The Roman occupation of Britain lasted for nearly 400 years from
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43 AD until around 410 AD when the last Roman administrators and most of the remaining troops were withdrawn to deal with crises closer to the heart of the empire. During those four centuries, the Romans built roads and forts and walled
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towns. They constructed the great northern wall that bears the name of the emperor Hadrien. Running from the Sowway FTH to the mouth of the Tine, marking the practical northern edge of their rule.
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They administered the land areas as a Roman province complete with all the apparatus of Roman government, taxation, law, and trade. They brought wine and olive oil and pottery from across the empire. They brought soldiers and merchants and slaves from a vast range
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of peoples including Gauls, Germans, Spaniards, North Africans, and even occasionally people from as far away as Syria and the Black Sea. They brought in the later centuries of their rule the Christian religion and they brought of course the
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Latin language which became the language of administration and education in the parts of the island under their direct control.
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The towns the Romans founded are still in many cases the great cities of England today. London was founded as Londinium a trading port on the north bank of the tempames around 47 AD. York was founded as Eberakam, a legionary
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fortress in the north around 71 AD. Bath was founded as Aquais around the natural hot springs at the foot of the Menep Hills also in the first century AD. Lincoln, Colchester, Chester, Exat, Glouester, St. Alburn's, Canterbury all began life as Roman
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foundations of one kind or another. The grid pattern of streets in many old English towns still preserves faintly the layout that the Roman surveyors laid down nearly 2,000 years ago. The straight roads of the Roman period still underly many of the major routes of the
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modern English road network. The Roman presence in Britain was in this sense lasting and consequential even though it ended a very long time ago.
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You might expect after 400 years of Roman rule that the genetic profile of the British population would have been substantially altered. So many soldiers, so many traders, so many administrators, all coming and going for so many generations must surely have left a deep
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mark. And yet the genetic evidence suggests otherwise. The Roman occupation, despite its enormous cultural impact, left only a small genetic imprint on the British population. The reason is that the Roman presence, even at its height, was always relatively small in numerical terms.
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There were perhaps 50,000 Romans and Romanized provincials living in Britain at any one time in a population that probably numbered between 2 and 4 million. Most of them lived in towns and forts somewhat apart from the rural majority. Many of them at the end of
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their uh tour of duty simply went home and those who stayed and married locally contributed only a thin layer of new ancestry to a deep and broad existing population. So the high RH negative frequency settled into the population
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for so long already was not significantly diluted by the Roman presence. The old blood flowed on more or less unchanged beneath the new roads and the new towns and the new villas with their painted walls and their underfloor heating. The farmers in the
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fields, the shepherds on the hills, the fishermen along the coasts were by and large the same people whose ancestors had lived on the same land for many centuries before the Romans came. When the Romans left, the people remained and
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the blood remained also. After the Romans came the Anglo-Saxons. This is one of the more contested chapters in the genetic history of Britain. For centuries, the traditional story was that after the withdrawal of Roman rule, large numbers of Germanic
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peoples, the Angles and the Saxons, and the Judes crossed the North Sea from what is now northern Germany, southern Denmark, and the Netherlands, and gradually overran the eastern and southern parts of Britain.
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The Romano British population in this telling was either driven out, killed or pushed westward into Wales and Cormal and the Southwest where they preserved the older Celtic language and culture.
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The new Germanic peoples settled the lands they had taken, established their own kingdoms, spoke their own language, and over time gave rise to the people we now know as the English. How much of this is true? Some of it certainly
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the Anglo-Saxon migration was a real event. The old English language, ancestor of modern English, did indeed come from the Germanic lands across the North Sea. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms did establish themselves across what is now England, and their culture and language
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did displace over time the earlier Romano British culture across most of the land areas. But the question of how many people actually crossed the sea and how completely they replaced the existing population has been argued back and forth among historians and
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geneticists for a long time. The years immediately after the Roman withdrawal were difficult ones for the people of Britain. The protection of the Roman army was gone. The trade networks that had supplied many goods from across the empire began to break down. The towns
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which had depended on Roman administration and Roman markets began to shrink. The villas, those large country houses of the wealthy, were abandoned one by one, their roofs falling in, their mosaics covered by drifting earth. In many places, the
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population went back to a simpler kind of life, more rural, more local, less connected to the wider world. The use of coinage declined. The making of fine pottery declined. The Latin language was still spoken in some places, but it was
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slowly being forgotten in favor of older British speech in the west and of incoming Germanic speech in the east. It was into this changing world that the Anglo-Saxons came. They came in many small groups in their long shallow boats
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across the North Sea from what is now northern Germany, from southern Denmark, from the coast of the Netherlands. They were in their original homelands a mixture of peoples.
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The Angles came from what is now the small region of Angolan in modern Schleswick Holstein. The Saxons came from the lower Ela and the broader coastal lands of northwestern Germany.
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The Judes came from what is now Jutland in modern Denmark. They spoke related Germanic dialects. They worshiped the old Germanic gods including Woden and Thunor and Tu whose names are still preserved faintly in the names of our days of the week. They lived in their
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original homelands much as the Iron Age Britain lived in theirs as small communities of farmers and herders and fishermen organized under chieftains and kings. When they came to Britain, they came at first as small bands of warriors, sometimes invited by post
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Roman British leaders to help defend against other threats, sometimes coming on their own to seek land and opportunity.
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Over time, the bands grew larger, the settlements grew more permanent, and entire families and communities began to follow the warriors across the sea. They settled mainly along the east coast at first in what would become Kent and East
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Anglia and North Umbrea. From there they spread slowly inland and westward. By the seventh and 8th centuries, most of what is now England had come under Anglo-Saxon rule, divided into a number of small and shifting kingdoms.
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The most recent genetic evidence, including major studies published in the past few years, suggests that the Anglo-Saxon migration was substantial, but not overwhelming. In the eastern and southern parts of England, particularly in regions like East Anglia, the population today carries something like
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30 to 40% ancestry of Anglo-Saxon origin. In central England, the proportion is somewhat lower. In the western and northern parts of England, lower still. In Wales, in Cornwall, in much of Scotland and Ireland, the Anglo-Saxon genetic signal is small to
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non-existent. So, the migration happened. It mattered. It changed the genetic profile of large parts of England. But it did not erase the older population. The majority of the genetic ancestry of even modern English people in even the most affected regions still
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traces back to the pre- Anglo-Saxon population. The long resident descendants of the Bronze Age Beaker people who had themselves carried the Western European huntergatherer ancestry forward from much deeper in the past. In the regions least touched by Anglo-Saxon
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migration, the older population continued essentially undisturbed. The people of Wales kept speaking their old British language, which had developed by this time into early Welsh.
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The people of Cornwall kept speaking their own close relative of Welsh, which would eventually become Cornish. The people of the north of England and of southern Scotland in regions that had been part of old Brit British kingdoms like Strathclide and Regg also continued
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to speak forms of British speech for some centuries. Though these were eventually lost to the spread of English from the south and of Gaelic from the north and west, the people of Ireland, never directly touched by Anglo-Saxon settlement at all, continued to speak
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their own godilic language, which had developed by this time into old Irish. And in all of these regions, the deep genetic profile of the long resident population remained largely intact, including its high frequency of Rh negative blood. And so once again, the
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Rh negative trait survived. It survived because the underlying population survived. The Anglo-Saxons themselves were a people with their own genetic profile, including their own modest frequency of the Rh negative trait. They were not like the Romans, a small
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administrative class moving in and out of the country. They were settlers who came, married locally, raised their children locally, and stayed for good.
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Their genes mixed with the genes of the people already there. And in the resulting population, the old high frequency of Rh negative blood was somewhat diluted, but not dramatically reduced. It remained especially in the western regions and in Ireland at the
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high levels that had held for thousands of years. After the Anglo-Saxons came the Vikings. From the late 8th century onward, the seafaring peoples of Scandinavia began a long series of raids, then settlements on the coasts of Britain and Ireland. They came from
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Norway, from Denmark, from Sweden. In their long ships, with their long swords and their fierce reputations, they raided the great monasteries of the north, including the famous attack on Lindisvan in 793 AD, which has often been taken as the symbolic beginning of
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the Viking age. They settled in the islands of Scotland, in the Orcnes, and the Shetlands and the Hebedes. They settled in much of northern and eastern England in the lands that came to be known as the Danlaw where Danish customs
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and Danish law held sway for several generations. They settled in the great trading port of York which they called Jorvvic. They settled in Dublin, in Wexford, in Cork, in Limmerch, founding cities that have survived to the present day. They mixed with the local
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populations, traded with them, fought with them, married into them, and over time their distinct Viking identity slowly faded back into the wider population.
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By the time of the Norman conquest in 1066, the descendants of the Vikings in England and Ireland were in most cases no longer distinguishable from their nonviking neighbors. The genetic impact of the Viking settlements was real, but again regionally specific. In the
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islands of northern Scotland, particularly in the Ornes and the Shetlands, the Norse genetic signal is very strong, sometimes amounting to 40% or more of the modern population's ancestry.
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In coastal areas of northern and eastern England, in parts of northwestern England, in coastal Ireland, the signal is also detectable, though smaller.
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Across the broader population, the Viking contribution is real, but modest. Picture for a moment the town of Jorvvic in the late 9th or early 10th century.
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The narrow streets of packed earth lined with low wooden houses thatched in straw and reed. The soft smell of woodsm smoke and tanning hides. of fresh fish from the river, of bread baking in small clay ovens, the sound of a smith's hammer at
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a forge, of children calling to one another in a gentle mixture of old English and old Norse, of a woman singing softly at a loom in a halfopen doorway, the traders coming in from the river with bales of wool and barrels of
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salted fish, with amber from the Baltic and silver coins from far away Arablands. Outside the town, the long fields of barley and oats stretching away in every direction, with the slow shapes of oxen turning the dark soil, and the soft line
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of a distant forest at the horizon. A whole world busy and ordinary and entirely real, going about its quiet business beneath the same wide northern sky that you are resting under tonight.
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And imagine, if you wish, a small farmstead far to the north, on one of the islands of Orcne, in the same long ago century. The low stone walls of a long house, set carefully into the slope to shelter it from the wind, the pete
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fire glowing softly in the central hearth, sending a thin line of smoke up through a hole in the turf roof. The sound of the sea, never very far away, washing gently on the rocks below. A family inside, wrapped in woolen
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blankets against the cold of the northern night, telling old stories of gods and heroes, of long journeys across wide gray waters, of ancestors who had come from a country they still called Norway. Their blood, mixed already with the blood of older island peoples whose
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ancestors had been there for thousands of years, carried forward all of the same quiet inheritances we have been tracing, including in many cases the small RH negative marker that had been present in the western edges of Europe for so very long. The Vikings, like the
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Anglo-Saxons before them, were a population with their own moderate frequency of the Rh negative to trait.
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Northern European populations generally have higher Rh negative frequencies than southern or eastern ones, and the Scandinavians were no exception. So, their arrival in Britain did not dramatically lower the Rh negative frequency in the receiving populations, and in some regions may even have helped
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to maintain it. After the Vikings came the Normans. In the year 1066, Duke William of Normandy crossed the channel with an army and defeated the English King Harold at the Battle of Hastings.
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The Norman conquest, as it is now known, is one of the most famous events in English history. It brought a new ruling class to England, a French-speaking aristocracy and clergy who took over the greater states of the country and held
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them with their descendants for many generations. It brought new architectural styles, new legal frameworks, new vocabulary into the English language. It connected England politically and culturally to France in ways that would have lasting consequences for the next several
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centuries. But again in genetic terms the Norman conquest was modest. The Normans themselves despite their name which means northmen and reflects their own descent from earlier Viking settlers in northern France were by 10 to 66 a thoroughly French-speaking and French
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cultured group. They came to England in relatively small numbers. They settled in the upper layers of society, marrying among themselves for several generations and only slowly mixing with the broader English population.
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Their genetic contribution to modern Britain is real but small, perhaps a few% in most regions, somewhat higher in areas of dense Norman settlement. The Rh negative blood of the older population carried forward through all of these transitions was once again only modestly
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affected. The Normans themselves being a population with Western European hunter gatherer ancestry through their own French background may even have carried a moderate frequency of the RH negative trait themselves, which would have meant that on balance their arrival did very
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little to dilute the trait in the receiving population. And so by the time the medieval period was well underway in the centuries after 1066, the basic genetic structure of the British and Irish population was essentially what it remains today. There
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were of course still many small movements of people across the centuries that followed. the arrival of small communities of Flemings, of French hugenauts, of Jews, of many others, but none of them substantially altered the broad genetic profile that had been
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built up over the long preceding millennia. The high frequency of Rh negative blood established so very long ago in the small ice age refuge populations of southwestern Europe carried forward through the mesolithic hunters who first walked into Britain
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across Dogland refreshed and consolidated by the beaker people of the Bronze Age defended through the cultural and demographic changes of the Iron Age and the Roman and Anglo-Saxon and Viking and Norman periods simply ly remained.
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It was always there. It is still there. One person in six walking the streets of Cardiff or Cork or Glasgow or Bristol or Manchester or Edinburgh or Dublin carries it today. They do not know, most of them that they carry it. They do not
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know that the small genetic detail that distinguishes their blood from the blood of most people elsewhere in the world is in some sense a small inheritance from people who lived on these islands 8,000 years ago or who walked through the lost
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land of Dogland 12,000 years ago or who sheltered in caves in the Pyrenees during the worst centuries of the last ice age 20,000 years ago. They do not know. They do not need to know. They simply live their lives and the old
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blood flows on quietly beneath everything else. Let us return now for a little while to that southern refuge to the green and misted hills of the Basque country where the same blood flows even more thickly still. The Basque country
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is a small region lying along the western end of the border between Spain and France wrapped around the corner of the Bay of Bisque. On the Spanish side, it includes the provinces of Viskaya, Guipusa, Alava, and Nava. On the French
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side, it includes the small mountainous regions of Labour, Lower Nava, and Sul. It is a land of green valleys and rocky coasts, of wet weather and mild winters, of deep mountain forests and sheltered harbors, and old stone villages set into
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the folds of the hills. The Atlantic Ocean batters its northern coast. The Pyrenees rise behind its eastern edge.
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It is one of the loveliest and most distinctive corners of Western Europe. The people of this region speak a language that is found nowhere else in the world. They call it as Yuskera. To outsiders, it is known as Basque. It is
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one of the few surviving non-Indo-Uropean languages of Europe. a language that bears no detectable relation to any of the great language families that surround it. Neither to Spanish nor to French, nor to any of the other romance languages, nor to the
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Germanic or Celtic or Slavic or Greek or Albanian or Baltic languages, nor to any known language anywhere else in the world. It is, as far as we can tell, a survival, a linguistic island, a small remnant of a much older European
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linguistic landscape that has otherwise been entirely overlaid by the languages of the Indo-Uropean family.
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How old is the Basque language? We do not know. It is older than any of the written records that surround it. It is older almost certainly than the arrival of the Indo-Uropean languages in Western Europe. which probably occurred during
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the Bronze Age alongside the spread of the beaker culture. It may be older than that. It may stretch back to the languages spoken by the early Neolithic farmers who arrived in Western Europe from Anatolia. It may stretch back even
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further to the languages spoken by the messylithic hunters of post ice age Europe. We cannot say for certain. The evidence is too thin and too ambiguous.
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But what we can say is that somehow against all the long pressures of history and conquest and assimilation, the language has survived. The Basques have kept it through Roman rule, through vis Visigothic invasion, through the Moorish conquest of much of Spain,
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through the long the long centuries of Christian Reconista, through the slow consolidation of the Spanish and French kingdoms, through wars and famines and persecutions, through the great waves of modern industrialization and migration.
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The language has remained spoken in homes and villages and today in schools and universities and on television and on the internet. That survival is one of the quiet wonders of European history.
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There were once many such non-indo-uropean languages spoken across the continent. Iberian was spoken across much of what is now eastern Spain. At Ruscan was spoken in central Italy before the rise of Rome. Pictish was spoken in northern Scotland before the
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spread of Gaelic. Tartesian was spoken in southwestern Iberia. Many smaller languages were spoken in pockets across the Alps and the Balkans and along the coasts. All of them are gone now. All of them, that is, except Basque. It stands
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alone, an old voice still speaking after all its siblings have fallen silent. The last representative of a linguistic world that once filled the continent and has now almost entirely vanished.
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The Basque people themselves are a quiet and reserved population, traditionally rural, traditionally devoted to their land and their language and their old customs. They have a long tradition of seafaring and their fishermen and whalers ranged across the North Atlantic
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from medieval times onward. Sometimes reaching the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador long before Columbus reached the Caribbean. They have a long tradition of mountain pastoralism with shepherds taking flocks up into the high Pyrenees in summer and bringing them
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down to the lowlands in winter in a pattern of seasonal movement that has continued in some places for many thousands of years. They have a long tradition of strong family and village ties, of distinctive folk music and dance, of particular foods and crafts
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and ways of building. Their flag is red, green, and white. Their traditional sports include forms of palotta played against the high walls of their village squares. Their cuisine is rich and famous, built around the fish of the Bay
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of Bisque and the cattle and sheep of the mountain pastures. Their landscape is wet and green and quiet, much like parts of Wales or Ireland. And the comparison is not accidental for both regions sit at the same latitude and
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share much the same Atlantic weather. For most of recorded history, the Basque country has been divided politically between Spain and France with the larger portion belonging to Spain. Through the long centuries of Spanish history, the Basque region was usually granted
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certain special privileges in recognition of its distinct culture and its long tradition of self-government.
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These privileges were called the Fuos. They allowed the Basque provinces to maintain their own laws and customs to collect their own taxes to manage their own internal affairs within the larger framework of the Spanish Kingdom. The Fuos were finally abolished in the 19th
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century after a series of civil wars in which the Bas generally supported the losing side. The loss of the Fuos was a great blow to Basque identity and it produced a long and sometimes painful struggle for the recovery of regional
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autonomy that has continued in various forms all the way to the present day. In the 20th century, the Basque region suffered greatly during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s and again during the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco that followed. The Basque
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language was officially suppressed for many years. Speaking it in public was forbidden. Teaching it in schools was forbidden. The famous bombing of the Basque town of Gueka by German aircraft in support of Franco's forces in 1937 became a symbol around the world of the
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brutalities of modern warfare and was immortalized in the great mural by Pablo Picasso that now hangs in Madrid. After Franco's death in 1975, the Basque country regained much of its autonomy.
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The language was officially recognized again. schools were established to teach it. Today, the language is taught alongside Spanish or French in the schools of the Basque country, and it has experienced something of a quiet revival, especially among younger people
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who want to reconnect with their old heritage. Through all of this, the genetic profile of the Basque population has remained relatively stable. The wars and the persecutions did not produce mass migration in or out of the region in
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numbers large enough to substantially change its underlying genetic composition. The bases today are genetically very similar to the bases of 200 years ago, of 500 years ago, of a thousand years ago.
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They continue to carry the deep western European hunter gatherer ancestry that distinguishes them from many of their neighbors. They continue to show the highest frequency of Rh negative blood found anywhere in the world. The genetic history of the bases is like their
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language distinctive though not as utterly unique as was once thought. For many decades, it was popularly believed that the Basques were a kind of pure survival from the pre-Indo-Uropean past, a direct unmixed remnant of the original Western European hunter gatherers,
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almost untouched by all the subsequent migrations and changes. This is now known to be too simple. The Bases, like every other modern European population, are a mixture of several ancestral components.
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They have messylithic huntergatherer ancestry. They have early Neolithic farmer ancestry. They have bronze age step ancestry. They are not in any simple sense an untouched survival. But within that mixture, the bases do show certain distinctive features. Their genetic profile is by the standards of
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modern European populations somewhat closer to that of Iberian Bronze Age populations than to that of most other modern Europeans. They appear to have undergone less subsequent ad mixture than most of their neighbors. They have in some sense been a more stable
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population less disturbed by the great folk movements of the medieval period and after and as a result the deep ancestry components including that western European huntergatherer component are unusually strong in their genetic profile. This is in the simplest
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and best supported scientific explanation why the bases have such a high frequency of Rh negative blood.
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They carry in unusually high concentration the deep European ancestry that originally produced the trait. They have been more than most other populations the keepers of this old genetic inheritance and they share that inheritance in somewhat diluted form with their distant
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cousins across the western edge of Europe including of course the British and the Irish. There is a real and meaningful sense then in which the high RH negative frequency of the British Isles and of the Basque country is part
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of the same story. They are connected not by any recent migration but by an ancient shared ancestry.
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Their common forebears in the small refuge populations of southwestern Europe during the depths of the last ice age carried the trait between them. When the ice melted, those people spread outward in different directions. Some moved north, eventually reaching what
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would become Britain. Some stayed close to home in the green corner of land that would eventually become the Basque country. And in each place, the trait persisted, defended by the relative isolation and stability of the receiving populations.
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This is the modern scientific view. It is supported by genetics, by archaeology, by the careful weighing of evidence over many decades. It does not claim certainty. It leaves many small questions unresolved. But in broad outline, it offers an answer to the
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original mystery. The British have so much RH negative blood because they inherit it from deep ancestral populations in which it was already common and because the subsequent history of the British Isles, despite all its many migrations and invasions,
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did not significantly dilute it. There are, of course, other theories that have been put forward over the years. Some of them are more grounded in science than others. One scientific theory holds that the Rh negative trait may have been
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favored in certain ancient environments by some kind of selection pressure. Perhaps it offered some protection against a disease that was common in the European refugees during the ice age but rare elsewhere. Perhaps it conferred some other small advantage in cold
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environments or in particular nutritional conditions or in some other circumstance that we cannot now reconstruct. If true, this would help to explain why the trait became so common in some populations and not in others.
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However, despite many decades of investigation, no clear selective advantage for the Rh negative trait has ever been firmly demonstrated. It remains in evolutionary terms a slight puzzle. Most geneticists today believe that its high frequency in Western European populations is best explained
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by simple founder effects and by the demographic history of the relevant populations rather than by any particular selective pressure.
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Another scientific theory holds that the trait may have arisen multiple times in multiple populations through different mutations of the same gene. This is plausible. There is more than one way for the gene that produces the RHD antigen to be disabled. And in
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some populations, different specific mutations are responsible for the Rh- negative phenotype. But again, this does not fully explain the geographic pattern. It simply tells us that the underlying genetic story is more complicated than it might first appear. A third theory, more cautious
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and more probabilistic, suggests that the high western European frequency of Rh negative is largely the product of chance. In small isolated populations, genetic traits can rise to high frequencies simply through random fluctuation.
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The technical name for this is genetic drift. If the small ice age refugee populations of southwestern Europe happened by pure chance to have a relatively high frequency of the RH negative trait, that frequency could have been preserved and even amplified
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by drift over the many generations of isolation. From there, as the populations expanded after the ice age, the high frequency was carried along. There need not have been any particular selective advantage.
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There need not have been any special reason. Sometimes in the long history of a population, certain traits simply come to predominate for no other reason than the operation of chance over many generations.
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This is perhaps the simplest and most satisfying scientific explanation. It does not require any special story. It requires only the ordinary workings of population genetics applied over many thousands of years to small populations in challenging environments.
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Chance is a great and patient force. It does not need to be intentional to produce striking results. There are alongside these scientific theories a number of more speculative and frankly less well-grounded ideas that circulate in certain corners of popular culture.
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Some have suggested that the Rh negative trait is somehow connected to ancient peoples who came from outside the normal human family. Some have suggested that it is linked to particular psychic or spiritual qualities.
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Some have suggested that it indicates descent from very ancient and specific lineages associated with various religious or mythological traditions.
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None of these ideas has any support in the evidence. They belong to the realm of speculation and imagination, not to the careful science of human genetics. We mention them only to set them aside gently and without judgment, so that we may return to the steadier
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ground of what the evidence actually shows. What the evidence actually shows is what we have been describing all along. A small genetic trait almost certainly arising or rising to prominence in the small western European populations that sheltered through the
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depths of the last ice age. A slow spread of that trait along with its bearers northward and outward as the ice retreated. a particular concentration of the trait along the Atlantic edge of Europe, including in the lands that
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would become Britain and Ireland. A long persistence of the trait through all the migrations and changes that followed, surviving the Neolithic and the Bronze Age and the Iron Age and the Roman and the Anglo-Saxon and the Viking and the
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Norman periods. surviving the medieval centuries and the early modern centuries and the industrial revolution.
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Surviving everything, a quiet inheritance flowing forward through tens of thousands of years all the way to the people who live in Britain and Ireland today. It is in its way a beautiful story. It connects each living British or Irish person who happens to carry the
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trait to a long, long line of ancestors, stretching back beyond all recorded history into a time before words, before writing, before farming, before even villages. It links them to the hunters who paddled their skinboats along the shores of Dogland. It links them to the
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painters of red ochre in the caves of southern France. It links them to the small bands who sheltered in the deep valleys of the Pyrenees during the long cold of the last glacial maximum. It links them to the very edge of what we
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can know about the human past on this continent. And yet it does so quietly.
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The trait does not announce itself. It does not glow or shine. It does not give the people who carry it any particular gift or ability or sign. It is simply there in their blood going about the steady business of carrying oxygen and
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fighting infection and maintaining the body exactly as everyone else's blood does. The story it tells is hidden. It must be looked for with the careful tools of modern science to be seen at all. But once it has been seen, it is
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hard to unsee. The map of RH negative blood across Europe with its strange and very particular pattern becomes a map of something else. It becomes a map of the long persistence of an old population in a particular part of the world across a
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very long time. It becomes a quiet record of where the ancient people sheltered and where they spread and where their descendants have against all the odds remained. We are coming slowly now toward the end of our journey for
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the evening. There are still some small things left to say. Let us say them gently and then let us rest. It is worth remembering as we close that the high frequency of Rh negative blood in Britain is not a sign of any kind of
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separateness from the rest of the human family. All human populations are connected. All human populations share, when you go back far enough, the same African origin. The differences that have arisen between different populations in skin color, in eye color,
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in blood types, in countless small genetic markers are real, but they are small in the larger picture. They are the local adornments of a single underlying human story. The British and the Irish, like everyone else, are part of the great wide human family. They
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share their deepest ancestry with every other human being on the planet. They differ in this small and quiet way that we have been discussing tonight, mostly through the long accident of geography and history. Their ancestors happen to shelter during the worst of the ice age
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in a particular set of southern refues. Their ancestors happened to spread when the ice melted into a particular set of northern lands. Their later history happened to allow the genetic inheritance of those distant ancestors to remain largely intact rather than
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being overwritten by later arrivals. And so today they carry a particular pattern in their blood. A pattern that quietly tells the story of where they came from. It is a story of survival, of small bands of people shivering through
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long winters, somehow keeping their fires al light and their children alive against terrible odds. Of long, slow walks across changing landscapes, following herds and seasons and rivers, century after century. of the steady patience of human life, persisting through ice and storm and famine and
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conquest, generation after generation, all the way down to the present moment. When you next find yourself in a British or Irish city or village or quiet country lane, and you look around at the people walking past, consider for a
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moment how very long the story of their presence here has been. Most of them of course are recent in their personal histories with grandparents from anywhere in the wide and connected world. But somewhere among them statistically are people whose deepest
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ancestry traces back through the long unbroken chain of generations to the very first human beings to walk into this land after the ice age. They do not look like Cheddaman. They do not live like the people who built Stonehenge.
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But they carry in their blood and in their bones a quiet inheritance from those very ancient people. And in some small percentage of them, that inheritance includes the trait we have been discussing tonight. This small and very old absence of a single protein on
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the surface of their red cells. The next time someone tells you their blood type and the second word is negative, you may, if you wish, allow yourself a small private thought, you may consider that they are, in some
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quiet sense, carrying the memory of a refuge in the Pyrenees 20,000 years ago, of a crossing of Dogland 12,000 years ago, of a journey from the shores of what is now France to the shores of what is now Cornwall, many thousands of years
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before that. The memory is not in their conscious mind. It is in their cells.
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But it is real in its way and it is very old. And now, dear listener, we come to the close. The fire has burned low. The candles have nearly gutted. The long, quiet hours of the night stretch ahead,
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gentle and undemanding. There is nothing more to do this evening to rest. We have walked together tonight through many tens of thousands of years.
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We have crossed deserts of ice and forests of pine. We have stood on cliffs that no longer exist, looking out overseas that no longer exist. We have met people whose names we will never know, whose languages we will never
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hear, whose lives we can only barely imagine. We have followed a small trait in the blood all the way back to its likely origin in the cold sheltered valleys of ice age Europe and we have followed it forward again through every
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age of British and Irish history all the way to the present day. We have asked a small question and we have followed it patiently and slowly into the very deep past of these green and quiet islands.
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Now the question has been answered as well as we are able to answer it. Now the journey is done. Let your mind, if it wishes, drift back over some of the things we have seen tonight. The footprints at Hapisburg, nearly a
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million years old, preserved in the muddy bank of an ancient river. The young man at Pavland Cave, sprinkled with red ochre, laid down to rest in the dark 33,000 years ago. The hunters in their southern refuges during the depths
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of the ice age, keeping their fires al light through the long winters. The first walkers back into the land that would become Britain more than 12,000 years ago. The country of Dogland with its slow rivers and its rich marshes
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full of fish and birds and game. The great wave of the Stoga slide sweeping across the low coasts in a single terrible morning. Cheddaman with his dark skin and his blue eyes laid to rest in his cave in Somerset. The farmers who
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came across the channel 6,000 years ago with their wheat and their cattle and their pottery transforming the land. The builders of Stonehenge raising their great stones on the windy chalk downs of Wiltshire. The Beaker people arriving with their bronze and their wagons and
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their distinctive cups, replacing so much of what had come before. The Iron Age tribes with their hill fors and their flowing artistic designs. The Romans with their roads and their walls and their towns. The Anglo-Saxons with their long ships and their new language.
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The Vikings with their raids and their settlements. The Normans with their castles and their new aristocracy. And through it all, beneath it all, carried forward by people whose names history did not record, the quiet old blood with its small distinctive marker, flowing on
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generation after generation, all the way to the present day. Let those images move slowly through your mind. There is no need to hold on to any of them. There is no need to remember. Let them drift like clouds across the summer sky, like
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leaves on a slow river. The story is yours now for as long as you wish to hold it, and you may release it whenever you like. The story does not need you to remember. It will be here whenever you
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wish to return to it. If your eyes have been closed for a long time, leave them closed. If you are already drifting, let yourself drift. The story will keep until you wake. The blood will still be there in the morning. The hills of
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Britain will still be standing just as they have stood in their present form for the past 10,000 years. The Basque country will still be wrapped in its green hills along the corner of the Bay of Bisque. The bones of Cheddaman will
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still be resting quietly in their museum case. None of it is going anywhere. There is something deeply restful perhaps about a story this old. The troubles of our own brief lives, the worries that fill our days, the small
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urgencies that pull at our attention. All of them become very small indeed when held up against the long, slow patients of 20,000 years. The Mesolithic hunters had their troubles, too. The Neolithic farmers had their troubles, too. The Bronze Age herders had their
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troubles too. The Iron Age villagers, the Roman provincials, the Anglo-Saxon farmers, the medieval peasants, all of them had their own troubles which felt as urgent and as important to them as ours feel to us. And now they are gone.
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The troubles passed. The lives ended. The names were forgotten. And yet in the quiet inheritance of the blood, in the small genetic markers carried forward across the generations, something of them remains, woven into the people who walk the same hills and shores today. It
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is a comforting thought perhaps, not because it makes any individual life less important. Each life matters fully and completely while it is being lived, but because it reminds us that we are all part of something much larger than
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ourselves. We are all in some sense links in a very long chain. We received the chain from those who came before us.
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We will pass it on in some form to those who come after. Our particular link will in time no longer be visible. But the chain itself will continue on into a future as long and as patient as the
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past behind us. Sleep well, dear listener. Thank you for spending this long, quiet evening here in this gentle place with this old old story. May your dreams be soft. May your night be untroubled. And when you wake, may the
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world be kind to you in the small and quiet ways that matter most. The story rests now. So may you rest your shoulders, rest your hands, rest the small muscles around your eyes that have been gently working all day. Let your
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breath slow. Let your thoughts soften. There is nothing more to do tonight. Nothing more to figure out. Nothing more to plan or worry over. The hills of Britain have stood through 10,000 years of nights. They will stand through this
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one easily while you sleep. Somewhere even now in a small house in Wales or in a quiet cottage in Cormal or in a sleeping village in the west of Ireland, someone with this old blood in their veins is lying down to sleep just as you
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are. They do not know they carry it. They do not need to know. They simply rest as you rest as their ancestors have rested every night for thousands and thousands of years. The blood goes on quietly with its work. The body goes on
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quietly with its repair. The night goes on quietly with its long patient turning. And in the morning, the sun will rise again on the hills, on the shores, on the people, on the blood, on everything that we have walked through
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together this evening. Until we meet again in another quiet evening, with another long and gentle journey through the half-remembered corners of the past.
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May you have peace. May you have rest. May you have all the soft and unhurried hours your heart could ask for. Sleep now. Sleep deeply. Sleep well. Good night. Good night. Good night.
Topics:Rh negative bloodBritish Isles historygeneticsblood typesCarl LandsteinerRHD antigenancient migrationsBasque countrypregnancy and Rh factorhuman ancestry
