AP reports from Berlin that a wave of migrants from what is now Greece and Turkey arrived in Britain some 6,000 years ago and virtually replaced the existing hunter-gatherer population, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature.
Scientists examining samples of ancient remains dating as far back as 8500 BC discovered the dark-skinned foragers who had inhabited the British Isles since the last Ice Age left comparatively little trace in the genetic record after the transition to farming, suggesting there wasn’t much interbreeding with the newcomers who arrived around 4000 BC.
By contrast, the same Aegean migrants mixed extensively with local populations when they introduced farming to continental Europe nearly 1,000 years earlier, according to previous DNA studies.
The researchers from Britain and the United States found that the remains of Britain’s early farmers were genetically similar to those located in what is now Spain and Portugal, indicating this population traveled east to west through the Mediterranean, and then up to Britain.
Read more at thenationalherald.com
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