The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Epochs #176 ｜ Ancient Britain： with Tom Rowsell

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this very special interview where I should be talking about the pre-history of Britain and what the British people are and I am delighted to be joined by Tom Rousell aka Survive the Bloody Jive. How are you, sir?

00:00:14.960 Very good, thanks, folks. Good to be back.

00:00:16.860 No, it's great to have you.

00:00:17.940 Yeah, good to see you.

00:00:18.880 I love having conversations with you. It's always brilliant. I love to be in the presence of someone whose knowledge is far deeper than mine, so I should be picking your brain here, if anything.

00:00:28.400 Oh, you know a lot about many things I don't know about, so it's not true altogether.

00:00:32.680 So let's kick off. Would you want to talk about just the history of the ancient peoples of these islands?

00:00:40.180 Sure.

00:00:41.220 So a long, long time ago, maybe, you know, talking 900,000, between 800,000 and a million years ago, there was a land bridge with Europe.

00:00:50.540 This is like many ice ages ago. This is when there were sort of primitive mammoths, a long, long time ago.

00:00:55.660 So there have been creatures here, whether they were pre-human creatures or not, for that long.

00:01:00.920 However, the story is only really of any proper interest, isn't it, when we get up to, what, something like 13,000 years ago?

00:01:11.480 Something like that. The first rock art and stuff.

00:01:15.200 The Mesolithic is a warm period following the Ice Age, and there have been different human beings and also other hominid species living on what's now the island of Britain, before, you know, in the Ice Age and before.

00:01:29.860 But we're only the ones that we have any, like, significant ancestry from.

00:01:33.680 The start is in the Mesolithic, when you get Cheddar Man's people, the Western hunter-gatherers. 0.57

00:01:38.500 And they have left some bits and bobs, like, there's some deer frontals you can see in York, like, it's like a kind of, like, the two antlers of a deer that they would wear on top of their heads.

00:01:49.680 And there's the star car pendant. It's like a little rock pendant with scratches on it.

00:01:55.060 And there's lots of, like, little microlifts, little spear points they use from those times.

00:01:59.540 Not a lot of art in Britain, but Britain was connected to the mainland, still in the Mesolithic, in that warm period.

00:02:08.300 Right.

00:02:08.680 And it didn't close off until the end of the Mesolithic, I think, like, 9,000 years ago.

00:02:15.080 Right. So, not long ago.

00:02:16.240 Not that long ago.

00:02:16.920 I find it fascinating that archaeologists have found, basically, chips of flint from as long ago as 800,000, 900,000, even a million years ago, where it's clearly somebody who understood napping, flint napping, wood, sorry, stone working, that long ago.

00:02:34.980 However, yeah, when you get up to, it's not that long ago that the channel was created.

00:02:39.020 There's a great bit, I mentioned it just the other day, I don't want to sound like a broken record, somewhere I mentioned it on someone's live stream, but I'll say it again.

00:02:44.480 There's a great bit at the beginning of the history of the English-speaking peoples by Churchill, where he says, at some point, there would have been two inlets, which becomes the channel, at some point long ago.

00:02:54.360 And at some point, these two inlets meet up.

00:02:57.700 There would have been a day, almost certainly a day, or at least when two marsh systems connected in some way, and that was the beginning of the channel.

00:03:06.620 There was some hunter-gatherer, knee-deep in the mud, hunting some ducks, and then he realised that he was in deep trouble.

00:03:13.180 The waters came in.

00:03:14.980 Yeah, or you're used to seeing, yeah, this small causeway of land between two bits of land, and at some point, it's cut off.

00:03:23.200 Yeah.

00:03:23.480 I imagine it was all soggy and muddy long before the two waters met, but it was all wee wetland.

00:03:28.280 Like a lot of Doggerland, which connected Britain to the mainland, was, it's very low land, so it would be soggy.

00:03:35.680 It would be wetlands with lots of, which meant hunter-gatherers would go there to hunt ducks and things like that.

00:03:40.320 Sure, sure.

00:03:40.780 But yeah, it wouldn't be very, there was no great civilisation Atlantis on those muddy, on those muddy, swampy bit of land.

00:03:47.280 I don't think so.

00:03:47.520 I'm holding out hope.

00:03:49.320 But it is remarkable, I think, to think of how young the channel is, essentially.

00:03:55.100 Yeah.

00:03:55.340 Yeah, and the Rhyde and the Thames kind of met once upon a time.

00:03:59.780 Oh, mad.

00:04:00.900 But there's some, I think some of the oldest rock art, there's some caves in Cheswell or somewhere, where there's some sort of picture of a, some sort of glyph of a deer or something.

00:04:13.640 Oh, yeah.

00:04:13.880 And they're looking at about 13,000 years ago, something like that.

00:04:18.100 That's Mesolithic.

00:04:18.480 So right at the end of the last island.

00:04:19.600 Yeah, yeah, that's early Mesolithic.

00:04:20.940 So that'll be our ancestors of this Western hunter-gatherer group.

00:04:25.640 There's rock art in France that's much older than that.

00:04:28.900 Like, yeah, some of the oldest in the world.

00:04:30.740 There's also some very old rock art in Southeast Asia.

00:04:34.760 But yeah, we're talking, yeah, I don't know that much about the rock art in Britain, but the Western hunter-gatherer people, Chedermans people, they only account for a good deal less than 10% of the DNA of modern British people.

00:04:49.600 So not a lot, maybe 5% even.

00:04:52.120 I'm not sure of the exact number, but it's less than 10%.

00:04:54.740 But for example, myself, my maternal lineage is from Western hunter-gatherers, which is U5, the same as Chedermans. 0.98

00:05:03.240 And my paternal lineage is also from Western hunter-gatherers.

00:05:05.820 So on both sides, I descend from them.

00:05:07.780 So even if you had the most exclusive and, you know, very high barrier to entry for Indigenous status of saying you had to have 20,000-year-old roots, well, I've got those too.

00:05:23.720 But most of us don't.

00:05:25.600 Yeah, most of us don't.

00:05:26.420 I really need to get my DNA done at some point.

00:05:29.520 I've kept meaning to do it for like, I mean, for like two or three years now.

00:05:33.900 And I keep putting it off, but I've got to do it soon.

00:05:36.860 But yeah, so, okay, so if we move the story on a little bit then, so I suppose maybe, well, where would you want to go from there?

00:05:44.040 The sort of the earliest builders of Stonehenge type culture, that sort of culture.

00:05:51.000 Yeah, well, they're the reason we have any ancestry from the hunter-gatherers in the first place.

00:05:55.680 Because when the hunter-gatherers, the hunter-gatherers first met the first farmers, they came to Britain about, or they got, they left, the first farmers of Europe left Anatolia 8,000 years ago.

00:06:08.760 And they reached the northern shores of France about 7,000 years ago.

00:06:12.980 So it took them 1,000 years to get all the way across Europe.

00:06:15.240 But it was another 1,000 years before they crossed that little bit of water to get into Britain.

00:06:19.560 So it's about 6,000 years ago they start entering Britain.

00:06:21.960 But we don't know why they were so hesitant to come to Britain.

00:06:24.840 But it's probably something to do with, in my opinion, a hefty population of hunter-gatherers there that made it not suitable for them to go across because there were already too many people there.

00:06:33.760 And I think that in some cases around the world, such as in the Pacific Northwest of America and in parts of Japan, you can see the rich marine resources can support a large hunter-gatherer population that normally you would only associate with a sophisticated society with farming because you need to be able to provide food and to have a town.

00:06:54.800 But you can get towns, they have, like, townships in the Pacific Northwest without farming because they have, you know, organised harvesting of oysters or whatever, crabs or whatever you want.

00:07:05.460 Japan is a good example of that.

00:07:06.540 Yeah, Japan, the Jomon people. 1.00

00:07:07.860 A big population without agriculture because the sea is so rich.

00:07:11.380 Yeah, they've got so much stuff.

00:07:12.760 They had, like, pottery and stuff.

00:07:14.880 Pottery is normally associated, like, in the West with the arrival of agriculture.

00:07:18.520 But there is, certainly in Japan, pottery long before agriculture.

00:07:22.360 So what would you call those people or that culture that first came across there?

00:07:27.860 Are they, like, Yemnaya people?

00:07:30.400 No, no, no.

00:07:30.680 Are they Kordidware people? 0.97

00:07:32.280 No.

00:07:32.960 They're before those.

00:07:33.960 You tell me.

00:07:34.340 Before those.

00:07:34.900 So, well, the genesis called this migration the early European farmers, EEF.

00:07:41.540 That's just what they're called.

00:07:42.400 They came from Anatolian hunter-gatherers and crossed the Bosphorus 8,000 years ago.

00:07:49.900 And then they mixed with the indigenous European hunter-gatherers to become this group we call early European farmers, which is why we, because we descend from them, that's why we have some indigenous DNA, too, from the preceding people.

00:08:00.860 But archaeologists divide them up into names according to their material culture.

00:08:06.600 So, for example, LBK or the TBK linear ceramics in Germany or the globular amphora culture.

00:08:17.980 And these are the same race, but they're different in different regions of Europe.

00:08:23.140 They had different cultures.

00:08:24.840 In Britain and Ireland, some people, some archaeologists might call them the grooved ware pottery people, but that's, they didn't have grooved ware when they moved here.

00:08:34.960 So, I would, I like to call them the megalith culture because 7,000, about 7,000 years ago in Britain, in northwestern France, the people there started making megalithic structures like stone, chambered tomb passages and stone circles and all these things that we associate with Britain now.

00:08:52.380 Or when, a thousand years later, when they moved to Britain, they brought all that in and then to Ireland, they brought it there.

00:08:56.480 That's why the Western, early European farmers all across Western Europe are very much associated with this megalith tradition, building megaliths. 0.98

00:09:05.080 But in Orkney Islands, when a plague hit around 5,300 years ago, maybe 5,200 years ago, a plague hit Europe, wiped out huge amounts of people.

00:09:17.880 Loads of people from that time have been found to be infected with plague, like a significant number of the, of the people in the tombs are, I think it's like a quarter or a third.

00:09:28.140 And that's like, I don't know how many died, but it's going to, that's just one pathogen at the time.

00:09:33.300 So, we can imagine a lot of people were dying of a plague in that time.

00:09:36.160 But in Orkney, it didn't seem to happen.

00:09:38.940 They didn't get hit for some reason.

00:09:40.820 And as a result, their pottery style, grooved wear, later becomes the default pottery for all Britain and Ireland.

00:09:49.040 So, like, even a thousand years later, people in Britain, Stonehenge, are making, are using this pottery.

00:09:54.820 So, that's the, like, the Orcadian pottery is the most fashionable ceramics you can have in the late stone age of Britain.

00:10:00.740 For people that might not know, the Orkneys are right at the top of Scotland, the Orkney Isles, right off the very top of Scotland.

00:10:09.720 So, I find it endlessly interesting and worthy of note how important Orkney is to our pre-history.

00:10:18.460 Again and again, it comes up, oh, this, we see this first in Orkney.

00:10:21.820 This comes from Orkney.

00:10:23.280 And it happens again and again and again.

00:10:25.480 And the archaeology on Orkney is incredible.

00:10:28.020 It's amazing.

00:10:28.280 I just, my next video is there.

00:10:29.620 I went there a second time.

00:10:30.420 Oh, really?

00:10:30.800 Because I went there 14 years ago and made a video and then I went there this summer again.

00:10:33.740 And my next video will be looking at some of those.

00:10:36.060 I went to Scarabrae, the best preserved Neolithic village in probably all Europe, at least Northern Europe.

00:10:42.100 It's fantastic.

00:10:42.820 It's like walking into someone's home from 5,000 years ago.

00:10:45.920 Briefly, what could possibly explain that?

00:10:48.660 Why, right off the very, very north of Scotland?

00:10:51.580 I mean, windswept doesn't even begin to explain it, does it?

00:10:54.280 Like, it's remote.

00:10:56.100 It's difficult.

00:10:57.040 Why would it?

00:10:57.640 It's, yeah, it's a really, like, low, low islands right in the North Atlantic, off the north coast of Scotland.

00:11:04.500 Not great place to live.

00:11:06.040 But, yeah, it's a really important place for the late Stone Age.

00:11:08.760 Two reasons, I think.

00:11:09.880 One is very simply, because there were no trees there, they had to build with stone, which means for us there's a lot of stuff still there.

00:11:16.860 Whereas everyone else would have built wooden houses in most of Europe.

00:11:21.020 They didn't.

00:11:21.920 They couldn't.

00:11:22.680 And so we've got a lot of evidence.

00:11:24.320 We can see what their homes look like.

00:11:25.460 That's one good reason it's important for us today.

00:11:27.720 But why was it important for other people in the rest of Britain at the time?

00:11:32.660 It's because of the plague.

00:11:34.060 Because they basically, the plague hit them too.

00:11:36.320 But it seems like about two, three hundred years after everyone else.

00:11:39.620 So if you can think of, like, the complex social networks, like complicated systems and all the, like, systems of labor required to make monumental structures like, you know, these that megalith builders made, those will start to collapse.

00:11:54.020 And, like, the period of massive megalith building did start to decline around 5,000 years ago around the rest of Britain.

00:12:00.380 And you also see a massive decline in crops to the extent that wheat and even barley go, just completely disappear in Scotland, for example, for a time and in parts of Ireland.

00:12:09.900 So it was a really, really severe impact from plague.

00:12:12.360 It was like, you know, like post-apocalyptic landscape, but not in Orkney.

00:12:16.500 So gradually after, after that plague, like Orkney's safety kind of allowed it to play some kind of influential role on the rebuilding of the rest of Britain.

00:12:26.740 So afterwards, as Britain and Ireland recover from the plague, you can see Orkney is like a sort of a hub of culture, cultural influence.

00:12:35.520 But then as the Wessex culture around Stonehenge grows, then by that time, the late, the last stage of the Neolithic, at the end of that, about, you know, four and a half thousand years ago, a period of massive monument building occurs around the Wiltshire Plain,

00:12:51.260 Salisbury Plain, sorry, including Stonehenge and Silbury Hill.

00:12:57.100 And by that stage, obviously, this is the centre, not Orkney.

00:13:00.200 Right, which is actually very close to where we're sitting right now.

00:13:03.180 Yeah, it's this area.

00:13:04.160 It's remarkable.

00:13:04.980 Yeah, like the Salisbury Plain and the Wiltshire is truly an ancient landscape.

00:13:09.700 I think I might be completely wrong about this, and I think maybe it's disputed, but I think maybe some of the pig bones or even some of the stones at Stonehenge came from Orkney.

00:13:18.840 As far away, possibly anyway, as Orkney.

00:13:20.960 Yes.

00:13:21.180 That's a slight thing.

00:13:22.280 One thing before we go on, if I can just get Dr. Goebbels about it, just briefly, very quickly.

00:13:29.300 Yeah.

00:13:29.640 The people from Anatolia that came to Britain, what would they have looked like?

00:13:34.860 Because they wouldn't have looked like modern-day Turkish people, because the modern-day Turkish people are largely sort of Central Asian or Scythian.

00:13:44.300 The sons of Osman come from Central Asia.

00:13:46.740 That's the modern Turk, right? 1.00

00:13:48.380 Well, so you tell me, what would they have looked like?

00:13:51.300 They were R1B people, though, weren't they? 0.96

00:13:53.340 No, you're thinking of the next invasion.

00:13:54.980 Okay.

00:13:55.340 The next invasion brings R1B.

00:13:56.960 Okay.

00:13:57.160 These people, you're right, they're not the same as the current inhabitants of Turkey, because the Turkic invasions have later.

00:14:03.520 Although modern Turks aren't as Turkic as you think they are.

00:14:07.600 They're only about 10% Turkic.

00:14:09.800 The rest of them is native Anatolians.

00:14:11.720 So they would have had some resemblance to modern Turks, but not at the time.

00:14:15.000 The closest living relatives to these people today are Sardinians.

00:14:19.560 So Sardinians are almost entirely this pure Neolithic race who survived today. 0.98

00:14:24.900 If you want to see what people in Neolithic Europe look like, probably very close to Sardinians.

00:14:30.400 In fact, very, very similar.

00:14:31.860 They're uniquely unaffected by the Indo-European migrations that happened across the rest of Europe later on at the end of the Neolithic.

00:14:39.020 That didn't really affect Sardinia, and so they preserved that.

00:14:42.720 But yeah.

00:14:43.320 And there's offensive megaliths on Sardinia, right?

00:14:45.600 The megalith culture reached Sardinia, yes.

00:14:48.080 But that reached it quite late.

00:14:50.060 Because as I say, the megaliths tradition started in Brittany.

00:14:52.680 So it started in the north.

00:14:53.720 But the people, Neolithic people, were already in Sardinia before they adopted that tradition.

00:14:58.920 Right.

00:14:59.260 But the oldest megaliths are in Brittany.

00:15:01.600 The oldest of the megalithic culture of Europe.

00:15:05.420 There are other megalithic.

00:15:07.460 Megalith just means big stone, right?

00:15:09.120 So there are other monuments made from big stones all over the world.

00:15:12.740 They're not the same cultural phenomenon.

00:15:14.740 Fair enough.

00:15:15.340 Yeah.

00:15:15.940 Fair enough.

00:15:16.520 Okay.

00:15:16.800 So when they first came over, because one of your areas of expertise is looking at genetic and DNA evidence and things.

00:15:25.920 So maybe I'm confusing what I'm about to say next with a later wave or something.

00:15:31.520 But the idea that in the genetic record, a lot of the original Neolithic peoples were replaced.

00:15:39.840 I mean, it's not quite like a modern day demographic replacement or anything.

00:15:44.000 But you see the older DNA die out relatively quickly and be replaced by this newer Anatolian type DNA.

00:15:51.300 Yeah.

00:15:51.620 So basically, a really interesting thing happened.

00:15:54.220 So, yes, the hunter-gatherers were, as you can imagine, in recent history, what happens when people who have farming and large settlements and organized, you know, societies start to encroach on the lands of, you know, fractured, scattered hunter-gatherers.

00:16:12.140 Gradually, they become more and more marginalized.

00:16:14.760 Hunter-gatherers eventually disappear.

00:16:16.220 Yes, that's what happened.

00:16:17.060 But there is not the same thing as what's happened in any modern recorded example, because the hunter-gatherers will have blue eyes.

00:16:28.760 That's where we get blue eyes from.

00:16:30.140 Those of us who have blue eyes, they come from the Western hunter-gatherers.

00:16:32.960 And the incoming people, the Anatolians, had lighter skin, and we get lighter skin as a result of them.

00:16:42.820 And the original Anatolian migrants carried haplogroups like G2A and other, like, Near Eastern haplogroups associated with the Near East today.

00:16:53.840 But the farmers in Britain that we look at all have indigenous male haplogroups, which means that when they moved to Britain, there was an initial period where the women of these farming societies were marrying into the indigenous male, marrying indigenous males.

00:17:16.920 And even though, like, the overall genetic code of the new farming people was from this incoming group almost entirely, their paternal lineages all came from the natives.

00:17:28.880 So the natives had some important role in, and it seems to me likely that what killed the natives was disease and loss of hunting grounds and things, so their way of life.

00:17:41.600 But lots of them were able to marry into the farming society, and that probably they had some status within the farming society, because even in Brittany, when the megalith culture begins, there's evidence that the actual megalith tradition was borrowed from or influenced by the hunter-gatherers that had been there before.

00:17:59.860 So it could be a continuation and an elaboration of an indigenous tradition.

00:18:04.820 And in fact, Stonehenge itself is built over the top of a place where native hunter-gatherers had wooden posts.

00:18:10.440 The post holes are now marked there.

00:18:11.880 If you go to Stonehenge, it shows on the ground these wooden, where the wooden posts were, it says Mesolithic post holes.

00:18:17.540 So there was already, it was already holy for the hunter-gatherers long before the farmers got there.

00:18:21.980 And there's other sort of evidence to believe, like, in Ireland, they've done DNA testing on the elite farmer, you know, the guys in the chamber tombs.

00:18:32.400 And they not only carry the indigenous lineages, but also they seem to be more likely to carry phenotypes associated with the indigenous hunter-gatherers.

00:18:45.640 So the elites have slightly darker skin and blue eyes, both things that were associated with the natives.

00:18:52.360 So it might be, they weren't natives, they weren't natives, but they might have just been, they were so inbred. 1.00

00:18:58.200 They've been, by the way, they were extremely inbred, like these elites were.

00:19:02.460 The average people, farmers weren't, but they looked at the Irish elites in the tomb and they found some of, like, first degree inbreeding had happened.

00:19:09.020 Like, it's like father-daughter kind of inbreeding, something equivalent of that.

00:19:11.960 And that usually only happens, like, in pharaohs or whatever, where they're trying to preserve their bloodlines.

00:19:17.420 And when we look at their phenotypes, they're preserving the phenotypes of this extinct hunter-gatherer race that used to live there.

00:19:23.320 It looks like they might be inbreeding to try and keep something alive from the old hunter-gatherers among the elites.

00:19:30.900 So remarkable how often that happened.

00:19:32.360 The Ptolemy, the Ptolemaic dynasty was terrible for that. 0.97

00:19:35.100 And, of course, the Habsburg.

00:19:36.040 So one thing I wanted to, you've already said a fair bit on it, but maybe we could just drill down slightly more on it.

00:19:41.960 So this view that you've got these indigenous or native hunter-gatherer type people, and then there's a newer influx of sort of farmers and also maybe metal workers.

00:19:53.720 That's a third thing.

00:19:55.040 Yeah, that comes later.

00:19:56.040 So quite often I think the older view is that they were just replaced, like, violently or something.

00:20:04.020 But my thinking now, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's exactly why I've got you in here.

00:20:07.560 So my latest thing I've read or seen is that it was probably less violent, less like an actual military invasion or something, because there doesn't seem to be large amounts of warfare and things.

00:20:18.920 Just that maybe they came over, they interbreed, and their cultures mix.

00:20:23.440 The indigenous people take on the culture of this megalithic building people. 1.00

00:20:29.060 And it's less that they're just coming over like a Viking invasion or a Roman invasion.

00:20:34.720 It's not like that, like the farmers come over and just start butchering all the hunter-gatherers.

00:20:39.460 Well, there's not much evidence for that.

00:20:41.060 Well, there's not much evidence for that, but it does seem likely that hunter-gatherers generally are going to be less resistant to some of the pathogens that people who are in contact with animals regularly as farmers are going to have.

00:20:51.080 And they would have started to build up an immunity to it.

00:20:55.920 So I'm sure there was violence.

00:20:58.100 There's always violence.

00:20:58.700 There must have been some.

00:20:59.480 But it doesn't look like...

00:21:00.360 It's not like a genocide, though.

00:21:02.280 There's no evidence that they came over and genocided the hunter-gatherers.

00:21:04.360 No, there's no evidence of that.

00:21:05.680 It's colonisation.

00:21:07.060 They're just taking the lands and there's mixing, obviously. 1.00

00:21:10.800 And the mixing is not just on a sort of system where hunter-gatherers are low status and the farmers are the high status.

00:21:19.520 It looks like the reverse is also true sometimes.

00:21:22.040 That's interesting, isn't it?

00:21:22.620 So that doesn't happen in recorded history.

00:21:25.380 So in modern times, you never saw, like, there are no, like, elite lineages in America of Native American descent, like, controlling the country now.

00:21:33.500 That would have been an equivalent, sort of roughly equivalent, but it didn't happen.

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - September 15, 2024

PREVIEW： Epochs #176 ｜ Ancient Britain： with Tom Rowsell

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