Tom Rousell aka Survive the Bloody Jive joins me to talk about the pre-history of Britain and what the British people are, and why they are the way they are. We talk about how the ancient peoples of these islands came to be, what they were like, and how they became the people they are today.
00:00:00.000Hello 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?
00:00:14.960Very good, thanks, folks. Good to be back.
00:00:18.880I 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.
00:00:28.400Oh, you know a lot about many things I don't know about, so it's not true altogether.
00:00:32.680So let's kick off. Would you want to talk about just the history of the ancient peoples of these islands?
00:00:41.220So 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.
00:00:50.540This is like many ice ages ago. This is when there were sort of primitive mammoths, a long, long time ago.
00:00:55.660So there have been creatures here, whether they were pre-human creatures or not, for that long.
00:01:00.920However, the story is only really of any proper interest, isn't it, when we get up to, what, something like 13,000 years ago?
00:01:11.480Something like that. The first rock art and stuff.
00:01:15.200The 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.
00:01:29.860But we're only the ones that we have any, like, significant ancestry from.
00:01:33.680The start is in the Mesolithic, when you get Cheddar Man's people, the Western hunter-gatherers.
00:01:38.500And 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.
00:01:49.680And there's the star car pendant. It's like a little rock pendant with scratches on it.
00:01:55.060And there's lots of, like, little microlifts, little spear points they use from those times.
00:01:59.540Not a lot of art in Britain, but Britain was connected to the mainland, still in the Mesolithic, in that warm period.
00:02:16.920I 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.
00:02:34.980However, yeah, when you get up to, it's not that long ago that the channel was created.
00:02:39.020There'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.
00:02:44.480There'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.
00:02:54.360And at some point, these two inlets meet up.
00:02:57.700There 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.
00:03:06.620There was some hunter-gatherer, knee-deep in the mud, hunting some ducks, and then he realised that he was in deep trouble.
00:04:00.900But 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.
00:04:20.940So that'll be our ancestors of this Western hunter-gatherer group.
00:04:25.640There's rock art in France that's much older than that.
00:04:28.900Like, yeah, some of the oldest in the world.
00:04:30.740There's also some very old rock art in Southeast Asia.
00:04:34.760But 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.
00:04:52.120I'm not sure of the exact number, but it's less than 10%.
00:04:54.740But for example, myself, my maternal lineage is from Western hunter-gatherers, which is U5, the same as Chedermans.
00:05:03.240And my paternal lineage is also from Western hunter-gatherers.
00:05:05.820So on both sides, I descend from them.
00:05:07.780So 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.
00:05:26.420I really need to get my DNA done at some point.
00:05:29.520I've kept meaning to do it for like, I mean, for like two or three years now.
00:05:33.900And I keep putting it off, but I've got to do it soon.
00:05:36.860But 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?
00:05:44.040The sort of the earliest builders of Stonehenge type culture, that sort of culture.
00:05:51.000Yeah, well, they're the reason we have any ancestry from the hunter-gatherers in the first place.
00:05:55.680Because 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.
00:06:08.760And they reached the northern shores of France about 7,000 years ago.
00:06:12.980So it took them 1,000 years to get all the way across Europe.
00:06:15.240But it was another 1,000 years before they crossed that little bit of water to get into Britain.
00:06:19.560So it's about 6,000 years ago they start entering Britain.
00:06:21.960But we don't know why they were so hesitant to come to Britain.
00:06:24.840But 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.
00:06:33.760And 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.
00:06:54.800But 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.
00:07:42.400They came from Anatolian hunter-gatherers and crossed the Bosphorus 8,000 years ago.
00:07:49.900And 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.
00:08:00.860But archaeologists divide them up into names according to their material culture.
00:08:06.600So, for example, LBK or the TBK linear ceramics in Germany or the globular amphora culture.
00:08:17.980And these are the same race, but they're different in different regions of Europe.
00:08:24.840In 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.
00:08:34.960So, 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.
00:08:52.380Or when, a thousand years later, when they moved to Britain, they brought all that in and then to Ireland, they brought it there.
00:08:56.480That's why the Western, early European farmers all across Western Europe are very much associated with this megalith tradition, building megaliths.
00:09:05.080But 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.
00:09:17.880Loads 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.
00:09:28.140And that's like, I don't know how many died, but it's going to, that's just one pathogen at the time.
00:09:33.300So, we can imagine a lot of people were dying of a plague in that time.
00:09:36.160But in Orkney, it didn't seem to happen.
00:11:09.880One 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.
00:11:16.860Whereas everyone else would have built wooden houses in most of Europe.
00:11:34.060Because they basically, the plague hit them too.
00:11:36.320But it seems like about two, three hundred years after everyone else.
00:11:39.620So 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.
00:11:54.020And, like, the period of massive megalith building did start to decline around 5,000 years ago around the rest of Britain.
00:12:00.380And 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.
00:12:09.900So it was a really, really severe impact from plague.
00:12:12.360It was like, you know, like post-apocalyptic landscape, but not in Orkney.
00:12:16.500So 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.
00:12:26.740So afterwards, as Britain and Ireland recover from the plague, you can see Orkney is like a sort of a hub of culture, cultural influence.
00:12:35.520But 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,
00:12:51.260Salisbury Plain, sorry, including Stonehenge and Silbury Hill.
00:12:57.100And by that stage, obviously, this is the centre, not Orkney.
00:13:00.200Right, which is actually very close to where we're sitting right now.
00:13:04.980Yeah, like the Salisbury Plain and the Wiltshire is truly an ancient landscape.
00:13:09.700I 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.
00:13:18.840As far away, possibly anyway, as Orkney.
00:13:29.640The people from Anatolia that came to Britain, what would they have looked like?
00:13:34.860Because they wouldn't have looked like modern-day Turkish people, because the modern-day Turkish people are largely sort of Central Asian or Scythian.
00:13:44.300The sons of Osman come from Central Asia.
00:15:51.620So basically, a really interesting thing happened.
00:15:54.220So, 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.
00:16:12.140Gradually, they become more and more marginalized.
00:16:14.760Hunter-gatherers eventually disappear.
00:16:30.140Those of us who have blue eyes, they come from the Western hunter-gatherers.
00:16:32.960And the incoming people, the Anatolians, had lighter skin, and we get lighter skin as a result of them.
00:16:42.820And the original Anatolian migrants carried haplogroups like G2A and other, like, Near Eastern haplogroups associated with the Near East today.
00:16:53.840But 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.
00:17:16.920And 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.
00:17:28.880So 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.
00:17:41.600But 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.
00:17:59.860So it could be a continuation and an elaboration of an indigenous tradition.
00:18:04.820And in fact, Stonehenge itself is built over the top of a place where native hunter-gatherers had wooden posts.
00:18:11.880If you go to Stonehenge, it shows on the ground these wooden, where the wooden posts were, it says Mesolithic post holes.
00:18:17.540So there was already, it was already holy for the hunter-gatherers long before the farmers got there.
00:18:21.980And 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.
00:18:32.400And they not only carry the indigenous lineages, but also they seem to be more likely to carry phenotypes associated with the indigenous hunter-gatherers.
00:18:45.640So the elites have slightly darker skin and blue eyes, both things that were associated with the natives.
00:18:52.360So it might be, they weren't natives, they weren't natives, but they might have just been, they were so inbred.
00:18:58.200They've been, by the way, they were extremely inbred, like these elites were.
00:19:02.460The 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.
00:19:09.020Like, it's like father-daughter kind of inbreeding, something equivalent of that.
00:19:11.960And that usually only happens, like, in pharaohs or whatever, where they're trying to preserve their bloodlines.
00:19:17.420And when we look at their phenotypes, they're preserving the phenotypes of this extinct hunter-gatherer race that used to live there.
00:19:23.320It looks like they might be inbreeding to try and keep something alive from the old hunter-gatherers among the elites.
00:19:30.900So remarkable how often that happened.
00:19:32.360The Ptolemy, the Ptolemaic dynasty was terrible for that.
00:19:36.040So 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.
00:19:41.960So 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.
00:19:56.040So quite often I think the older view is that they were just replaced, like, violently or something.
00:20:04.020But my thinking now, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's exactly why I've got you in here.
00:20:07.560So 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.
00:20:18.920Just that maybe they came over, they interbreed, and their cultures mix.
00:20:23.440The indigenous people take on the culture of this megalithic building people.
00:20:29.060And it's less that they're just coming over like a Viking invasion or a Roman invasion.
00:20:34.720It's not like that, like the farmers come over and just start butchering all the hunter-gatherers.
00:20:39.460Well, there's not much evidence for that.
00:20:41.060Well, 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.
00:20:51.080And they would have started to build up an immunity to it.
00:21:22.620So that doesn't happen in recorded history.
00:21:25.380So in modern times, you never saw, like, there are no, like, elite lineages in America of Native American descent, like, controlling the country now.
00:21:33.500That would have been an equivalent, sort of roughly equivalent, but it didn't happen.
00:21:36.920To watch the full video, please become a premium member at LotusEaters.com