According to a recent study, the oldest known human DNA from Britain indicates two distinct populations, one of which may have engaged in cannibalism.
The DNA of two British individuals who lived near the end of the Old Stone Age was analyzed in London.
One of the people was discovered in Gough’s Cave in Somerset, and the other in Kendrick’s Cave in North Wales.
According to researchers, the Gough’s Cave figure was female and lived 14,900 years ago, while the Kendrick’s Cave individual lived 13,600 years ago.
Results show that each belonged to a distinct population that came to Britain at the end of the last Ice Age and that their nutritional choices were vastly different.
The female from Gough’s Cave was presumably part of a group that engaged in cannibalism, whereas the second group consumed primarily marine and freshwater foods.
The Natural History Museum, University College London (UCL), and the Francis Crick Institute spearheaded the new study, which was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The Natural History Museum’s Dr. Selina Brace, who authored the study, stated, “We wanted to learn more about who these early communities in Britain may have been.”
“We knew from our prior research, particularly the study of Cheddar Man, that hunter-gatherers from the west were in Britain approximately 10,500 years before the present.
“However, we did not know when they initially arrived in Britain or if this was the sole population there at the time.”
The individual’s DNA from Gough’s Cave suggests that her ancestors participated in the early migration into northwest Europe.
The man from Kendrick’s Cave is from a later period, approximately 13,500 years ago, and his heritage is from a group known as “western hunter-gatherers,” whose ancestors originated in the Near East.
The research revealed that these populations were not only genetically distinct but also culturally distinct.
Dr. Rhiannon Stevens at UCL explained, “Chemical tests of the bones revealed that the inhabitants of Kendrick’s Cave consumed an abundance of marine and freshwater foods, including large marine mammals.”
Humans at Gough’s Cave, however, ate mostly terrestrial herbivores such as red deer, bovids (such as wild cattle called aurochs), and horses, with no evidence of eating marine or freshwater foods.
Kendrick’s Cave contained no animal bones showing signs of being consumed by humans, indicating that the cave was utilized as a burial ground by its occupants.
Among the animal bones discovered were artifacts such as a painted horse mandible (lower jaw).
In contrast, animal and human bones discovered in Gough’s Cave exhibited extensive human modification, including human skulls molded into “skull-cups” and regarded as evidence of ceremonial cannibalism.
The individuals were part of groups that arrived in Britain many thousands of years after the Last Glacial Maximum, a major climatic period in which temperatures dropped roughly 20,000 years ago.
Despite the presence of humans in Britain before the Last Glacial Maximum, the majority of the island was uninhabitable until roughly 19,000 years ago, when vast ice sheets began to melt.
As the temperature warmed and the glaciers continued to retreat, humans began to return to northern Europe some 17,000 years ago.
Dr. Sophy Charlton of the University of York, who authored the study, explained that the period of 20 to 10,000 years ago is part of the Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age.
This is a critical period for the ecosystem in Britain, since considerable temperature warming, woodland expansion, and changes in the types of animals available for hunting would have occurred.
There are extremely few human remains of this period in Britain, probably a dozen individuals scattered among six locations.
The Gough’s Cave individual shares genetic ancestry information with a 15,000-year-old Belgian (‘Goyet Q2’), according to researchers.
Moreover, Kendrick’s Cave human is related to the 14,000-year-old Italian Villabruna individual.
However, there is no evidence that the individual from Kendrick’s Cave is connected to the older Gough’s Cave specimen.
This suggests that there were two genetically separate groups in Britain around a thousand years apart, similar to patterns of ‘dual ancestry’ observed elsewhere in Europe throughout the late Pleistocene.
Finding the two ancestries so close in time in Britain, barely a millennium or so apart, contributes to the growing picture of a shifting and dynamic population in Palaeolithic Europe, according to Dr. Mateja Hajdinjak of the Francis Crick Institute.
In an accompanying News & Views article, Chantel Conneller, a pre-history researcher at Newcastle University who was not involved in the study, wrote that it “provides new evidence for the genetic composition of Late Upper Palaeolithic people in Britain.”
However, she cautioned against the ‘inevitable simplification’ that results from organizing and interpreting enormous quantities of DNA data.
She writes, “Palaeolithic archaeology, with its somewhat imprecise chronologies and tiny datasets, is especially susceptible to assertions of synchronization for population events and material culture shifts that may have occurred hundreds or thousands of years apart.”
