Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  With all the DNA results in from the school, and from Cheddar Man himself, the producer arranged a notorious ‘reveal’ session. The pupils, all aged between sixteen and eighteen, and the master who had organized the event at the school, gathered in the hall, nervously waiting for the results to be announced. The camera passed across the faces of the teenagers, each one apprehensive that it might be their DNA that had been matched to Cheddar Man. The presenter spoke, the match was revealed and the cameras swivelled round to bring one face into tight close-up. It was not one of the pupils at all, but the history teacher who had made the arrangements–Mr Adrian Targett. Gasps all round, a blushing teacher and a score of ever so slightly disappointed teenagers.

  The following day Adrian Targett’s smiling face was on the front page of every national newspaper. He was pictured crouching next to the replica of Cheddar Man’s skeleton at the spot in the cave where it had been discovered in 1903. Even the tabloids carried the story, impressively assembling a topless model in a skimpy rabbit-skin loincloth and with a hastily assembled flint axe. Adrian told me later that he had been offered a ‘five-figure sum’ to appear in a loincloth but had, sensibly, declined. The following day the story was picked up by newspapers abroad. It proved to be particularly popular in the US, probably because it fitted in nicely with the image of a bucolic English countryside in which it takes 9,000 years for someone’s descendants to move 300 yards down the road. People still remember the story even now, and when I was lecturing in California last year I was introduced by the organizers as the man who got DNA from the Cheese Man.

  The Cheddar Men, though they lived a very long time ago, were not the first human inhabitants of the Isles. There are scattered shreds of evidence that the Isles were once occupied by archaic species of humans, not directly ancestral to our own species, Homo sapiens. A shin bone from Boxgrove Quarry near Chichester on the Sussex coast, a tooth from Pontnewydd Cave in north Wales, both over a quarter of a million years old and both the remains, as far as can be told, of much sturdier, large-boned humans, more like Neanderthals than our own species. The recent discovery of flint tools that have been exposed in a crumbling cliff near Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast is evidence, albeit indirect, of a human presence on the Isles more than half a million years ago. Fascinating though these finds are, they are merely glimpses into the world of long-extinct humans who came and went but left no lasting impression on the Isles, small bands of roving hunters whose luck finally ran out. These were not our ancestors.

  The earliest evidence of our own species, Homo sapiens, in the Isles comes from Paviland Cave just above the rocky shoreline of the Gower Peninsula to the west of Swansea in South Wales. In 1823 the Oxford palaeontologist William Buckland excavated the partial skeleton of a man. Misled by the presence of ivory ornaments near the body, Buckland assumed that he had found the remains of a woman and, because the bones were stained with red ochre as part of an unknown burial ritual, she soon became known as ‘the Red Lady of Paviland’. However, a more thorough analysis of the bones, particularly the pelvis, showed that the Red Lady was actually a man, though he still retains the title. When Buckland found these bones they were so well preserved that he thought they could not be all that old. His theory was that they were the remains of a woman who had been living in the cave while working at a nearby Roman camp. But he was wrong again. We now know from carbon-dating that the Red Lady was much older than the time of the Roman occupation. ‘She’ died 26,000 years ago and ‘her’ pendant was not made of elephant ivory but had been carved from the tusk of a mammoth. We know, from the deliberate burial, that the Red Lady was survived by her relatives, but no trace of them remains. After the time of the Red Lady, there is a long empty gap in the fossil record of the Isles. There is nothing until the time of the ‘older’ of the Cheddar Men, just over 12,000 years ago. Why the break? There is one very simple answer–the Ice Age.

  About 24,000 years ago the temperatures in the northern latitudes around the globe, including the Isles, began to drop as the planet entered once again into the downward phase of a glacial cycle. These regular cycles of bitter cold and comparative mildness have been going on for at least 2 million years. They are caused by the slight shifts in the way the earth rotates and moves in its orbit around the sun. The shape of the orbit changes from circular to elliptical and then back to circular about once every 96,000 years. The angle of the earth’s axis changes, shifting the positions of the Arctic Circle and the Tropic of Cancer up and down by 3 degrees of latitude, and several hundred miles, once every 42,000 years. Another cycle, every 20,000 years, alters the seasons when the earth is at different parts of its orbit. As the earth runs through this cycle, the signs of the zodiac slowly move round and we enter new astrological ‘ages’, the latest being Aquarius. The combination of all three cycles one on top of the other means the earth’s climate never stands still for long. The effect is to change the amount of sunlight which hits the higher latitudes in both hemispheres, slowly increasing and decreasing as the overlapping cycles gradually shift the planet’s position with respect to the sun. We are now in a warm phase of the long-term glacial cycle, but it will not last for ever and at some as yet unpredictable time in the future we will slide inexorably into another Ice Age. How soon the next cold phase will begin and to what extent its chilling effects will be tempered by ‘global warming’ are all uncertainties for future generations.

  For the descendants of the Red Lady and the other scattered occupants of the Isles 24,000 years ago, even though they did not know it, their tenancy of the land was coming to an end. Gradually the year-on-year temperatures began to fall. Snow that covered the mountains in winter no longer melted in the summer and gradually built up into a permanent ice cap. The sea began to recede as more and more water became locked in permanent ice sheets, not just in the Isles but also at the Poles and over the mountain ranges of Europe, Asia and America. The Isles became a peninsula as the North Sea receded. Britain and Ireland were joined. Vicious winds howled around the edges of the expanding ice cap as the weather systems shifted away from the succession of moisture-bearing Atlantic depressions towards an Arctic climate of intense, dry cold. And all the time, the ice moved south. The herds of migrating game–reindeer, bison, wild horse and mammoth–moved their ranges away from the worsening conditions, and the scattered groups of humans who depended on them for food had no choice but to follow them. By the time of the coldest phase of the Ice Age, 18,000 years ago, there were no humans left in Britain, or anywhere else in Europe north of the Alps.

  The descendants of the Red Lady and their contemporaries had retreated to refuges in southern France, Italy and Spain, abandoning northern Europe to the frost and ice. Great glaciers flowed downhill from the ice domes over the mountains of northern Britain, gouging out steep-sided valleys and pulverizing the bedrock as they ground their way across the landscape, obliterating everything in their path. All evidence of human occupation in northern Britain was completely erased by the ice. Only south of a line from the English Midlands to central Ireland, which marked the edge of the ice, could any trace remain.

  And then, quite suddenly, the climate began to improve as the planet moved its alignment in the heavens. The warmth of the sun returned to the northern latitudes and the ice began to melt. Our ancestors followed the herds north from their huddled refuges as the frozen land began to thaw. Carbon-dating of charcoal left by campfires has traced the advancing front and by 13,000 years ago they had reached northern France. A millennium later, the older of the Cheddar Men, or his immediate ancestors, were among the first to arrive in the Isles, by foot across the land that now lies beneath the North Sea. His are among the oldest remains to be found anywhere in post-Ice Age Britain. He arrived in a landscape scrubbed clean of human occupation by the effects of the Ice Age, even though the ice itself never reached as far south as his home in Cheddar. His camp in the gorge was perfect as an ambush site to trap the migrating herds of reindeer as they moved from their summer
feeding grounds on the high Mendips to spend the winter on the Somerset Levels. Remains at the site showed he was skilled at making the variety of flint tools on which the life of the hunter depended.

  When he arrived, 12,000 years or so ago, the Isles were connected to each other and to the rest of continental Europe. The sea was 100 feet lower than it is now and large tracts of land that are now under water were well above sea level. Ireland was connected to mainland Britain through a broad plain that joined it to the west coast of Scotland and took in what is now the whisky isle of Islay. The Irish Sea, which now entirely separates Ireland from the rest of the Isles, was then a narrow sea inlet between flat plains, blocked at its northern end by the isthmus that joined Scotland to the north of Ireland. The Western Isles off the north-west coast of Scotland were similarly joined to the mainland with a narrow strip of dry land. The Hebridean islands of Skye, Mull, Rum, Coll and Tiree were not islands then; neither were the Orkney Islands, now separated from the far north of the Scottish mainland by the turbulent seas of the Pentland Firth. Only the Shetland Isles, 60 miles north of Orkney, were truly islands in those far-off days.

  Most important of all, there was dry land connecting Britain to continental Europe. This was no narrow causeway, but a wide rolling plain joining eastern Britain to the rest of Europe from the Tyne in the north to Beachy Head near Eastbourne in the south. The entire southern section of what is now the North Sea was dry land intersected by wide rivers. The Thames was then a tributary of the Rhine, their joined waters emptying into the sea 100 miles east of Newcastle upon Tyne. What is now Britain and Ireland, separated by shallow seas, was then a great peninsula protruding into the Atlantic Ocean. The Irish Sea was open only at its southern end and the North Sea was dry land. The sea level was rising as the global temperature climbed back up after the last Ice Age. The great ice sheets that covered the northern hemisphere were melting, as their remnants in the polar north continue to do today.

  Even now, the Isles are still twisting and turning in the aftermath of the last Ice Age. The immense weight of snow and ice across the Scottish Highlands and, to a greater extent still, over the mountains of Sweden and Norway pushed these lands further down into the semi-molten layers deep beneath the earth’s solid crust. The continents are floating on molten magma and, just like a cargo ship, they move up and down depending on their loadings. Unlike a ship, when one part goes down under the weight of ice, a nearby section can be pushed up. This happened to the land that now lies beneath the North Sea and which was artificially elevated by the sinking of Scandinavia under the weight of its ice dome. As this melted, the sea level certainly rose, simply because there was much more water in the oceans. But the land that had been pushed down into the magma began to rise up again as the load of ice melted away. And as Norway and Sweden floated back up towards their pre-Ice Age levels, so Doggerland, as this now vanished land beneath the North Sea is called, sank back down, quickening its submergence beneath the rising sea and accelerating the conversion of the Isles from peninsula to the real thing.

  The Isles are still slowly convulsing. The southern and eastern coasts of England are sinking at the rate of an inch a year, causing the kind of coastal erosion that has shed the flint tools half a million years old from the crumbling cliffs of Suffolk. The west and north coasts are rising at about the same rate or sometimes faster. Dunbar, on the east coast of Scotland not far from Edinburgh, for example, is rising at the rate of 2 inches a year. Ireland is still lifting itself from the ocean.

  By the time the ‘younger’ Cheddar Man lived in the same gorge, 9,000 years ago, the climate had improved even more, but the great herds of big game had gone. What had once been open tundra was now dense woodland and, though the climate was warmer, the business of living was very much harder. His diet was opportunistic: fish and crayfish from the river that tumbled out of the rocks; birds and mammals, perhaps a squirrel or a pine marten from the woods; and, on a good day, a red deer. In the autumn there were mushrooms and nuts from the woods around the gorge. Woodland was now the dominant feature of the landscape of the Isles as the chilling effect of the Ice Age wore off. Though the types of trees varied from place to place, the land was covered in dense forests from the southern shores to the glens of the northern Highlands. Only the uplands remained free of natural tree cover due to a combination of altitude and poor soil.

  Since the time of the ‘older’ Cheddar Man, the Isles have been almost continuously occupied. During the millennia that his remains slept in the silent limestone caves of Somerset, almost everything has changed in the Isles. The landscape has been transformed from open tundra to thick forest to cultivated fields. Where once he hunted for food, tourists throng the gorge and queue for cream teas. From a total population of a few thousand in the Stone Age, the Isles are now home to more than 60 million people. Beyond the shores, a further 150 million people from all over the world can trace their roots back to the Isles. While his bones were gradually entombed by the drip, drip, drip of limestone water in the silence of his cave, the ancestors of the ancient Celts have arrived in Wales and Ireland, the ground has trembled under the marching feet of Roman legions, the shingle beaches of Kent have yielded to the keels of Saxon warships, and the blood-curdling cries of Viking raiders have echoed from the defenceless monasteries of Northumbria and the Scottish islands. While he endured 12,000 years of solitude, the world outside pulsed with life–and death. His DNA stayed where it was, but outside the cave it had another life in the generations of descendants whose stories we can now begin to unfold.

  2

  WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE?

  On Easter Day 1278, Edward I, King of England, accompanied by Queen Eleanor and a glittering retinue of knights and ministers, arrived at the Benedictine monastery of Glastonbury in Somerset. The reason for his visit was very specific–and very deliberate. He and his court were there to open the tomb of the legendary King Arthur. In a lavishly elaborate ceremony, two caskets containing the bones of Arthur and his queen, Guinevere, were taken from the tomb, the bones removed and carefully laid out on the altar of the monastery chapel. The following day Edward wrapped Arthur’s bones in sheets of silk and solemnly placed them in a painted casket decorated with Arthur’s portrait and his coat of arms. Queen Eleanor then mounted the platform and performed the same rites with the bones of Guinevere. After this the caskets were placed in front of the high altar and the royal party departed.

  What was Edward up to? Why did he go to so much trouble to travel all the way to Glastonbury? He was there for one very simple reason. He was aligning himself with the legend of King Arthur and through him laying claim to the ancient kingdom of the Britons. He was able to capitalize on the predominant myth about the origins of the British people, a myth that utterly dominated the Middle Ages. We may believe that nowadays we are beyond the grasp of hazy origin myths and treat them as the sole preserve of ignorant and primitive people clinging to absurd notions of their past. But in my research around the world I have more than once found that oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology. Hawaiki, the legendary homeland of the Polynesians, was said to be located among the islands of Indonesia, and genetics proved it. The Hazara tribe of north-west Pakistan had a strong oral myth of descent from the first Mongol emperor, Genghis Khan, and his genes are still there to this day. These are just two examples.

  Only when I began my research in the Isles did I come to appreciate that we are just as entangled in our own origin myths as everybody else. They are still very powerful and, as in other parts of the world, they may contain grains of truth that we can test by genetics. I believe we are just as vulnerable to the power of myth about our own origins as the Polynesians or the Hazara or, indeed, the witnesses to the elaborate ceremony at Glastonbury over 700 years ago. The modern historian Norman Davies castigates archaeologists for their over-materialist approach to the past and their disdain for myth. I am on his side. While no one would be f
oolish enough to suggest that they are entirely accurate in every detail, myths have a very long memory. They are also extremely influential. To see how our own origin myths have developed, let us return to the Middle Ages.

  The legend of King Arthur was brilliantly exploited by Edward I and many other of the Plantagenet kings who reigned during the Middle Ages. By linking himself to the mythical dynasty of ancient British kings he was seeking to justify his attempts to become sovereign of the whole of Britain. Twenty years after Glastonbury, he argued in the papal court in Rome that his descent from Arthur and a long line of ancient British kings gave the English crown rights over Scotland and had been ample justification for his military campaigns. His great-grandfather, Henry II, had done a similar thing when he arranged for Arthur’s remains at Glastonbury to be ‘discovered’. His grandson Edward III showed his enthusiasm for the myth in 1348 by instigating his own version of the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table: the Order of the Garter, a select company of twenty-four grandees that still continues today. It is no coincidence that Prince Charles, the current heir to the throne, was christened Arthur among his many names.

  The origin of the myth itself was a quite brilliant work of creative imagination by a Welsh cleric, Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in 1138. The History of the Kings of Britain has everything an origin myth should have. It is full of heroic deeds, terrible battles, black treachery, and is woven with just enough threads of authenticity to be taken seriously. It even had its own mysterious source–a book (never discovered) ‘written in the British language which told of the lives of the ancient British Kings from Brutus, the first, to Cadwallader, the last’, given to Geoffrey by a mysterious archdeacon, named Walter, in Oxford where he wrote the History.