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The exhumed dead, who share parts of my autosomal DNA, provide hints at where ‘I’ have been for the last few millennia and where ‘we’ got to. In the hegemonic European discourses of the period, we would all have been classed as barbarians.
The archaeological DNA Matches used are partial not only in ‘relatedness’ (genetic distance) but also levels of scholarly interest (of the brush and trowel variety) at different sites across Europe. The correlations available suggest I was a barbarian: Celt, Frank, Visigoth, Lombard, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Gael, Illyrian. We all must have been barbarians to begin with, restlessly harrying the edge of someone literate man’s firelight?
My closest match, in the samples available to me at this time, is a Gal-Gael buried in the North of Iceland around 1000 years ago. This assertion is based on the number of single point mutations he and I share.
Reading through the 100 closest matches to specific exhumed individuals[1], allows me to construct a pseudo-scientific myth-of-origin from Moravia 6000 years ago.
We are all migrants – our biomass shifting in waves of movement driven by environmental and social pressures. This part of the story comes in four phases.
- Phase 1 – Over 4000 years ago
- Phase 2: 3500 to 2000 years ago
- Phase 3 – 2000 to 1200 years ago.
- Phase 4 : 1200 to 600 years ago
This is epic history: from the beginnings of agriculture, at least on the British Isles, well into the age of reported history. Our shared – not inherited – DNA is smeared across North Western Europe, in barrows, cemeteries, mass graves and battlefields. The litter of death evocative of Benjamin’s Angel of History..
There is no data to indicate Mediterranean elements, let alone – in this time frame – participants from farther afield. Though some of us migrated away in later centuries – as far as Australasia – I remain trapped the ‘fish trap of North-West Europe’[7]. The landform narrows and narrows and, driven by the pressures of the ‘people behind us’,‘we’ found ourselves facing the ocean, the opposite of our backs to the wall.
The stories of these generations are explored more extensively in Twilt.
Notes
[1] Bohemia and Southern Germany
[2] The land-bridge had long gone.
[3] Calculated genetic distance is labelled on the chart below: lower numbers are closer.
[4] Although the figure below suggest migration outwards from a Central European origin,
[5] At least in German History