The traces of my kin suggest migration out of Central Europe^[1] and across the North Sea.^[2]  Pale farmers of the Beaker culture migrating out of Bohemia and Moravia.  They lived in shallow-footed round houses.  Grew bere barley.  Made patterned pots from clay, incised with complex patterns.  They were archers knapping arrow heads from flint: status weapons.  When we buried our ancestors, the males lay on their right, the females on their right.  We respected children. 

The first clusters of bodies with close DNA matches were buried in Bohemia between 5000 and 4000 years ago. [1]

The pattern suggests the migration of a neolithic ‘us’ out of Central Europe^[2] and across what some now call the English Channel^[3]  The model of successive coastal hops North is consistent with current theories regarding the movement of neolithic ‘Beaker’people and culture on this island at this time.  The sample match in East Lothian has been dated at around 4150 years ago.

When my ancestors arrived, in small,hide boats, on the shore of the island, our endemic diseases, acculturated through centuries of proximity to domesticated pigs, cattle & sheep, decimated the dark-skinned indigenous population who had arrived,earlier, on foot following the retreat of the last major ice-sheet 8000 years before. In our (re)beginning was a plague. As happened in the American continent following the Columbian Exchange of 1492.

We cleared forests, grew grain and avoided shellfish for reasons that escape me.  We built henges.  In the beginning, our wooden halls were high-roofed, monumental: but the timbers rotted faster than the oaks could grow.