A new longue duree

Archaeological remains discovered in the late twentieth century suggest that hominids made stone tools, hunted and gathered near what is now the south-eastern coast of England 500,000 years ago. They fled or died out about 25,000 years ago as the weather worsened and ice-sheets rolled across the landscape. For the next 10–13,000 years the regions were uninhabitable. An epochal climatic event ‘left a clean genetic sheet, a blank slate, until about 15,000 years ago, with no confusing genetic traces remaining from any hunter-gatherers who may have lived there before the ice.’ The ‘new longue duree’ of English population history begins roughly twelve thousand years ago.

The entire human and most of the animal and vegetable genetic stock now found in Britain and Ireland arrived (and continues to arrive) over the last 12,000 years. That fact alone, it is suggested, offers a new longue duree (or ‘timescape’) for population history. Common genetic markers in contemporary British and Irish populations trace back to immigrants who arrived before 6–8,000 years ago. According to a recent synthesis of the findings of genetic archaeology, ‘three quarters of British ancestors arrived long before the first farmers…88 per cent of Irish, 81 per cent of Welsh, 79 per cent of Cornish, 70 per cent of the people of Scotland and 68 per cent of the English.’ The peopling of ‘modern’ Britain began after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago.