I have discussed the possibility that the downturn in the climate might have brought an increased urgency around the scale and nature of monument and ritual in Neolithic Ireland. I am particularly interested in whether some of this is mentioned in Irish mythology. Around 2500BC, the population is at a low level, and then the Beakers arrive. A climate downturn around 3500BC was said to have pushed Neolithic populations into a thousand-year-long decline. The Neolithic culture reached a zenith with the construction of the Boyne tombs.įrom an Irish point of view, this is all very interesting. As Mike Parker Pearson from University College London (UCL) said, " are not prepared to collaborate on enormous labour-mobilising projects their society is more decentralised." The construction of massive stone monuments involving the co-opting of hundreds of people, which was an alien concept to the Beakers,was a "core rationale" of the Neolithic people. Indeed, the construction of large stone sites involving huge labour (and presumably a substantial "buy-in" from the Neolithic population of the time) comes to an end in Britain. Following their arrival, the Beaker genes appear to swamp those of the native farmers.īecause the Beaker people arrived into both Britain and Ireland at around the same time, it is assumed that something similar occurred here. The comprehensive genetic study detailed in the new paper (entitled The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe) shows that the Beaker people were a distinct population from the Neolithic British. But what the genetics are showing - with the clearest example now in Britain at Beaker times - is that these large-scale migrations occurred, even after the spread of agriculture." Prof Reich told BBC News: "Archaeologists ever since the Second World War have been very sceptical about proposals of large-scale movements of people in prehistory. From there, the culture propagated quickly to Central Europe, and from there, according to the BBC article, it "exploded in every direction". It is thought that the Beaker traditions initially flourished in Iberia, as "a kind of fashion", from about 5,000 years ago. ![]() The new way of life that had spread from Europe into Britain and Ireland around 4,450 years ago saw people burying their dead with stylised bell-shaped pots, copper daggers, arrowheads, stone wrist guards and distinctive perforated buttons. The Bronze Age saw the introduction of henges, or embanked enclosures, and burial mounds were simpler constructions – barrows, low earthen mounds. The type of monument being built changed dramatically. But shortly after this apex in the achievements of the Neolithic people, something dramatic happened. This passage-tomb-building culture had its zenith at Brú na Bóinne, where Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth were the largest such monuments constructed in Ireland. ![]() It was during that period that the great megalithic momuments were built. The Neolithic brought agriculture to Britain and Ireland, around 6,000 years ago. The reasons for this are not known, but it is thought factors such as climate change, disease and ecological disaster might all have played a role. The newcomers replaced about 90% of the existing gene pool in Britain in the space of just a few centuries. ![]() Archaeologists wondered what caused this spread, whether it was a mass movement of people, culture or a combination of both. The lead author of the study, Professor David Reich of the Harvard Medical School in Cambridge in the USA, told the BBC that: "The magnitude and suddenness of the population replacement is highly unexpected."Ī major debate has for years raged around the cause of the spread of the Beaker complex, which reached Britain and Ireland around the same time. The huge study involved the extraction of DNA from 400 ancient Europeans, including samples from Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age peoples, 226 of them from the Beaker period. ![]() A new study in the journal Nature suggests that the Neolithic population of ancient Britain was almost completely replaced by newcomers, the Beaker people, by about 2500BC.
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