A new blow - scientific this time - is coming to make things worse for traditional British pride. The builders of the famous Stonehenge monument, which is the pride of every good Englishman and Briton in general, seem to have come from the coasts of Asia Minor and Anatolia, according to a new genetic research.
The ancestors of the builders of Stonehenge were farmers who, starting their journey westward from the area of present-day Turkey and the eastern coast of the Aegean, after crossing the Mediterranean, reached Iberia and from there - via France - ended up in Britain around 4,000 BC Quickly, due to their much greater numbers, they replaced the local hunter-gatherers, with the exception of Western Scotland. Their descendants at some point, around 3,000 BC, began to build the Stonehenge monument, for reasons that are not entirely clear to this day.
The researchers, led by Ian Barnes of the Natural History Museum of London and Mark Thomas of University College London (UCL), who made the relevant publication in the journal "Nature Ecology &Evolution", according to the BBC and the British "Independent" ', they analyzed and compared the DNA of 47 Neolithic skeletons (4,500 to 6,000 years old) found in Britain, six hunter-gatherer skeletons from the earlier Mesolithic period (6,000 to 11,600 years old), as well as DNA from modern Europeans.
The migration to Britain was merely an offshoot of a wider migration of populations from Anatolia, bringing agriculture and other innovations with them to the West. Until then, Europe and of course isolated Britain was inhabited by small scattered groups of hunter-gatherers. The mass migration had two main branches:the northern one followed the Danube and Rhine rivers to Central and Northern Europe, while the southern or Mediterranean one reached Western Europe, either along the coast or by "hopping" from island to island in ships, through of today's Greece, Italy and southern France.
The new genetic analysis shows that the Neolithic Britons, who introduced megalithic architecture and - among other things - built Stonehenge, came mainly from the second Mediterranean branch. Towards the end of the Neolithic period, around 2450 BC, the descendants of the first farmers in Britain were in turn almost entirely replaced by another population, known as the Bell Beakers, who had also migrated from mainland Europe.
SOURCE:APE-ME