Scientists Claim - The Builders Of Stonehenge Were Descended From Turkish Migrants

Scientists Claim - The Builders Of Stonehenge Were Descended From Turkish Migrants

In modern-day Turkey, The ancient Britons who built Stonehenge were descended from migrants with origins scientists have claimed comes from the modern-day Turkish. A genetic study has revealed that about 6,000 BC a dramatic ‘population replacement’ took place after tribes of ‘Anatolian farmers’ started to arrive on these shores.. The Neolithic incomers supplanted the Mesolithic population in most of Britain apart from west Scotland, where a small population of hardy natives held out against the invasion. The conquerors brought farming techniques with them but are also believed to have introduced the tradition of building stone monuments.

But when they arrived in Britain, a farming society was established much more quickly and genetic testing shows the hunter-gatherer culture died out at a much quicker rate. ‘This may reflect the fact that farming arrived in Britain a couple of thousand years later than it did in Europe,’ the team wrote. ‘The farming population who arrived in Britain may have mastered more of the technologies needed to thrive in northern and western Europe than the farmers who had first expanded into these areas. ‘A large-scale seaborne movement of established Neolithic groups leading to the rapid establishment of the first agrarian and pastoral economies across Britain, provides a plausible scenario for the scale of genetic and cultural change in Britain.’ The researchers analyzed the genes of 6 Mesolithic hunter-gatherers found across the UK and 67 Neolithic individuals. Their results indicate that the ‘the majority (approximately 75%) of ancestry in all British Neolithic individuals could be attributed to Anatolian farmers, indicating a substantial demographic shift with the transition to farming’. This could mean the new arrivals did not breed with the natives at first, although it’s believed the two populations mingled their genes more extensively in the centuries and millennia after the ‘initial colonization’

Whilst the farmers who replaced them had lighter skin – Mesolithic hunter-gatherers are believed to have had dark skin although their pigmentation was probably still darker than later populations of white people. ‘British Neolithic people derived much of their ancestry from Anatolian farmers who originally followed the Mediterranean route of dispersal and likely entered Britain from northwestern mainland Europe,’ the scientists wrote in a pre-publication version of their paper. The team said their research backs ups the current hypothesis that genes ‘commonly associated with lighter skin were introduced in Western Europe by Anatolian farmers’. The incursion had devastating effects on the hunter-gatherers who once lived in Britain. Migrants gradually replaced the populations of Western Europe at a relatively slow pace.