Lost DNA - The Truth About Ancient Europeans | Part 1: Origins | FD Ancient History

who are we where do we come from how did we get here humans have pondered these questions for many years now science may be able to supply some answers new advances in DNA are giving us fascinating information about the earliest peoples to arrive in Europe where they came from and what they looked [Music] like from the ancient hunter gatherers who sought their food in the wild to the First Farmers and their extraordinary legacies DNA research allows us to peel back the Millennia and uncover new and unexpected Tales from our ancient past [Music] here at Trinity

College Dublin an expert team is uncovering exciting new information about the ancient people of Europe scientist Lara Cassidy is at The Cutting Edge of modern genetic research through DNA analysis she uncovers surprising and even shocking information about early peoples [Music] her work centers on the building block needed for the foundation of every human being the genome well your genome basically is uh in its Essence a sort of like an instruction manual um containing everything you need to create and maintain a human body so we have two copies of the human genome in nearly every cell

of our body uh we get one from our mom and we get another from our dad so in that way your genome doesn't just tell you about your physical characteristics it can tell us a huge amount about ancient populations from which you descend so this is the very first step we need to actually Source samples for ancient DNA analysis and this is done away from the lab so we go through lots of Bones to reduce any potential contamination if you know someone's genome you can sometimes tell something about their physical makeup uh their eye color

their their hair color their pigmentation other more important aspects like disease um height for example but also genomes tell us about how closely related people are to each other how populations are related to each other so it contains information about our family history or our population history it's perfect and it's absolutely critical modern DNA can be sourced almost anywhere in the human body but if to find ancient DNA scientists must use samples of one of the body's hardest Bones the Petrus located at the base of the skull the petus is fantastic because of its density

H at its core it is rock hard some Petra spins they almost look like marble the surface is a Sheen so this allows for good preservation of ancient DNA and what we're going to do now is we take this and we put it in a solution that will dissolve the bone protein and collagen and release all of our DNA into the solution once we get that DNA isolated then we can take it on and get it sequenced and actually figure out what the code of the DNA is this here is our final product uh We've

purified uh the DNA from our ancient specimen and we're pretty much ready to go and sequence the actual sequencing happens in a lab in South Korea then the data is sent back to Ireland so we get the file back from Korea it looks something like this we have all of these very short sequences uh and we want to take every single one of these little sequences and piece them all back together again to make the entire Human Genome sequence for this ancient person [Music] Lara has compared her results to the European genetic database and she

has found out incredible information about some of Europe's earliest [Music] populations some years ago on a small island off the Irish Coast archaeologists made a fascinating Discovery Rattan Island sits on the fringes of the north channel the straight that separates Ireland and Scotland it's just 13 miles from here to the mull of canre so it's no surprise that people have migrated across this channel for thousands of years almost certainly the first people to arrive on the island of Ireland came this way by boat around 8,000 BC [Music] DNA analysis can uncover the origins of this

Island's early inhabitants local historian Mary O'Driscoll is fascinated by a recent discovery that presents intriguing new [Music] information in 2006 they were doing some excavations in the local Po and rlin and They Came Upon A kissed burial um which had a body inside it and some pottery as well and it was dated from the Bronze Age it was quite exciting the Bronze Age dating means that the burials took place around 4,000 years ago archaeologists from Queens University Belfast rushed out to the island to investigate when we actually came out on the site what we were

met with was a big flat slab of stone we can actually see into the section we can see through a crack that uh we could see the burial and the pottery vessel in it as well so we had a fair idea that was actually Bronze Age and de it's very typical sort of Bronze Age burial the way they used to do it dur especially during the early Bronze Age round about by 200 to about 1800 BC um so what we do we just did a normal archaeology thing we dug down exposed the whole thing and

then we lifted the lid of the kiss and that that's where my job really becomes a privilege because you know that you're the first person in 4,000 years to see this see this site you know you know the last person to see that person when they went into the ground was probably the family at the funeral you know and again that that is that is a privilege for [Music] archaeologists the skeleton was in the fetal position so he was crouched up with his knees up to his chest and his arms folded we kind of think

that this might represent rebirth you know that the it's it's kind of like the baby would be in the womb you know and it's it's kind of like maybe you know this life is ended so this is the rebirth for the next life he would have been between sort of 40 and 60 when he died so that was a very good age and he was about 5' 11 and he looked like he'd had from his bones we could say he had quite an arduous physical existence you know he had lots of evidence of arthritis he

had a healed injury in his hail so he must have you know had some sort of like an injury or fracture or twist um on his his ankle at one stage and he even had sort of um evidence in one of his shoulders again sort of suggesting very strenuous muscle use this Bronze Age man walked the island almost 4,000 years ago but where did he and his people originate the DNA locked in the man's skeleton allowed scientists make a thrilling Discovery we sampled all the genomes um we could get from these new sort of early

Bron Bronze Age casario and yeah what we see is the majority of their ancestry is coming from this step region of Russia grasslands and where you have highly mobile pists sort of like think of maybe the Huns or the Mongols the pontic step is a vast plainland region that stretches from the Northern Shores of the Black Sea through present day Ukraine and Russia the DNA analysis suggests that the inhabitants of this region migrated west across Europe over many generations until at last their descendants reached rathl an island migration Theory it has had sort of you

know sometimes it's very popular in archaeology and then there's been times when it's been quite dismissed and it's and people believe it's more a movement of ideas but the DNA research is really showing that people could move long distances and that they they definitely did you know because we we are seeing people moving as well as the the material culture they bring we think of rattlin as being on the edge of Europe but this is only from a 21st century perspective thousands of years ago go it was once very much at the center of things

Ratt Island was very important during the Neolithic period That's the period preceding the Bronze Age it starts around about 4,000 BC right the way up until about 2,000 BC and the one feature about rathon island is it's got an outcrop of a stone we call porcelanite it's a lovely kind of dark bluish black sort of color and that it polishes up really well and during the Neolithic period the stone was mined it was shaped and it was polished into lovely Stone axis and then they actually exported them because there was evidence of these AIDS found

in the south of England um in the middle of Europe and I think as far away as Eastern Mediterranean so they actually were in the export business these discoveries suggest that the story of Europe thousands of years ago is one of migration of people moving gradually from east to west until at last they reached Ireland but was this ever recorded in history an old medieval manuscript held in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin could hold the answer the book of invasions or yala aen is a compilation compiled in the middle Irish period perhaps around the

11th century which purports to tell the history of Ireland from earliest times down to the time the the Irish the go arrived uh this compilation was compiled most likely in an ecclesiastical setting by learned ecclesiastics Scholars well versed in in the writings of the church in the in the Old Testament it's a mythical compilation and it gives various different invasions accounts of the different people who are supposed to have invaded Ireland now one of the uh the great points of Christianity was the history of the world the history uh as was transmitted in the old

test there was one problem it didn't mention Ireland or the Irish so they set about putting this right uh and plugging this Gap and to do so they concocted their own origin Legend and this reports to tell where they came from and they use as a starting point jaff the son of Noah and his descendants and the Irish were supposed to have descended from certain of jaffa's descendants after the great flood Noah's Arc is supposed to have come to Earth on Mount Ararat in Turkey so the legend in the book of invasions suggests that the

Irish have their origins in the near East but can this medieval manuscript be trusted it's written from a Christian point of view thousands of years after the events it describes now exciting advances in DNA are giving us the hard facts about these early inhabitants where they originated where they migrated to and what they looked like this is M sandal in County Derry Northern Ireland the green Mound is all that's left of a medieval Fort that once stood here but long before that during an era called the Mesolithic man sandal was home to a very ancient

people right where we are now is where the very earliest evidence of human settlement in Ireland was found in terms of time we're talking about 10,000 years ago a long forgotten people lived here in a region of dense Woodland and [Music] foliage I think you just have to look around you uh to get a sense of um how much uh natural resources and this place has this whole area would have been covered in forests so you'd have had wild fowl boar uh all running about ready to catch and beaten the early residents of M sandal

didn't understand farming they got all their food in the Wild by gathering nuts berries and shellfish and killing wild animals [Music] so these guys were hunter gatherers they probably lived in quite uh small groups population numbers were probably quite low and this is really reflected in the genomes of these individuals we've sequenced and they were very very Innovative they really knew how to extract everything they needed from their natural environment excavations revealed the mid or Rubbish Tip where they threw the remains of their diet fish fowl and shell fish the hunter gatherers were probably a

small extended family group and they appear to have occupied the camp for most of the year just across the way there is the river ban you walk down at about 2 hours and you're hitting the Sea and the estery and that tidal Zone which has lots of lovely yummy things to eat in it over 80% of the animal Marines they found in this site are coming um from fish they were very skilled fishermen we found very complex fishing traps in other sites like this in Ireland their ancestors were some of the first uh modern humans

ever to set foot in Europe and one of the last places they reached was uh Ireland Ireland was never isolated from as long as we can tell there was always connections between Continental Europe particularly Britain and France and Spain when there was only hunting and Gathering to sustain the population in the in the misthic the population maybe numbered around 10,000 people at the absolute most maybe less than that the Huts they would have built um would likely have been covered with reads or maybe animal skins these hun gatherers they Ireland's most mysterious population we know

they were in Ireland for about 4,000 years but there were very very few of them so they actually left very little of themselves behind and Mesolithic sites are extremely rare um which is why Mount sandal is such a wonderful find but Lara has discovered something even more Wonderful by sequencing ancient DNA from Mesolithic sites she has reached back 10,000 years and revealed what these people looked like we've sequenced two FR genims from this Mesolithic period the S gaads even though there's no population quite like them alive today um we can still try to predict maybe

what they looked like or how they were um so one of the things we can do is we can take frenic techniques that allow us to prict skin color eye color and hair color and apply it to our hunch gatherers and we get a very very weird profile they seem to have quite dark skin and hair um it seems like blue eyes were quite common among these people for darker skinned people to have blue eyes is really unusual in fact it's a genetic combination that doesn't really exist anymore but during the Mesolithic era pretty much

everyone in Western Europe looked like this DNA analysis of human remains from other parts of Europe has also turned up these genetic traits these dark skinned ancients inhabited Europe for many centuries and yet their days were numbered around 7,000 years ago a dynamic new technology appeared in Europe agriculture where we go from hunting and Gathering uh to farming and the big question for ages was was this new people coming in bringing the these uh new technologies or was it indigenous Innovation um and what we see uh in this agricultural period this Neolithic period in Ireland

is all our genomes are extremely different um from the preceding Hunter gathers so these are people of very different ancestry very very different population history something fatal must have happened to the hunter gatherers because little or no trace of the Mesolithic can be found in the DNA of modern Europeans the Mesolithic people were overwhelmed and they were overwhelmed by a sheer weight of numbers we can tell that there were many Neolithic people perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands who came to Ireland and so the Mesolithic people who were much fewer in number died out but

you have to remember that Ireland's ecosystem is only capable of supporting a small number of hunter gatherers there aren't many natural resources to go around when the Neolithic arrived the grew crops they were able to have many more children fertility rates were higher and so the sheer numbers of Neolithic people diluted the Mesolithic population beyond the limits of our [Music] detection the Neolithic farmers were sophisticated and imaginative they buried their dead in extraordinary Stone tombs like this one in the bast country of Northern Spain this is chabola doer the Hut of the [Music] Sorceress we

must remember that these are first monuments built by the the people who inhabited these areas almost 6,000 years ago and these are monuments for the de so it's something that they they do for their ancestors chabola Dei is a portal tomb huge upright Stones support an enormous cupstone most of the dolans in the aan peninsula they are all facing the eastern part of the Horizon this means not just East but all the all the part of the Horizon where we can see the sun rising from the winter solstice to the summer solstice [Music] the same

design is used in other Neolithic monuments all over Western Europe on the Limestone landscape of the buron in Ireland stands another haunting portal tomb po namon the place of the sorrows under the shadow of this great megalith the bones of the Dead lay undisturbed for [Music] Millennia in the 1980s archaeologist an Lynch excavated the tomb what she discovered gave a fascinating glimpse into the lives of these early farmers this is a megalithic tomb built in the Neolithic or the new stone age at a time when farming was first being introduced to Ireland in the 1980s

an archaeological excavation was carried out and it's the material recovered from this excavation that has given rise to a lot of new information about these early farmers the tomb consists of a single chamber covered by a very large uh sloping cap Stone to our surprise the remains of at least 36 individuals had been interred within the tomb the bodies were interred whole within the chamber allowed to decompose and then there was a lot of manipulation movement and removal of Bones over the [Music] centuries we were able to date the bones shortly after 4,000 BC more

than 30 years after the excavation DNA analysis has given an unprecedented insight into these people's lives the discovery that ancient DNA can actually be extracted has been extremely exciting for us archaeologists and to know that here in pal NE Bron bones that date to around 3,000 800 BC still have within the Petrone of the ear very very well preserved DNA they're beginning to isolate uh diseases we know that they suffered very badly from osteoarthritis um they had broken foot bones presumably from falling and dropping stones on themselves uh here in the burn and there was

a very poignant um result in that uh one of the very young uh children was a Down syndrome child and this is the first time or the earliest example of um Dan syndrome to be recorded as far as we are aware the DNA also revealed something unexpected the people buried here were not related to one another originally when we excavated at the tomb we assumed it was a familial tomb you know a tomb used by an extended family who settled here in the very early Neolithic however the the ancient DNA analysis has told us something

completely different in other words that there was no genetic kinship between the people whose remains were put into the tomb so now we know that it must have been the focus for outbreeding communities in this general area so that was a a very big surprise for us as a result of the ancient DNA analysis different tribes and communities must have come to PO NE Maron to bury their dead in an elaborate ritual this is the kind of knowledge that only DNA can reveal the work is continuing and I think with this collaboration between the archaeologists

and the scientists we'll be able to learn a lot more about these early farmers the people who built pound theone had a far more complex culture than the hunter gatherers who went before them but questions still remain unanswered what did they look like and what did they [Music] believe at the opposite end of Ireland near Belfast lies a mysterious Neolithic enclosure known as the Giant's ring Dr Rowan mlin of Queens University Belfast is an expert on the early farmers who built it the Giants ring is a is a Monumental enclosure it involved in its construction

thousands or maybe even millions of hours of heavy heavy labor and so that was a activity that involved a lot of coordination amongst the society in terms of what it was used for once it was completed that is more conjectural but we can't speculate because the Neil ethic is all about communial action you can imagine a large number of people perhaps telling each other stories or performing and the activities that went on here would have been the thing that really bind NE ethic Society together scientists use many techniques to reconstruct a picture of these ancient

[Music] Farmers we excavate as archaeologists we physically dig up the evidence and then that evidence gets subjected to all different kinds of scientific analyses now the most important one of these is is dating radiocarbon dating enables us to understand when things happened how long ago that occurred scientists can also analyze chemicals in bones and teeth to work out where people lived and what they ate the DNA locked inside the bones giving Insight not only into their ancestry but also their relationship with one another the charcoal samples can be examined to identify what sort of trees

and wood they used for fuel and construction yes definitely seems to just be a little they grew cereals they grew wheat and they grew barley and they brought with them domesticated animals cattle and sheep and goats and pig and red deer as well so they had the skills to look after these animals they had the capacity to fertilize the soil and grow the cereals and they also brought with them a new set of material culture different tools polished Stone axes and crucially pottery and that enabled them to cook their food and to store their food

and to transmit their food from one place another so they are radically different LifeWay from the hunter gatherers that uh lived in Ireland before the netic in the 19th century a human skull was discovered near the Giant's ring today she is known as the balatti woman somewhere around here we're not quite sure where In 1855 that's where she was discovered she was part of the neic culture she was a adult woman who lived her life here in County D the balatti woman gives us an extraordinary insight into the Neolithic Community Eileen Murphy is an Osteo

archaeologist at Queens University Belfast I'm interested in the study of the people who lived in the past and I learn more about them from looking at their skeletal remains so if it's an adult I can tell if it's a man or a woman what what age they were when they died and I'm also interested in things like the diseases they suffered from and you know evidence for injuries this is the skull of a young woman who was found in balati in County D um she was found from quite an unusual Subterranean tomb when they lifted

the capstones they found this beautiful circular Subterranean structure and you can see it's divided into compartments and in each compartment there were bits of pottery of pots um burnt bone and then in compartment D there were five skulls so she was one of those skulls she would have been um stored in the aler museum and in Queens um over the over those the intervening time period um so at the time you know the anatomists who looked at her you know they they were able to recognize that she was um Fe was a skull of a

female um and my sort of osteological work you know more recent times has has confirmed that you know you can see she's got very sort of straight forehead and petite you know cuz that's one of the ways we can tell whether we're dealing with a male or a female so you look at this is called the mastoid process and you can see hers are very small whereas in a male it' be much larger um and her skull is very rounded um whereas again and a male it' be much more powerful and robust you know with

the muscle attachments um and we're also then able to say you know it's a she was a young woman when she died and we can just look at the sort of the wear patterns on her teeth so there's you can see her MERS they there's very slight wear so that was sort of suggestive that she was a woman you know about 18 and older you know between 18 and 35 this is a facial reconstruction of the balati woman so this was undertaken several decades ago you know the beauty of facial reconstruction is it gives us

an impression of what the person was like and help remind us that it's not just a skull it's the remains of a young woman so that was was the story up until very recently um and then uh the sort of the DNA technology came on so far that it's not possible to learn a lot about prehistoric people with the petris bone of the bahati woman completely intact the skull was sent to Trinity College for DNA analysis when Lara Cassidy carried out the sequencing she discovered something unexpected the bahati woman's ancestry was from the Mediterranean [Music]

further DNA evidence showed that the ancestors of Ireland's Neolithic people came from the Fertile Crescent this is the section of the Middle East where farming originated around 5,000 BC they spread right around the Mediterranean and headed north crossing the Alps arriving in France and Spain around 4,500 BC and a few hundred years later they finally reached Ireland so when the book of invasions states that Ireland's early populations originated in the near East it's surprisingly close to the Mark we came by boat from Britain and from Continental Europe we have find actually some Dugout canoes these

large trees that were hollowed out and and made into boats so they came over and they also had to bring with them their animals and that would have been an extraordinary event trying to bring over to Ireland you know sheep and goats and calves there could have been up to a million people a huge population when we compare our Farmers to Modern modern day Europeans what we see is they don't look like the modern day Irish or indeed any northern European they look more like Europeans from the south particularly [Music] Sardinia they're not only similar

to sardinians Across The genome they're also similar in terms of physical appearance so we're seeing a lot of uh variance involved in dark hair and brown eyes and and salow skin when farming spread West over Europe from the Middle East it brought with it a new dawn people no longer had to move around in search of food now they could settle down with their crops and animals their most hallowed temples marked key moments in the agricultural cycle near leik in Eastern Germany stands a circular structure that may be the oldest solar observatory in the world

gosc Circle was built around 5,000 BC by the earliest Neolithic Farmers to live in this region it's made up of three concentric circles two of the entrances are aligned precisely with sunrise and sunset on the winter solstice German archo astronomer Michael rapen Gluk has studied the site uh people they're very excited in the field of culture astronomy because uh it is uh so old and it it shows that astronomy played an important role several thousand years ago the people looked upon the sky they saw the sun rising and setting and they also saw the places

of the sunrise and sunset and to um rely a calendar time Reckoning on these places of sunrise and sunset the sun was worshiped as The Giver of Life and the orchest Ator of the changing seasons with the observatory likely playing a key role in man's understanding of nature also there was um a relation uh to some fertility rights the rituals to some ideas about a new life about uh the old year the New Year and so it played a very very important role in the ancient cultures the leaders I think they had the idea of

um showing the people some ideas about the cosmos and it it has something to do with power leaders know where the sun is rising up exact points they know the calendar they know all the things to manage time and probably also other things let us say to orientate in uh in the landcape and so they had power and for them uh such things had been a kind to to show Power power this is a relatively simple structure built of wood and mud but over a thousand years after it was built the Neolithic culture would construct

greater and more impressive temples with the dual function of solar Observatory and tomb t miles north of Dublin tucked inside a bend in the river Bo lie two of Europe's most magnificent ancient monuments the huge burial mound of new Grange and close by its sister tomb now older than Stonehenge they were built by the first farmers new Grange was built coming up to around 3,000 BC one of the three Mega uh passage tombs in the in Bruna Bona in recent years we've discovered um underground evidence or cropmark evidence of huge uh enclosures within brunonia where

large assemblies must have taken place you had the astronomical alignments on the winter solstice you have a wonderful megalithic art in the tombs in brunon so you're talking about a much more sophisticated community and Society the tombs are among the greatest achievements of the Neolithic people in Europe they contain extraordinary Clues to their culture and beliefs ones that have yet to be deciphered more than half of all of Europe's Neolithic rock art is found at new grains and nth excavations so far have uncovered over 200 decorated stones but what do the symbols mean could they

be cryptic references to a mystery that signs s have only just [Music] uncovered at the time of midwinter this part of the world is at its greatest distance from the Sun from now until Midsummer it will draw closer to the Sun Life will be renewed and the crops will grow again at newrange on the shortest day of the year the sun's Rays Blaze through this small opening Illuminating the narrow passage and the central chamber deep within the passage travels 62 ft until it ends in a chamber deep in the center of the Tomb this is

the most sacred part of the entire Monument when archaeologists excavated newra some 50 years ago they found many human bones in this Central chamber for many years science was unable to tell us much about their owners but Professor Michael O Kelly kept a detailed record of these human remains his work gave Lara Cassidy the means to uncover a 5,000-year-old secret so this is Michael O Kelly's book on the new Grange excavations uh and uh going through it um we've actually got these pictures of the human remains found there uh and inside we see um this

picture of this pair of uh petus temporal bones that look absolutely perfect for analysis so we saw these and we thought we got to have them petus bones are ideal for sampling human DNA and it's so happened that when o' Kelly excavated newrange he found two Petra bones in the most sacred part of the monument The Next Step the next big step was actually locating them in the national museum of Ireland's storage facility near Dublin the shelves are lined with boxes and boxes of finds from around the country it was over 30 years since the

publication of Elli's book and there was no telling whether Lara would be able to locate the [Music] bones a lot of the bone tends to be cremated um which is no use to us because uh cremation destroys all DNA and but we couldn't find anything from newrange a bit sad about this but towards the end of the day we actually did find one box uh but it had just sprack its cremation on us and we thought oh more crated bone almost didn't look in it but thought oh popped it open what do we find our

pair of petus temporals uh that we'd actually seen in the book applied and we sampled one of them we started to do our basic analysis he was looking the same as all the other Neolithic Farmers but then something really weird came up you have two copies of the genome one from your mom one from your dad what happens if your mom and your dad are related is that those two copies of the genome are going to look very similar and the level of this similarity tells us how closely related your parents were and this guy

honestly I thought there was something wrong with my analysis cuz he was off the chart but it was actually correct um and we decided to try and measure the degree of this relationship and it turned out his parents were actually either siblings or parent and child so first degree incest [Music] [Music] new Grange was the most sacred place in Ireland and possibly in Western Europe Lara Cassidy's Discovery could change everything we thought we knew about religion in Europe 5,000 years ago [Music] he was so inbred that the inescapable conclusion is that his parents were either

brother and sister or um parent Offspring now that's pretty crazy and that is not normal and not only is it not normal in our society it's not normal in any society it's a universal taboo [Music] the story whenever you go somebody a very high rank who is The Offspring of brother sister is that the rank of these people is perceived to be so high that other people are are unworthy um that their rank is such that they're almost gods or they are perceived as Gods so normal rules don't apply could this really be a sign

that the man was revered as a God to answer this question we need to travel to the region where the Neolithic people originated the Middle East and the land of the [Music] Pharaohs from ramsus the great to Cleopatra the kings and queens of this ancient land ruled [Music] Supreme history tells us that in ancient Egypt Kings frequently married their sisters brothers and sisters wed and then lay together and these unions were seen as something that brought good luck to theing [Music] Kingdom the Pharaohs believed they were descended from the gods and so inbreeding was crucial

to preserve the [Music] bloodline could similar attitudes have existed in the ancient Irish site of new [Music] gra what we know about ancient Egypt makes us look at newrange and the early farmers who built it in a whole new way is it possible that the tomb was built by a royal figure who treasured the fact that he was The Offspring of incest did he see death as a phase in which he transcended to the Gods whatever the answer to these questions the discovery suggests that Ireland's First Farmers had the same beliefs as the ancient Egyptians

these beliefs may have existed elsewhere in Europe throughout Europe neic culture shares certain similarities so this idea of communities coming together to perform in C in spaces out in the open is something it's shared so in Ireland we have enclosures and we also have megalithic sites sites made of large monuments similar things are find in Spain and in France and right around the periphery of the Neolithic World in Malta for example there are megaliths that in many ways resemble sites in Ireland temples where people came together and performed and told each other stories celebrated the

agricultural year and enabled their Neolithic culture to thrive this is the Great temple of gantia on malta's sister Island goo it was built around the same time as newrange and on the day of the winter solstice just like newrange it would have been the scene of great celebration as the morning sun sha directly into the temple did the Neolithic people of Malta share the same beliefs as their far-flung cousins in Ireland right now no one knows for sure but in time science May reveal more what happened to the Intriguing people who left this extraordinary Legacy

[Music] was it climate change a devastating epidemic or a cataclysmic event that saw the demise of the Neolithic Farmers we actually don't quite know could be a combination of factors you could have had new diseases being introduced that European Farmers weren't immune to you could have a climactic downturn or something if the crop fails a few years in a row that can cause havoc in an ancient civilization whatever the cause around 2,300 BC almost a thousand years after new Grange was constructed the Neolithic people died out modern science has given us a window into their

world and how it might connect to ours it's through DNA that we know the Neolithic people are direct descendants from those residents of the near East 10,000 years ago and the DNA is also telling us who our modern day ancestors are and there's very very little of the Neolithic that remains in US instead people in Northwestern Europe are more closely related to a Bronze Age population who Moved west across the continent over 4,000 years ago and yet the first farmers have Beed a great legacy passage tombs like newrange are found not just in Ireland but

all over Western Europe now DNA research has given us a fascinating Insight in into what the Builders of these tombs believed it seems they thought that the man buried at the center of newrange was nothing less than a god a spine tingling Revelation that totally changes how we look at these [Music] places these tombs are among the most sophisticated ancients structures in all of Europe there are undoubtedly more secrets hidden within them and in time science can help us reveal them [Music]