Tom Booth
@Boothicus
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Bioarchaeologist and amateur scarecrow. Ancient Genomics Laboratory @TheCrick
London, England
Joined May 2012
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Prof Caroline Wilkinson at the
@LJMU
and
@dundeeuni
Face Lab did some facial reconstructions of two victims for History Cold Case: a child and a man. Caroline kindly updated these reconstructions with pigmentation predictions from the DNA. The girl may be one of the sisters.
Our superlatively-titled paper 'Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date the 12th century', is out now in
@CurrentBiology
- Bit of a long thread, but it is 18 years in the making…
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First genetic evidence that there have been English people with West African ancestry for as long as there have been English people in Britain.
@CurrentArchaeo
challenging our preconceptions, 33% of Updown girls ancestry was WestAfrican from her grandfather or great-gfather. Two women buried close were her greataunts and had 99% Continental Ancestry. All 3 had Anglo-Saxon goods– family was community in early England 3/5
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Then there's this, breathtaking. 27 members of a family genealogy covering 5 generations at Hazelton North Neolithic long barrow. Women having children with multiple men, men having children with multiple women and adoption of sons, they do move in herds.
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Seen some excitement over the location of Plato’s possible burial place in terms of digging him up and sequencing his DNA…but why?? Getting past the practicalities, what would it achieve? Are there some major outstanding questions about the life of Plato that DNA could answer?
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On a personal note, the skeleton this reconstruction is based on, an Iron Age man from Slonk Hill, had one of the lowest levels of DNA preservation we’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.
And look at him now, grinning like a manic weasel. Bastard.
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Ashamed I've not encountered this before, but lovely map of 'preservation capacity' for bones, teeth and shells in different European soils. For people who would like their bones to be discovered by future archaeologists - AVOID THE BLUE!
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Increasingly feels like HS2 will be the biggest publicly-funded programme of archaeological research excavations the country has ever seen and nothing more.
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Our superlatively-titled paper 'Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date the 12th century', is out now in
@CurrentBiology
- Bit of a long thread, but it is 18 years in the making…
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@zackpinsent
It was you I saw striding through St. Pancras the other day!? Incredible moment, made my week.
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The ghosts in
#BBCGhosts
gathering round an archaeologist while he’s digging their skeletons and judging him on his osteological assessments is a anxiety-inducing daydream I’ve had which I never expected to see realised on the small screen.
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Perhaps futile: Turks didn’t build Stonehenge. People who built Stonehenge had been living in what is now Britain for a thousand years. They did have ancestry originating in what is now Turkey via population movements through Europe taking thousands of years.
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With Cheddar Man trending because Farage and GBnews have discovered a Horrible Histories video that came out some time ago maybe worth sharing this yet again.
For the sake of
#BlackHistoryMonth
and the same old stale, predictable reaction to Cheddar Man being included.
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Me and my brother visiting Stonehenge in AD 2003. Speaking of relatives in and around Stonehenge, here's a new (OA) paper with Jo Brück,
@SelBrace
& Ian Barnes based on findings in Olalde et al. (2018)
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So this makes two burials from early medieval Britain carrying substantial genetic ancestries from West Africa, this time from Worth Matravers, Dorset. Different timing, different part of the country. This doesn't appear to be a one off.
Lots of excitement about this finding, which I agree is cool. But worth to mention: We have another individual with around 25% West-African ancestry from Worth Matravers in Dorset, around the same time, see our paper last month (Supplement) with
@DuncanSayer
and
@JoGretzing
et al
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Incredible biography of a person who lived in Scandinavia 5000 years ago. Started life as a hunter-fisher-gatherer in present-day Sweden or Norway, joined a group of farmers in Denmark in later life before being clubbed to death and thrown in a bog, perhaps as a ritual sacrifice.
This day in really, really REALLY cool stone age shit: aDNA, palaeoproteomics and stable isotopes reveals the life-history of a ~3.000 BC individual from a peat bog (in Vendsyssel - my home region).
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For some strange reason this post on Cheddar Man has been very popular on Reddit today. It contains one of maybe many claims around him that we possibly could have addressed better a few years back. Rough and ready thread.
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Putting aside the ins and outs, this is an absolutely horrendous way to treat any group of people, never mind a department that’s operated on a top level for decades. I don’t see how
@sheffielduni
and students can have any trust in their VC and management after this.
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This is quite telling. Skin and eye pigmentation are predicted in ancient samples using the same method. So if one is a ‘guess’ the other one has to be too. Pretty useful example of the double standards of evidence these sorts of guys employ depending on what they find palatable.
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Pots don’t equal people. Epic paper.
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Huge ancient pathogen paper, bound to go viral (ha ha).
Suggests disease loads in Europe increased after transition to farming (from c.6500 years ago) but also with expansions of groups from the Steppe (from c. 5000 years ago).
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Cheddar Man.
We’ve been asked questions about him, frequently.
In advance of the documentary on Sunday and the paper we’ve set up an FAQ (whatever that stands for!) and posted his pigmentation data here:
Distribute!
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Here’s to the next four glorious months of parental leave/goblin-minding. So loooooooonng!
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Lot of people self-deprecatingly sharing that airplane meme, but was involved in a genuine archaeological emergency on the train yesterday when a woman needed someone to explain the Uffington White Horse to her children.
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The human thigh bone whistle is out of the bag! The Bronze Age curation of human remains paper Jo Brück and I have been working on for 0-60 years (95% confidence) is amongst us! There's some good coverage in the ol' dailies, here's a link to the paper:
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Stupendously interesting results from Neolithic and Bronze Age Orkney - massive shift in genetic ancestry into the Bronze Age, but without obvious accompanying cultural change and with substantial persistence of paternal lineages from the Neolithic. Different from the mainland.
Ancient DNA at the edge of the world: Continental immigration and the persistence of Neolithic male lineages in Bronze Age Orkney
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Today I fulfilled every archaeologists’ dream of finding a frozen ancient hunter-gatherer.
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Other people I’ve seen commenting on this and who I’ve RT’d have covered the main points but to be clear this is a vile abuse of aDNA research.
A new study of DNA recovered from an ancient Philistine site in the Israeli city of Ashkelon confirms what we know from the Bible – that the origin of the Philistines is in southern Europe.
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For Europe, this is the 10th Century AD. So if you have any kind of recent ancestry from Europe, everyone who lived in any part of Europe in 10th Century AD and who successfully passed on descendants is your ancestor.
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Of course it is terrifically exciting that we can us aDNA to identify that certain ancient remains were close genetic relatives. But do we take these biological relationships too literally when thinking about social kinship?
🆕
#archaeology
: Ancient DNA can reveal biological kinship between people, but would this match their view of kinship?
We must be careful about inferring past kinship from aDNA with assumptions based on a modern view of kinship.
🔗 to a new debate (£)
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Some juicy morsels here - signals of natural selection in humans of Bronze Age Britain all seem linked to vit D/calcium deficiency. Potentially helps to explain recent continuous skin pigmentation reduction and development of lactose tolerance.
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Is should also add a couple of years ago I was going around mouthing off about the lack of close genetic relatives in Neolithic tombs. I was wrong! My words taste like hostage to fortune.
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Wow, some of the bones from the Coldrum Neolithic tomb are early medieval. Given it has some of the oldest bones dated from a Neolithic tomb, surely must have the largest gap between the earliest and latest deposit?
Recently published by
@royalsociety
: analysis of bones from early 20th c excavations at
#Coldrum
(held
@NHM_London
) has revealed that the site was also re-used for burial in the early
#medieval
period.
@MaidstoneMuseum
#NeolithicNovember
#OpenAccess
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Here at the Skoglund Ancient Genomics lab in the Francis Crick Institute we're always banging on about sampling auditory ossicles, the three tiny bones of the inner ear (the Malleus, the Incus and their little friend the Stapes) for DNA. Why? A thread.
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Was talking to a colleague about Europe in 3rd Millennium BC and he asked whether it would be useful to use his son’s Risk board and figures to map out the geography of Corded Ware cultures and I said don’t be so Childeish.
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Caesar's Camp Iron Age hillfort on Wimbledon Common is a tad more obvious in the LIDAR data than in person...
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TFW your ancestors migrated to Britain for trade, fortune and a glorious life history of travel, but all you ended up with was bad weather, vitamin deficiency and early death.
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Cheddar Man!
Variation in Mesolithic Western Hunter-Gatherer pigmentation!
What else? Oh,small thing, no big deal, transition to farming in Britain mostly driven by migration.
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So...turns out Aveline’s Hole, Britain’s ‘oldest cemetery’, a cave site which held the remains of at least 21 people, all radiocarbon dated to within 120 years of each other, c.8300 BC (Early Mesolithic), is not *just* Mesolithic. The Hole story below...
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Our imaginatively-titled liquorice pizza ‘Ancient Genomes Indicate Population Replacement in Early Neolithic Britain’ feat. Cheddar Man dropped in
@NatureEcoEvo
today. Props to
@LucyvanDorp
whose haplotype matching took it beyond ‘just another aDNA paper’.
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Neolithic approach to marriage…uhhhh…
Congratulations to this author who has siezed upon the trad wife trend and doubled down with 'neolithic marriage' tips, the main tip being, 'Clare and her husband Sean have never said 'I love you' to one another.'
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If only we could harness the energy produced from the inevitable hardcore rationalisation of this result in certain quarters. Could generate more heat than a crypto farm.
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Eeeeee ten years working in ancient DNA for me…here’s the photo of me taking the call from the President of the Natural History Museum - they had a problem and only the kind of man who owns a novelty Micky Mouse landline could help.
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Thinking why do people say 'some personal news' when talking about career developments that definitely qualify as 'professional news'?
Anyway, some (slightly belated) personal news, I've joined the
@pontus_skoglund
lab
@TheCrick
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Arrogant elitist mainstream archaeologists will tell you that this cup of tea is recent. They’ll say things like “Graham, it’s still warm, it can’t be more than 5 minutes old.” But just because the tea inside the cup may be hot doesn’t mean that it is necessarily recent.
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aDNA finds Beaker migrations into Britain led to replacement of >90% of local Neolithic population. New preprint:
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Oh this has been so sorely needed for a while, particularly to create transparency for archaeologists who find aDNA papers inscrutable.
Primer on methods and concepts underlying aDNA research.
This Primer published in
@MethodsPrimers
provides an overview of concepts and state-of-the-art methods underlying ancient DNA analysis and illustrates the diversity of resulting applications.
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Not dunking on the author of this thread, this idea of violent conquest appears everywhere and is symptomatic of the prominence of some simplistic narratives of European prehistory that have grown out of misunderstandings of aDNA. But it’s a bold and under supported idea.
Indo-European conquest was extremely violent, far surpassing whatever waves that came later. Pre-Indo-European cultures designated as the Early European Farmers seem to be wiped out almost completely. Now pre-conquest cultures remain only in the mountains of Pyrenees and Caucasus
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Popping up like an angular seasonal mammal to post about this paper led by
@Commiosproject
as well as Harvard and Vienna. Middle-Late Bronze Age migrations into Britain led to a ~50% shift in the genetic ancestry of people living in southern Britain.
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My contribution to the ‘Were 90% of Archaeologists Wiped out by an aDNA Plague!?!’ World Archaeology Special Issue is up!
Poss. not much new to friends on here, but I try to address some of the misunderstandings that drive aDNA/archaeology barneys.
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That Lionel Shriver article is bringing out the Cheddar Man trolls again. A reminder that troll accounts using a New Scientist article to say that the Cheddar Man dark skin prediction has been debunked, retracted or proven to be a lie either haven't read it or are gaslighting.
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Ironically, people with recent ancestry from Scotland and Ireland, modern nations with strong national Celtic identities, have little or no genetic ancestry related to these Bronze Age migrations which may have introduced celtic languages to Britain.
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A group of radical Californian lifeguards use prior probabilities to prevent drownings, solve crimes and catch killers.
Bayeswatch.
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High coverage ötziome. Interesting ancestry seems derived entirely from Early European Farmers with recent Mesolithic derived admixture but no steppe-related ancestry. Suggests fairly isolated Alpine groups into 3rd Mill BC. Plenty of predictable whinging about skin pigmentation.
#Ötzi: dark skin, bald head, Anatolian ancestry. High-quality sequencing of his genome gives new insights. Study in
@CellGenomics
by an intl. team led by Ke Wang, Johannes Krause &
@AlbZink
.
@MPI_EVA_Leipzig
@EURAC
@oetzimuseum
&
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Good to see some push back against this category of very online man obsessed with laundering aDNA papers to make unsophisticated Far Right dog whistles. Seem to have little actual interest in the past beyond their narrow sense of identity and grievance in the present.
This is absolutely not what we said. We showed that before the imperial expansion of Rome, central Italy was home to people from all over the Mediterranean. This may have been an important factor in the rise of Rome.
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‘Boy, come to me quickly now, what did you see in yonder Belfast?’
‘Archaeologists, sir. Hundreds of ‘em. Dancing to the Indiana Jones theme tune, sir.’
#EAA2023
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Visions of grumpy Neolithic farmers in Britain, driven by their feelings of guilt and anxiety to build more elaborate monuments, never quite managing to satisfy their internal critic, haunted by the knowledge that they could build something even bigger.
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Second quick thread on this paper, this time for the attention of later prehistorians generally!
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I spent 7 years at
@UniShefArch
(BSc, MSc and PhD). I stayed because it was and is a fabulous department in so many ways. I wouldn’t be where I am now without it. It is immensely distressing to see that it could all be swept away within days.
#SaveSheffieldArchaeology
Petition to save Sheffield Archaeology.
Please sign and share.
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(Incidentally you won’t have inherited DNA from many of these ancestors - once you get past around 10 generations ago the chances you have inherited any DNA from any one of your ancestors are vanishingly low).
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A potential bombshell in almost every paragraph for fans of the Neolithic in Ireland.
Neolithic Targaryens (maybe, sort of)!
Great stuff by
@_larsporsena
et al.
So thrilled to see my photo of the winter solstice inside the passage of Newgrange made the cover of Nature!
Inside is one of the biggest stories in Irish achaeology for years:
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So it turns out there’s a good chance Adrian Targett is in fact the direct descendant of Cheddar Man. As most of us are. No matter who you are.
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This series of essays on people in Iron Age Britain is immense! The Mel Giles one on the Parisi especially - to me, what archaeology is all about.
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Utter, utter, utter, utter, utter, utter, utter, utter, utter, shite.
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Important - can get bogged down in the minutiae of why these nationalistic takes are wrong factually, but more important is flat out rejecting the idea that ancestry in the distant past should have any significant bearing on modern notions of identity, nationality and heritage.
It also misrepresents the genetic, archaeologist, and historical science, but it shouldn't matter.
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I’m on the Infinite Monkey Cage tonight! Or have been for the past month for anybody familiar with BBC sounds. I had a grand old time and they even let me have a peek at the titular monkeys.
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Whenever the topic of the Queen’s funeral comes up my daughter keeps asking whether the Queen’s head is still attached, with increasingly incredulity. Starting to think she might be the reincarnation of an Iron Age priest.
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Excellent stuff!
Although omits to mention the important fact that caves are also shifty bastards and you can’t trust a single thing they tell you about how old all of the things inside them are likely to be.
Not that I’m bitter.
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Happy Halloween!
Remember, it’s all for the kids really. Kids love it!
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Very good write-up of the boom in studies of genealogy and kinship in ancient DNA, with necessarily much closer collaboration with archaeologists.
Also this chart is incredible.
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New Archaeology gallery at
@BrightonMuseums
to which I contributed a little bit. It’s ace! Photos don’t do it justice, spectacular finds, striking reconstructions, bags of atmosphere. Go and see it.
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Someone in your life coming home reeking of latex and disinfectant, covered in a suspicious white powder, and a new obsessesion with cleanliness? Careful now, they could be hooked on SAMPLING ANCIENT BONES FOR DNA!
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Human ancient DNA sampling is quite the drug.
Just one more early medieval cemetery, it will be my last one, I swear…
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Each generation back your number of ancestors theoretically increases exponentially, except quickly you reach a point where you have more ancestors than there were people alive. Eventually you reach a point where everyone has exactly the same ancestors.
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What I’m trying to say is that someone needs to make a whistle out of a human femur and send it to me a month ago.
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Do you live in fear of feral Vikings infesting your back garden, trading lead, renaming local landmarks, making war, and then peace? If so, our team is here to help.
We had four brilliant talks by
@jk_viking
,
@JudithJesch
,
@Boothicus
, and Clare Downham - thanks again for taking part!
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For the whole world this identical ancestors point is counter-intuitively recent - 5000-15,000 years ago. So...it’s quite possible Cheddar Man lived before the identical ancestors point of all living humans.
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Iron Age genomes from southwestern Germany- matrilineal patterns of descent amongst rich burials, female-biased trans-alpine movement from northern Italy, consanguinity, it’s all happening…
Kinship & ancestry of the
#Celts
in Baden-Württemberg - genetic analyses show close relationships & provide new insights into the power structures of early Celtic elites. Study by
@JoGretzing
,
@stschiff
, Dirk Krausse & colleagues. &
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Great paper and an important result for Neolithic Britain and Ireland - DNA from France consistent with multi-strand settlement.
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Dunno what it is about bronze axe heads, but when I see images like this I really have a strong desire to put one in my mouth.
(Any curators watching I would never act on this, not while you were watching anyway).
Some cracking photos of the
#HaveringHoard
released by
@MuseumofLondon
- the exhibition will be fab!
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Beaker aDNA paper is out!
Dozens of new samples from Britain (total=51 Neolithic, 104 Beaker-LBA)
Same result, 90% replacement by MBA.
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Check out that very early (the earliest I know of) burial from Britain carrying ancestry from continental Beaker-associated groups. And it’s a woman. Buried at a Neolithic long barrow.
First attempt at a poster presentation. Come & chat about British Neolithic/Bronze Age genetics and some really early Bell Beakers.
#EESHuman
(Matching shirt-poster colour combo not purposeful)
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Mind-bending stuff - humans in Europe 46,000-43,000 years ago most similar to modern populations in East Asia and possibly substantially composed of human-Neanderthal ‘hybrids’.
In our new paper, out today in
@nature
, we recovered genome-wide data from the oldest Upper Palaeolithic modern humans in Europe, who lived between 46,000 and 43,000 years ago in Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria:
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Pretty interesting and potentially revealing figure from the Morez et al. Pict preprint measuring the relative extent to which genomes from a selection of present-day people from Britain are descended from ancient groups.
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This is a great example of balanced integration of archaeogenetics, history and archaeology. Can archaeogenetics contribute more to history than the caricature of bombastic headlines apparently ‘proving’ what was already known? Yes!
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Exploration of DNA preservation in a range of bones.
Bad news: Nothing is as good as a petrous.
Good news: Beyond teeth, thoracic vertebrae, talus and distal phalanx can be pretty good.
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The Skoglund Ancient Genomics lab visited an obscure prehistoric monument yesterday. Thanks to
@SueGreaney
for showing us around!
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That plague epidemics in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe had significant consequences which still resonate today in unexpected ways is correct and worthy of attention. Great to have something in a national newspaper showing the relevancy of aspects of prehistory to today. But...
Wow, there is a lot to unpack here. I mean, the general gist is correct but... I'll just start with the fact that the Amesbury Archer wasn't discovered 'by builders'.
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Franglo-Saxons
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So...if Cheddar Man did have children (he was only in his early 20s when he died), it’s likely he’s the ancestor of more-or-less everyone alive today.
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There are only 2 bladder settings in an aDNA lab.
Don’t need to piss.
And
Never needed to piss so much in my entire god damn life argh shite, get the suit off, get the suit off...
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All of the complexities surrounding the Stonehenge tunnel discussions, which are often drowned out by the noise, in one thread.
Lucky you!
👇👇👇
This Friday there will be a decision made about whether the Stonehenge tunnel will built.
Over the years I have seen many plans put forward for Stonehenge - from previous plans for tunnels to road widening and other associated works.
Thread.
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Whether or not the site is linked to the 1190 riots to me personally it viscerally illustrates the horrors of medieval antisemitic persecution. Historical record is one thing, but to be confronted with the remains of murdered Jewish men, women and children has a different impact.
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The facial reconstruction police seem to have been deployed in force on this one. Funny it never seems to be the lightly-pigmented ones they go for…
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He made some amends by offering me an elaborate coffee, talking about some bands I’d probably never hear of and telling me some stories about his tats.
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