How the first Britons were wiped out by boozy Beaker people who invaded the UK and their blood STILL runs through us today
Groundbreaking DNA tests showed the mysterious Beaker people - so named because of their favourite drinking vessel - quickly spread across Britain
ANCIENT Brits were wiped out by immigrants from mainland Europe — who introduced booze to our shores for the first time.
The newcomers, known as the Beaker people due to their favourite drinking vessels, replaced at least 90 per cent of the original population within a few hundred years, groundbreaking DNA tests have shown.
The light-skinned and blue-eyed Beakers first arrived in Britain around 4,500 years ago and quickly spread their culture — and their taste for honey mead — across our island.
They had already spent the previous few centuries moving across Western Europe and now their true impact on British culture has been uncovered for the first time.
Analysis of hundreds of skeletons found Brits who lived shortly after their fabled pots appeared here have very different DNA to those before.
The old inhabitants of Britain - who built monuments like Stonehenge and took part in basic farming - were outmatched by the Beaker's love of metal work.
Their arrival heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age and the decline of ancient Neolithic Brits possibly through new disease rather than violence.
Prof Ian Armit, of the University of Bradford who took part in the research by 144 European and US scientists, said: “The available evidence doesn’t necessarily suggest a violent invasion.
“There might have been environmental problems which caused a population decline or the Beaker migrants could have brought new diseases with them.”
Co-author Professor Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, said: "The sheer scale of population replacement in Britain is going to surprise many, even though the more we learn from ancient DNA studies, the more we see large-scale migration as the norm in prehistory."
Such is the impact of the Beakers - who originally came from the steppes of Ukraine and Russia - that many modern Brits can claim a direct heritage.
Prof Armit said: "Anyone who's got British ancestry going back a couple of hundred years will have a predominance of steppe ancestry.
"Once it's here, that's essentially the ancestry of the British population".
Dr Tom Booth, an archaeologist from the Natural History Museum, said: "This spectacular transformation of Britain, with such a large number of Beaker people coming here is the opposite of what experts have thought for the last 10 to 20 years.
"The textbooks need to be ripped up."
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368 . We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.
COMMENTS