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

Who? 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 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. 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. Her work centres on the building block needed for the foundation of every human being. The genome. Well, your genome basically is, in its essence, sort of like an instruction manual. 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. We get one from our mum 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. Their eye colour, their hair colour, their pigmentation, other more important aspects like disease. 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. Modern DNA can be sourced almost anywhere in the human body. But to find ancient DNA, scientists must use samples of one of the body's hardest bones. The petrous, located at the base of the skull. The petrous is fantastic because of its density. At its core, it is rock hard. Some petrous bones, 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. We've purified 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. 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. Lara has compared her results to the European genetic database. And she has found out incredible information about some of Europe's earliest populations. Some years ago, on a small island off the Irish coast, archaeologists made a fascinating discovery. Ratlin Island sits on the fringes of the North Channel, the strait that separates Ireland and Scotland. It's just 30 miles from here to the Mull of Kintyre. 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 8000 BC. 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 information. In 2006 they were doing some excavations in the local pub in Ratlin. And they came upon a kist burial 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 4000 years ago. Archaeologists from Queen's 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 we can see the burial and the pottery vessel in it as well. So we had a fair idea that it was actually Bronze Age in date. It's a very typical sort of Bronze Age burial, the way they used to do it, especially during the early Bronze Age, around about 2000 to about 1800 BC. So what we do, we just did a normal archaeology thing. We dug down, exposed the whole thing and then we lifted the lid off the kist. And that's where my job really becomes a privilege. Because you know that you're the first person in 4000 years to see this site. You know the last person to see that person when they went into the ground was probably the family at the funeral. And again, that is a privilege for 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, it's kind of like the baby would be in the womb. You know, and it's kind of like maybe this life has 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 five foot eleven. 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 heel injury in his heel, so he must have, you know, had some sort of like an injury or fracture or twist on his ankle at one stage. And he even had sort of 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 we could get from these new sort of early Bronze Age casparials. And yeah, what we see is the majority of their ancestry is coming from this steppe region of Russia, grasslands, where you have highly mobile pastoralists, sort of like think of maybe the Huns or the Mongols. The Pontic Steppe 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 Rathlin 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 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 definitely did, you know, because we are seeing people moving as well as the material culture they bring. We think of Rathlin as being on the edge of Europe, but this is only from a 21st century perspective. Thousands of years ago, it was once very much at the centre of things. Rathlin Island was very important during the Neolithic period, and that's the period preceding the Bronze Age. It starts around about 4000 BC, right the way up until about 2000 BC. And the one feature about Rathlin Island is it's got an outcrop of a stone we call porcelainite. It's a lovely kind of dark bluish-black sort of colour, and it polishes up really well. And during the Neolithic period, the stone was mined, it was shaped and it was polished into lovely stone axes. And then they actually exported them, because there was evidence of these axes found in the south of England, 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 Laoghaile Aiden, 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 Irish, the Gaeil, arrived. This compilation was compiled most likely in an ecclesiastical setting by learned ecclesiastic scholars, well versed in the writings of the Church 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 great points of Christianity was the history of the world, the history as was transmitted in the Old Testament. There was one problem. It didn't mention Ireland or the Irish. So they set about putting this right and plugging this gap. And to do so they concocted their own origin legend. And this purports to tell where they came from. And they used, as a starting point, Japheth, the son of Noah, and his descendants. And the Irish were supposed to have descended from certain of Japheth's descendants. After the Great Flood, Noah's Ark 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 Mount 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, Mount 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 foliage. I think you just have to look around you to get a sense of how much natural resources this place has. This whole area would have been covered in forest. So you'd have had wild fowl, boar, all running about ready to catch and be eaten. The early residents of Mount Sandal didn't understand farming. They ate all their food in the wild by gathering nuts, berries and shellfish and killing wild animals. So these guys were hunter-gatherers. They probably lived in quite 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 midden, or rubbish tip, where they threw the remains of their diet – fish, fowl and shellfish. 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 Band. You walk down it about two hours and you're hitting the sea and the estuary and that tidal zone, which has lots of lovely, yummy things to eat in it. Over 80% of the animal remains they found in this site are coming 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 modern humans ever to set foot in Europe. And one of the last places they reached was 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 Mesolithic, the population maybe numbered around 10,000 people at the absolute most. Maybe less than that. The huts they would have built would likely have been covered with reeds or maybe animal skins. These hunter-gatherers, they're 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, 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 first genomes from this Mesolithic period, these hunter-gatherers. Even though there's no population quite like them alive today, we can still try to predict maybe what they looked like or how they were. So one of the things we can do is we can take forensic techniques that allow us to predict skin colour, eye colour and hair colour and apply it to our hunter-gatherers. And we get a very, very weird profile. They seem to have quite dark skin and hair. 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 to farming. And the big question for ages was, was this new people coming in, bringing these new technologies, or was it indigenous innovation? And what we see in this agricultural period, this Neolithic period in Ireland, is all our genomes are extremely different from the preceding hunter-gatherers. 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, they 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 detection. The Neolithic farmers were sophisticated and imaginative. They buried their dead in extraordinary stone tombs, like this one in the Basque country of northern Spain. This is Chabola de la Hechicera, the Hut of the Sorceress. We must remember that these are first monuments built by the people who inhabited these areas almost 6,000 years ago. And these are monuments for the dead. So it's something that they do for their ancestors. Chabola de la Hechicera is a portal tomb. Huge, upright stones support an enormous capstone. Most of the dolmens in the Iberian Peninsula, they are all facing the eastern part of the horizon. This means not just east, but all the parts of the horizon where we can see the sun rising. From the winter solstice to the summer solstice. The same design is used in other Neolithic monuments all over Western Europe. On the limestone landscape of the Burren in Ireland stands another haunting portal tomb, Páil na mRom, the Place of the Sorrows. Under the shadow of this great megalith, the bones of the dead lay undisturbed for millennia. In the 1980s, archaeologist Anne 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 sloping capstone. 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 centuries. We were able to date the bones shortly after 4000 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 Palmyra Brougham, bones that date to around 3800 BC still have, within the petrous bone of the ear, very, very well preserved DNA. They're beginning to isolate diseases. We know that they suffered very badly from osteoarthritis. They had broken foot bones, presumably from falling and dropping stones on themselves here in the burn. And there was a very poignant result in that one of the very young children was a Down syndrome child. And this is the first time, or the earliest example, of Down syndrome to be recorded as far as we're aware. The DNA also revealed something unexpected. The people buried here were not related to one another. Originally, when we excavated the tomb, we assumed it was a familial tomb, a tomb used by an extended family who settled here in the very early Neolithic. However, 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 very big surprise for us as a result of the ancient DNA analysis. Different tribes and communities must have come to Powell-on-the-Marone 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 Powell-on-the-Marone 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 believe? At the opposite end of Ireland, near Belfast, lies a mysterious Neolithic enclosure known as the Giant's Ring. Dr Rowan McLoughlin of Queen's University Belfast is an expert on the early farmers who built it. The Giant's Ring is a monumental enclosure. It involved in its construction thousands or maybe even millions of hours of heavy, heavy labour. And so that was an 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 speculate. Because the Neolithic is all about communal 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 bound Neolithic society together. Scientists use many techniques to reconstruct a picture of these ancient 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 dating. Radiocarbon dating enables us to understand when things happened, how long ago that occurred. Scientists can also analyse chemicals in bones and teeth to work out where people lived and what they ate. The DNA locked inside the bones give an 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. 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 fertilise 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 to another. So they are a radically different life way from the hunter-gatherers that lived in Ireland before the Neolithic. In the 19th century a human skull was discovered near the Giant's Ring. Today she is known as the Balmahatty Woman. Somewhere around here, we're not quite sure where, in 1855 that's where she was discovered. She was part of the Neolithic culture. She was an adult woman who lived her life here in County Down. The Balmahatty Woman gives us an extraordinary insight into the Neolithic community. Eileen Murphy is an osteoarchaeologist at Queen's 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 age they were when they died. And I'm also interested in things like the diseases they suffered from and evidence for injuries. This is the skull of a young woman who was found in Balmahatty in County Down. 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, remains of pots, burnt bone. And then in compartment D there were five skulls. So she was one of those skulls. She would have been stored in the Ulster Museum and in Queen's over the intervening time period. So at the time the anatomists who looked at her, they were able to recognise that she was the skull of a female. And my osteological work more recent times has confirmed that. You can see she's got a very straight forehead and petite. Because 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 would be much larger. And her skull is very rounded. Whereas again in a male it would be much more powerful and robust with the muscle attachments. And we were also then able to say she was a young woman when she died. And we can just look at the wear patterns on her teeth. So there you can see her molars. There's very slight wear so that was sort of suggestive that she was a woman about 18 and older. Between 18 and 35. This is a facial reconstruction of the Bali Nahati woman. So this was undertaken several decades ago. The beauty of facial reconstruction is it gives us an impression of what the person was like. And how it reminds us that it's not just a skull, it's the remains of a young woman. So that was the story up until very recently. And then the DNA technology came on so far that it's now possible to learn a lot about prehistoric people. With the petrous bone of the Bali Nahati 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 Bali Nahati woman's ancestry was from the Mediterranean. 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 5000 BC, they spread right around the Mediterranean and headed north, crossing the Alps, arriving in France and Spain around 4500 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 found actually some dugout canoes, these large trees that were hollowed out 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 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 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 variance involved in dark hair and brown eyes and sallow 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 Leipzig in eastern Germany stands a circular structure that may be the oldest solar observatory in the world. Goseck Circle was built around 5000 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 archaeoastronomer Michael Rappengluck has studied the site. People were very excited in the field of cultural astronomy because it is so old and 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 rely a calendar, a time reckoning, on these places of sunrise and sunset. The sun was worshipped as the giver of life and the orchestrator of the changing seasons. It was the observatory likely playing a key role in man's understanding of nature. Also there was a relation to some fertility rites, the rituals to some ideas about new life, about 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 showing the people some ideas about the cosmos and it has something to do with power. Leaders know where the sun is rising up, the exact points, they know the calendars, they know all the things to manage time and probably also other things, let us say, to orientate in the landscape and so they had power. And for them such things had been a kind to show 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. Thirty miles north of Dublin, tucked inside a bend in the River Boyne, lie two of Europe's most magnificent ancient monuments. The huge burial mound of Newgrange and close by its sister tomb, Nowth. Older than Stonehenge, they were built by the first farmers. Newgrange was built coming up to around 3000 BC. One of the three mega passage tombs in Bruna Boyne. In recent years, we've discovered underground evidence or crop mark evidence of huge enclosures within Bruna Boyne, 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 Bruna Boyne. 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 Newgrange and Nowth. Excavations so far have uncovered over 200 decorated stones. But what do the symbols mean? Could they be cryptic references to a mystery that scientists have only just 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 Newgrange, 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 feet until it ends in a chamber deep in the centre of the tomb. This is the most sacred part of the entire monument. When archaeologists excavated Newgrange 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 Newgrange excavations. And going through it, we've actually got these pictures of the human remains found there. And inside we see this picture of this pair of petrous temporal bones that look absolutely perfect for analysis. So we saw these and we thought, we've got to have them. Petrous bones are ideal for sampling human DNA. And it so happened that when O'Kelly excavated Newgrange, he found two petrous 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 O'Kelly's book, and there was no telling whether Lara would be able to locate the bones. A lot of the bone tends to be cremated, which is no use to us because cremation destroys all DNA. But we couldn't find anything from Newgrange, so a bit sad about this. But towards the end of the day, we actually did find one box, but it had just brackets, cremation on it. And we thought, oh, more cremated bone. Almost didn't look at it, but thought, oh. Popped it open, what do we find? Our pair of petrous temporals 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 mum, one from your dad. What happens if your mum 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 because he was off the chart. But it was actually correct 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. Newgrange 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. He was so inbred that the inescapable conclusion is that his parents were either brother and sister or 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. The story, whenever you give somebody a very high rank, who is the offspring of brother or sister, is that the rank of these people is perceived to be so high that other people are unworthy. 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 pharaohs. From Ramses the Great to Cleopatra, the kings and queens of this ancient land ruled 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 the kingdom. The pharaohs believed they were descended from the gods and so inbreeding was crucial to preserve the bloodline. Could similar attitudes have existed in the ancient Irish site of Newgrange? What we know about ancient Egypt makes us look at Newgrange 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, Neolithic culture shares certain similarities. So this idea of communities coming together to perform in certain spaces out in the open is something that's shared. So in Ireland we have enclosures and we also have megalithic sites, sites made of large monuments. Similar things are found 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 Durantia on Malta's sister island, Gozo. It was built around the same time as Newgrange. And on the day of the winter solstice, just like Newgrange, it would have been the scene of great celebration as the morning sun shone 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? 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. It 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 2300 BC, almost a thousand years after Newgrange 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 the 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 bequeathed a great legacy. Passage tombs like Newgrange are found not just in Ireland, but all over western Europe. Now, DNA research has given us a fascinating insight into what the builders of these tombs believed. It seems they thought that the man buried at the centre of Newgrange was nothing less than a god. A spine-tingling revelation that totally changes how we look at these places. These tombs are among the most sophisticated ancient structures in all of Europe. There are undoubtedly more secrets hidden within them. And in time, science can help us reveal them.