DNA testing has improved by leaps and bounds since the 1980s and has helped us track the evolution of humans over thousands, even millions, of years.
It has enabled scientists to compare our genetic code with different species to find shared ancestries, study how humans have evolved due to environmental and lifestyle changes and help map how ancient people migrated.
Now, a researcher from Kings College London is working with developers of a new DNA technique at the the Francis Crick Institute in London which he has described as “revolutionary”, and could result in a major rewrite of Britain’s early history.
Prof Peter Heather and the Institute are using the new method – known as Twigstats – to analyse human remains from Britain, particularly from the time when the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain around 410 AD and were replaced by the Anglo-Saxons from what is now northwest Germany.
The researchers have tried to solve the issue that arises from spotting small genetic changes in the human genetic code – which consists of three billion separate chemical units – an observation likened to finding a needle in a haystack.
They did this by finding a way to identify the older genetic changes and disregard them, leaving only the most recent alterations behind.
First focusing on human remains found in mainland Europe between 1 and 1,000 AD, they combined the genetic data of thousands of human remains from an online scientific database and then calculated how closely they were related to each other – revealing which fragments of DNA were inherited from which groups, and when.
This created a family tree with older changes appearing in earlier branches, and more recent changes showing up in newer “twigs”, hence the new method’s name, Twigstats.
“That was the moment we got really excited,” said Dr Leo Speidel, who developed the technique with his group leader Dr Pontus Skoglund. “We could see that this could really change how much we can find out about human history.”
Much of what they learned from the DNA about the spread of the Vikings into Scandinavia tallied with historical records, confirming that the method worked. This result, published in the journal, Nature, shows how powerful it could be at shedding new light on established facts when findings do not match what was written in the history books.
While the new project will analyse the DNA of over 1,000 ancient human remains from the past four and a half millenia, it is this specific era that has left historians baffled and divided.
The scale of the Anglo-Saxon invasion is unclear from historical and archaeological records, as well as whether it was hostile or cooperative.
“It is one of the most contested and therefore one of the most exciting things to work on in the whole of British history,” explained Prof Heather, according to BBC News.
“[The new method] will allow us to see the type of relations that are being found with the native population,” he added. “Are they co-operative, is there interbreeding, are the locals able to make their way into the elite?”
“We want to understand many different epochs in European and British history, from the Roman period, when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, through the Viking period and see how this shapes the ancestry and diversity of this part of the World,” added Skoglund.